Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg

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Friedrich-Werner Erdmann Matthias Johann Bernhard Erich Graf von der Schulenburg (born November 20, 1875 in Kemberg ; † November 10, 1944 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German diplomat and resistance fighter from July 20, 1944 .

Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg

Life

Diplomatic career

Friedrich-Werner came from the von der Schulenburg family and was born as the son of the Prussian Lieutenant Colonel Bernhard Graf von der Schulenburg (1839-1902) and his wife Margarete Freiin. von Waldenfels (1847–1918) born in Kemberg , Kreuzstrasse 12. A son of his cousin Friedrich was the later fellow resistance fighter Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg . The family moved to Darmstadt in 1883 and then to Braunschweig in 1887. In 1894 he passed the Abitur at the Wilhelm Gymnasium in Braunschweig . At a very early stage he wanted to join the diplomatic service . Until 1895 he served as a one-year volunteer in the 1st Guard Field Artillery Regiment. He then studied law in Lausanne , Munich and Berlin and passed the second state law examination in 1900 . A year later he joined the consular service of the Foreign Office . In 1903 he was appointed Vice Consul at the Consulate General in Barcelona . In 1906 he took over the management of the Lemberg consulate . At the same time he worked in Prague and on an interim basis in Naples . From 1907 he was appointed Vice Consul for the General Kunsulat in Warsaw . From 1911 to the beginning of 1914 he was imperial consul in Tbilisi .

With the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Schulenburg served in the German army . After the Battle of the Marne , he was promoted to Captain of the Reserve in the 1st Guard Field Artillery Regiment in October 1914 . In August 1915 he was claimed by the Foreign Office for special use and used as a German liaison officer to the Ottoman Army based in Erzurum . He took over the formation of the Georgian Legion , a unit of Georgian volunteers in the fight against Russia . He received the Iron Cross and high Turkish awards. After the Russian conquest of the city, he moved to the consulate in Beirut in 1917 , then to Damascus . In 1918 he became ambassador to the newly founded Democratic Republic of Georgia in Tbilisi. After the collapse of the German Empire, British troops interned him together with Friedrich Freiherr Kreß von Kressenstein on the Turkish island of Prinkipo , from where he returned to Germany in 1919.

He was only transferred to Erzerum, a region in the originally Armenian core area of ​​the Ottoman Empire , after the first phase of the Armenian genocide , and therefore probably did not see how almost all male Armenians were forcibly deported or killed there, but was through the reports of his predecessor. Nevertheless, Schulenburg, who enjoyed a high reputation among several Turkish officials, denied or played down the massacres. His behavior revealed a strong anti-Armenian attitude. In the following, he hardly or not at all campaigned for the protection of the remaining Armenians from Erzurum and left them to their own devices.

Inscription by F.-W. Graf vd Schulenburg at the entrance to Persepolis

After his return, he was called to the diplomatic service of the Weimar Republic in autumn 1919 and was initially employed in the political department of the Foreign Office, where he was appointed lecturer in March 1921. From July 22, 1922 to 1931, von der Schulenburg was an envoy in Tehran ( Iran ). Here he kept in close contact with the consul general Otto Günther von Wesendonk (1885–1933) appointed in Tbilisi ( Transcaucasia ). From Tehran he also visited Persepolis and met his future partner, Ala Duberg. During his service in Tehran he was a frequent guest of the German ambassador in Moscow, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzaus . The main goal of the discussions held here was to get a common picture of the current situation in the two countries that border each other.

In 1931 von der Schulenburg was appointed ambassador first class and was entrusted with taking over the embassy in Bucharest ( Romania ). In 1934 he became a member of the NSDAP and the National Socialist People's Welfare . On June 21, 1934, he then moved to Moscow as the German ambassador to the Soviet Union . Out of deep conviction, Schulenburg vehemently advocated an understanding between Germany and the USSR and was instrumental in bringing about the German-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939. In his position as ambassador, he accompanied the talks in Moscow between the German Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Soviet head of government Vyacheslav M. Molotov and the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR , Josef Stalin , and thus had the most intimate knowledge of the Top secret additional protocol to the pact on the "question of the delimitation of their mutual spheres of interest in Eastern Europe". His great hope was that the “non-aggression pact could prove to be an instrument of peace”. The achievement of this pact was given high credit to the ambassador von der Schulenburg, but privately he wrote, "Now Hitler has the opportunity to start a war and we will lose it."

