Friedrich August Tuchmann

Friedrich August Tuchmann (Anglicised Frederick Augustus Tuckman ; born June 9, 1922 in Magdeburg ; † July 6, 2017 in Great Britain ) was a German-British entrepreneur and politician. He came from a family of timber merchants and had lived in England since March 1939. After military service and studies, he first worked in business before he was a British Conservative Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 1979 to 1989 .

Origin and childhood

Tuchmann came from a wealthy Jewish family.

The paternal grandfather was a timber dealer, the other grandfather a stockbroker in the US and UK. Tuchmann's father, Otto Tuchmann (born October 2, 1878 in Dessau; † January 16, 1930), worked in a managerial position in the timber business and, after the death of his first wife, had been married to Amy Adler-Weiss since September 19, 1921 (9 December 1894 - 26 October 1966) married. This marriage resulted in three children: Friedrich August and his sisters Johanna Elisabeth (* 1923) and Lilly Ruth (* 1928), about whose further fate nothing is known. The death of Otto Tuchmann had a strong impact on the living conditions of the Tuchmann family. Amy Tuchmann sold her house in late 1932 / early 1933 and moved several times before she emigrated to England. After the National Socialists came to power, the Tuchmann company was Aryanized until the end of 1938 .

As a result of the death of his father and the events of 1933, the eleven-year-old Friedrich August Tuchmann was brought to an uncle in Hampstead (London) , where he also attended the “Hall School” for a year.

The years 1934 to 1938

Due to health problems, Tuchmann first returned to Magdeburg in 1934 and then started his school career in the Jewish country school home in Herrlingen , where he stayed until 1938. Tuchmann had mixed memories of Herrlingen - for personal reasons, but also for political ones. Personally, he experienced himself in a constant outsider role: “For me, Herrlingen was a place where my interest in others was constantly dominated by fear, because I had difficulty getting along with others: they were often hostile to me and mocked me. "

His political reservations apply to the attempt to educate people in a conscious Judaism, as was the aim of the school and its director Hugo Rosenthal . Tuchmann questions this claim: “Has Herrlingen now also succeeded in raising us to be conscious and affirmative Jews? In this context I mean more the worldly view. Yes, it worked, if only as a negative self-defense. Unfortunately, the German environment did not allow anything else, unless we killed ourselves immediately. But I'm afraid that the school has failed with its goal of making us proud Jews. "

He also does not see the form of student participation practiced in Herrlingen, the supreme body of which was the Kahal , as a model for success . “The kahal should encourage children's sense of responsibility. Its members have been appointed, but the actual conditions of admission have never been entirely clear to me. In any case, those who were chosen as worthy citizens were chosen. I never got that far. Another Herrlinger topic was the responsibility for the community and for that the Kahal was the key exponent. In my opinion it would have worked just as well without the Kahal, naturally. "

Another cornerstone of Herrlinger's upbringing, Zionism, is also not a success model for him. Apparently he did not feel that he was successfully brought up to him by the Herrlingen upbringing: “Have we become Zionists in Herrlingen? For me, Israel is a country with some familiar features. To emigrate to this country would mean as much as to emigrate from Germany to England: on the one hand there are the language barriers and on the other hand there is the view. Besides, I don't feel like part of the country. Nevertheless: for me it is important that Israel survives, and I hope that - in contrast to the ongoing state of war - it will ultimately find a friendly and constructive path with its neighbors. Unfortunately, Israel doesn't seem to have that chance. "

In 1938, Tuchmann left Herrlingen with little exuberance. The year seems to have been very turbulent for him, whose mother moved from Magdeburg to Berlin in 1937. For a short time he was a student at the Jewish Business School in Berlin, the Hodheim School of the Jewish Reform Congregation , before he switched to the Groß Breesen teaching estate . After the SS attacked the estate, he returned to Berlin in November 1938.

First training in Great Britain and military service

In March 1939 he moved to London again, where Tuchmann lived with his uncle in Hampstead, as he did during his first stay. He now attended "Pitman's College", a kind of higher business school, named after Isaac Pitman , the father of the English shorthand . After the outbreak of World War II, he and the college were evacuated to Kettering, Northamptonshire . With the support of his uncle, he then continued his training in Bedford and worked as a management trainee in hotel kitchens.

Tuchmann was naturalized as a British citizen and volunteered for the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1942 . He was trained as a radar technician and was later able to work in vocational training while still serving in the military. In October 1946 he was demobilized.

Studies and professional career in business

Tuchmann started his post-war career by studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), which he attended from 1946 to 1949. In 1949 he changed his name to become Frederick (Fred) Tuckman. The LSE's visit also seems to have brought about a lasting change in his political attitudes: he entered as a Fabian and left as a conservative. He became a member of the conservative think tank Bow Group .

After graduating, Tuckman started his career in business. He worked for Marks & Spencer and one other company before becoming a partner in consulting firm Hays Group . He worked for this company in South Africa and from 1970 to 1980 in Frankfurt am Main. At the same time, he also worked for a Finnish company from 1973 to 1981.

Political career

Tuckman pursued his political career in parallel to his economic career. from 1958 to 1989 he was honorary secretary of the aforementioned Bow Group , and from 1965 to 1971 he was a councilor for the London Borough of Camden . In the first direct election for the European Parliament in 1979, he won the constituency of Leicestershire for the Tories . Author NJ Crowson summarizes in his book The Conservative Party and European Integration Since 1945: At the Heart of Europe? Tuckman's answer to the question “What does a Member of the European Parliament do?” In 1983 summarized as follows: “Fred Tuckman's answer was that he saw his most important functions in influencing and shaping opinions, the ability to participate other member states to agree to counter the 'inevitable' bureaucracy tendencies of the EEC and to 'show that being a good European and sounding British is not a contradiction in terms'. "The author points out that the magazine that this interview took it as an opportunity to refer in an article to the MEP's intention to project his own idea of ​​the failure of the European Parliament into the consciousness of the British electorate. The tone of the article was rather negative about Britain's relations with Europe.