Until the very end he tried to prevent the German attack on the Soviet Union . Again and again he warned the highest management circles of the German Reich that Russia was militarily strong and that its industrial reserves were practically unassailable. On April 28, 1941, he managed to get in touch with Adolf Hitler personally . He had already written a memorandum beforehand to change Hitler's plans to attack the Soviet Union. During the 30-minute conversation, this document was also on Hitler's table. When he said goodbye, he emphasized to his interlocutor: "And one more thing, Graf Schulenburg, I do not intend a war against Russia." After this conversation von der Schulenburg flew back to Moscow on April 30, 1941 and responded to the anticipated questions from his colleagues in Moscow, "He just lied to me on purpose." In May 1941 he spoke three times in Moscow with the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Vladimir Dekanosow . On May 5, he warned him that the Soviet Union was underestimating the danger of war, that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union and that Stalin should contact Hitler. At the same time he emphasized the private character of the conversation. Dekanosow simply could not imagine such a breach of duty on the part of a German diplomat. Von der Schulenburg noted with satisfaction on May 6th that Stalin had been appointed chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and that for the first time he had the opportunity to travel abroad in accordance with the protocol. At the meetings on May 9th and 12th, Schulenburg emphasized again that there should be no reference to his conversations when making contact. The Soviets did not understand the contact, and there was also the fact that hardly anyone in Moscow wanted to speak against Stalin's convictions, while the latter noted that a large part of all other indications of an attack were based on Anglo-American sources, which may poison relations between Germany and the Soviet Union wanted to.

After Germany's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and thus the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union , von der Schulenburg interned briefly in Moscow and then housed the entire embassy staff in a rest home in Kostroma from June 24 to 29. From there they took the train to the Turkish border in 8 days, where they were exchanged on July 13, 1941. Immediately after the exchange, von der Schulenburg took an airplane to Berlin. But reporting was expressly not wanted. After that, the Foreign Office assigned von der Schulenburg to a post without political influence: he became head of the Russia Committee and thus sidelined.

During the Second World War in the Soviet Union, on behalf of the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories , Alfred Rosenberg , looted files and books were collected and distributed at Hardenbergstrasse  29 in Berlin until the spring of 1943 . Friedrich Werner Graf von der Schulenburg took, among other things, around 100 volumes of mostly French-language literature from the 18th and 19th centuries, which came from the library of the Pavlovsk Palace near Leningrad .

Resistance fighters

In the summer of 1943, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler (1884–1945), a head of the German resistance, sought contact with Schulenburg (see People of July 20, 1944 ). They discussed, among other people from the circle around Goerdeler and von Hassel, about the possibility of a separate peace with the Soviet Union. It was intended that Schulenburg should act as a mediator to Josef W. Stalin in order to be able to hold talks with him about a negotiated peace. The records of these conversations and plans were stored in a safe, the location of which gave Goerdeler the assumption that it had been destroyed during a bomb attack. The inspection of these explosive documents led the Gestapo to track down Schulenburg. Schulenburg later discussed with Henning von Tresckow how he could be smuggled through the Eastern Front in order to negotiate a peace treaty with Stalin . The conspirators temporarily envisaged Schulenburg as German foreign minister after the coup ( Beck / Goerdeler shadow cabinet ). In his briefing on August 31, 1944, Hitler described the people who want to ally themselves with Russia against England as the “Schulenburg direction”. The editor of these notes, Helmut Heiber, sees this as a correct representation of Schulenburg's political concept for the situation at the time.

Memorial plaque in Kemberg

After the failed assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , he was arrested on October 19 and charged with high treason . In the trial before the People's Court , he denied in vain that he knew anything about overturning plans. He was sentenced to death on October 23, 1944 and hanged on November 10, 1944 in the execution site of the Berlin-Plötzensee prison . On the parents' grave in the main cemetery in Brunswick , an inscription commemorates Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg. Today this grave site is a memorial for those involved in the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944.

Private

From 1908 to 1910 he was married to Elisabeth von Sobbe (1875–1955), with whom he had the daughter Christa-Wernfriedis.

During his time as ambassador in Tehran, he met Ala Duberg, who was his partner for 20 years and who was also murdered by the National Socialists .

In 1936 Schulenburg acquired Falkenberg Castle in the Upper Palatinate . After approval by the Bavarian Monument Preservation Office , he had the castle extensively renovated and furnished as a retirement home. The complex was restored between 1936 and 1939 from the point of view of monument preservation. After his delivery from the office of ambassador in Moscow it was available as a residence and was also used as such by him and his partner at times.

literature

  • Ernst-August Roloff : Outsider in bourgeois society? : "Patriotic journeymen" and "cowardly traitors" - Heinrich Jasper and Friedrich Werner Graf von der Schulenburg. In: Ernst-August Roloff: 100 years of the bourgeoisie in Braunschweig. Volume II: Tradition and Change. Life stories from a middle-class residential area. Hans Oeding Verlag, Braunschweig 1987, ISBN 3-87597-010-1 , pp. 71-81.
  • Sigrid Wegner-Korfes : Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg. Ambassador of Nazi Germany and co-conspirators of July 20, 1944. In: Olaf Groehler (Hrsg.): Alternatives: Fates of German citizens. Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-373-00002-5 .
  • Erich F. Sommer: Ambassador Graf Schulenburg: The last representative of the German Empire in Moscow. Mut-Verlag, Asendorf 1989, ISBN 3-89182-025-9 .
  • Ingeborg Fleischhauer : Diplomatic resistance against "Operation Barbarossa". The peace efforts of the German Embassy in Moscow 1939–1941. Ullstein, Berlin / Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-550-07504-9 .
  • Commemoration of the Federal Foreign Office on the 100th birthday of Ambassador Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg. Bonn 1975.
  • Johannes Hürter :  Schulenburg, Friedrich Werner. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 679 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Lars Peter Schmidt , Kathinka Dittrich van Weringh (ed.): Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg. Diplomat and resistance fighter. Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Moscow Office, 2012.
  • Nikola Kaul: “The devil is always going on here!” - German-Soviet relations in the mirror of the German Embassy Moscow 1934 to 1939. Dissertation, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg 2016, ISBN 978-1-53-513555 -9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johannes Lepsius: Germany and Armenia. Collection of diplomatic files 1914–1918. Potsdam 1919, p. 505.
  2. ↑ My mission in the Caucasus. The memories of General von Kressenstein
  3. ↑ Sigurd Sverre Stangeland: The role of Germany in the genocide of the Armenians 1915-1916. Trondheim 2013, pp. 180-181.
  4. ↑ Hilger Memory Book: We and the Kremlin , 1956.
  5. ↑ Artem Demenok, Andreas Christoph Schmidt (2018), Film War and Peace , ARD, March 5, 2018 (joint production by Schmidt & Paetzel TV films, Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, Südwestfunk and Westdeutscher Rundfunk), quotation at 27:47 min.
  6. ^ Erich F. Sommer: Ambassador Graf Schulenburg, Contemporary History Research Center Ingolstadt , MUT-Verlag, Asendorf 1987, p. 96.
  7. ^ Erich F. Sommer: Ambassador Graf Schulenburg, Contemporary History Research Center Ingolstadt , MUT-Verlag, Asendorf 1987, p. 97.
  8. ↑ Leonid Mlechin: A Conspiracy of Ambassadors , Novaya Gazeta, May 24, 2019.
  9. ↑ Ready to jump at the German border . In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1965 ( online ).
  10. ↑ Anja Heuss: The Künsberg special command and the robbery of cultural property in the Soviet Union. In: Quarter-year books for contemporary history. Volume 45, 1997, Issue 4, p. 552.
  11. ↑ Helmut Heiber : Hitler's situation discussions : The protocol fragments of his military conferences 1942-1945 . Stuttgart 1962, p. 616.
personal data
SURNAME Schulenburg, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schulenburg, Friedrich-Werner Erdmann Matthias Johann Bernhard Erich Graf von der (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat, resistance fighter, Nazi victim
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Kemberg
DATE OF DEATH November 10, 1944
Place of death Berlin-Plötzensee