In the European Parliament, Tuckman was elected Conservative Spokesman for Social and Employment Affairs. In 1989 the victory of the Labor Party put an end to his parliamentary life. He was then president of the Anglo-Jewish Association from 1989 to 1995 . In 1993, AJR Information , the newsletter of The Association of Jewish Refugees, wrote : “'Politician' has a derogatory connotation these days, miles away from Aristotle's zoon politikon (i.e., person involved in civic affairs). Fred Tuckman, OBE, is the kind of person who gives politics a good name. ”The consumer magazine“ Which? ”, From which NJ Crowson Tuckman quoted Tuckman's opinion of a British European politician, would probably not have agreed with this assessment.

Honors

Tuckman had held the Order of the British Empire since 1990 . There is no evidence that he was also the bearer of the Great Cross of Merit .

Heinz Erich Tuchmann

It was already mentioned above that Friedrich August Tuchmann was Otto Tuchmann's son from his second marriage. Otto Tuchmann's first wife was Gertrud Eisenberg (born December 11, 1884 in Hofgeismar). The two had been married since January 11, 1917, and this marriage resulted in Heinz Erich Tuchmann, born on January 18, 1911. Gertrud Tuchmann died two months after his birth on March 24, 1911.

Following the death of his mother, Heinz Erich spent the first years of his life in his grandparents' house in Erfurt. When his grandfather died in 1917, he returned to Magdeburg and attended school here from 1922. He later continued his education in a boarding school in Zuoz , Switzerland.

Heinz Erich Tuchmann, who was nineteen years old when his father died in 1930, did not join the family business, but completed an apprenticeship in Fürth and Marktredwitz . His further life is not clearly clarified. He presumably went to Switzerland at the end of 1933, he could have stayed in Milan in 1934, and there are clear indications of his stay in Zagreb for 1941 . From 1942 he was apparently in Padua .

Life in Italy was relatively safe for Tuchmann, as there was no active persecution of Jews under Benito Mussolini . That changed when the German Wehrmacht invaded Italy.

“On September 10, 1943, Rome is occupied, where Tuchmann ended up - presumably via Padua. On March 23, 1944, a Roman group of the Italian Resistancea killed 33 members of the Bolzano regiment in an attack in Rome. In retaliation, ten Italians are to be shot on the same day for every German killed. When not enough political prisoners could be identified as death row inmates, Herbert Kappler , SS-Obersturmbannführer, took Jewish prisoners who had escaped deportation to the firing squad. One of the 75 victims of the Mosaic faith is Heinz Erich Tuchmann, who must have been in custody at this point in time. The place of execution are the Ardeatine caves near Rome, the commanders of the execution are Hauptsturmführer Karl Schütz and Erich Priebke . "

Web links

• University of Southampton: MS 270 Papers of FATuckman
• Imperial War Museums: Tuckman, Fred (Oral history) / Object and Content Description
• 'Our' man in Europe
• Stumbling block for Heinz Erich Tuchmann in Magdeburg
• Entry for Frederick Tuckman in the European Parliament 's database of MEPs

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The following biographical data are mainly based on the database of the University of Southampton , in whose archive the written estate of Frederick (Fred) Tuckman is stored ( University of Southampton: MS 270 Papers of FATuckman ), and on the explanatory notes on an oral history -Project of the British Imperial War Museum ( Imperial War Museums: Tuckman, Fred (Oral history) / Object and Content Description )
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} stumbling block for Heinz Erich Tuchmann in Magdeburg
3. ^ Hall School: School History
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Fred Tuckman: Negative Self-Defense , in: Lucie Schachne: Education for Spiritual Resistance: The Jewish Landschulheim Herrlingen 1933–1939 , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-7638-0509-5 , pp. 120– 121
5. ↑ Fred Tuckman (1971), in: Lucie Schachne: Education for Spiritual Resistance: The Jewish Landschulheim Herrlingen 1933–1939 , dipa-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-7638-0509-5 , p. 178
6. ↑ This school, founded in 1936, was also part of the redeployment program , although it had a certain special position among the educational institutions that were committed to the primacy of practical education as preparation for emigration. On the history of this school in Joachimsthaler Str. 13 in Berlin: Jörg H. Fehrs: From Heidereutergasse to Roseneck. Jewish schools in Berlin 1712-1942 , Edition Hentrich, Berlin, 1993, ISBN 3-89468-075-X , pp. 291-292, and Jewish institutions in Joachimsthaler Str. 13 in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf .
7. ↑ 'Our' man in Europe ( Memento of the original from September 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ About Hay Group
9. ^ NJ Crowson: The Conservative Party and European Integration Since 1945: At the Heart of Europe? , Routledge, New York, 2007, ISBN 978-0-415-40022-0 , p. 206. "MEP Fred Tuckman's response was that he saw his most important functions as being able to influence and shape opinion, an ability to reach agreement with other member nations, to counteract the EEC's 'inevitable' bureaucratie tendencies and to 'show that being good European and sound British are not in conflict'. "
10. ^ About The Anglo-Jewish Association
11. ↑ 'Our' man in Europe ( Memento of the original from September 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . “'Politician', these days, has a derogatory connotation miles removed from Aristotle's zoon politikon (ie person involved in civic affairs). Fred Tuckman, OBE, is the sort of person who gives politics a good name. " 
12. ^ University of Southampton: MS 270 Papers of FATuckman