Friedrich Gaus

Friedrich Wilhelm Otto Gaus (born November 26, 1881 in Mahlum , ( Duchy of Braunschweig , today District of Hildesheim ), † July 17, 1955 in Göttingen ) was a German lawyer, civil servant and diplomat. Gaus was best known as the long-time head of the legal department of the Foreign Office in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s.

Live and act

Friedrich Gaus (far left on the edge) during the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August 1939.

After studying law at the universities of Geneva , Munich , Berlin and Heidelberg , which he completed with a Dr. jur. graduated, Gaus came in the German Empire , 1907, as a civil servant in the Foreign Office in Berlin's Wilhelmstrasse. After posting as a diplomat to Genoa and Constantinople from 1910 to 1912, he mainly worked at the headquarters of the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. In 1919 he headed the legal commission of the peace delegation in Versailles as a lecturing council . Afterwards he was employed in the peace and then in the legal department of the office. As head of the department for international law, from 1923, he held a key bureaucratic position which he was to hold under Foreign Ministers Stresemann , Curtius , Brüning , Neurath and Ribbentrop .

As head of the legal department of the Foreign Ministry, Gaus was instrumental in the drafting of diplomatic documents, especially in the form of contracts. Among other things, the treaty texts of the Treaties of Rapallo (1922) and Locarno (1925) go back in large parts to Gaus. Due to the powerful position that Gaus created for himself in the Foreign Office, he became known to a broad public under his nickname as "Crown Lawyer".

Gaus had particular influence during the "Stresemann era", from 1923 to 1929, when Gustav Stresemann became the most important advisor to the foreign minister at the time, whose policy he - although officially "only" a ministerial director - had a decisive say.

In the years since 1926, Gaus was, alongside Stresemann and his State Secretary Carl von Schubert , one of three German delegates to the League of Nations in Geneva ( Rudolf Breitscheid , Werner von Rheinbaben , Johann Heinrich Graf von Bernstorff and Ludwig Kaas were also deputy or parliamentary delegates) .

In the time of National Socialism , despite his marriage to a quarter Jew, Gaus was valued as a legal expert on contractual matters and international relations ("international law advisor") and was entrusted with the preparation of numerous political and legal documents and contracts. Gaus was a member of the National Socialist Academy for German Law founded by Hans Frank and wrote the German-Polish non-aggression pact of 1934, the “ Führer Decree on the Establishment of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia ” in 1938 and (meanwhile with the rank of Undersecretary) the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 (including the secret additional protocol). He had drafted the latter work on the basis of agreements between Molotov and the German ambassador von der Schulenburg . He accompanied the National Socialist Reich Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop in August 1939 to Moscow to sign the treaty. He also accompanied Ribbentrop, like Hitler himself, on numerous other diplomatic trips. Gaus was a member of Hitler's entourage when he visited Franco in Madrid in 1940. With the appointment as "Ambassador for special use" Gaus reached the high point of his career in 1943.

After the war he appeared as a witness at the Nuremberg trials . An indictment as part of the so-called " Wilhelmstrasse processes " against the leaders of the Foreign Office remained Gaus spared after he, under pressure from the US Prosecutor Kempner - reportedly threatened the Gaus him to the Soviet Union to deliver - the prosecution as a witness to Provided. Gaus himself attributed his role as “witness for the prosecution” not to fear of punishment, but to “remorse” and the need to “make up for his past sins”.

Gauss in the judgment of contemporaries and research

In his memoirs, the former ambassador and expert on Ostpolitik Herbert von Dirksen attributes to Gaus the “second highest role in the hierarchy of the (foreign) office” after the foreign minister for the Stresemann period and insists that Gaus is far more than “just the legal Expert “of the office. The view that Gaus had overtaken his official superior during the Stresemann period, State Secretary Carl von Schubert , who was also largely regarded as very competent , can also be found in the memories of numerous other people who lived there, such as Werner von Rheinbaben . Most of the time, Gau's over-formal importance is ascribed to his greater intellectual agility and productivity, which would have brought him a surplus of influence. In the 1980s, Enssle summarized with a view to this section in Gau's career that Gaus “was of particular importance for the Locarno politics” Stresemann's had “not yet been fully appreciated ” by historians .

In this sense, the American Time magazine named Gaus in its March 23, 1936, article "Germans Preferred", one of the "most capable diplomatic craftsmen of Wilhelmstrasse" ( Wilhelmstrasse's ablest practitioners of diplomacy ) and a "smartster" (for example, Pfiffikus ”), who had helped Hitler write his more thought-out speeches, and ruled that any professional diplomat would see Gaus as“ an ace in his field ”( any professional diplomat would recognize as [an] ace [in his] line ).

Jost Nikolaus Willi characterizes Gaus in his 1972 study on the Jacob-Wesemann case as a “sober and precise officer” and “cautious thought worker”. As such, he was “a bit brittle in dealing”, but as “a man with at times too great a finesse”, he commanded about sarcasm and about an “at times amazingly accurate” judgment.

Henry Bernhard criticized Gaus' role in the Nazi era in 1947 in his work “Finis Germaniae” with the assessment that “without his experience Ribbentrop would have worked considerably more slowly” and that Gaus “was selling himself for the three pieces of silver of an undersecretary and an ambassadorial title " have. Utley pointed out that other Gaus would even be regarded as the "gray eminence of the Foreign Office" and "Ribbentrop's evil spirit".

Fonts

• The civil broker , University of Leipzig 1908.

literature

• Henry Bernhard (Ed.): Friedrich Gaus . In: Gustav Stresemann: Legacy. The estate in three volumes . Berlin 1932, Volume 2, pp. 129-175.
• Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes , Moshe Zimmermann : The Office and the Past . German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 .
• Gerhard Stuby : From "Crown Lawyer" to "Crown Witness". Friedrich Wilhelm Gaus. A life in the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse . VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 2008.
• Gerhard Stuby: Friedrich Gaus. Eminence gray or notary of the Foreign Office? . In: Marschang and Stuby (eds.): No habrá olvido .

Imagery

• "Friedrich Gaus": Portrait from 1925 (oil on canvas 85 × 105 cm; inscribed below with "Sabine Lepsius 25"), today owned by the Georg Haar Foundation, Weimar.
• Gaus at the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact on August 24, 1939: Photograph from 1939, see [1] (Gaus is the man on the far right behind the lampshade)

Web links

• Literature by and about Friedrich Gaus in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry In: Gerhard Köbler : Who was who in German law (online version)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christopher Browning: The Origins of the Final Solution, 2007, p. 91.
2. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 175.
3. ^ Alfred-Ingemar Berndt / Hasso von Wedel : Deutschland im Kampf , 1943, p. 94.
4. ^ Rosie Goldtschmidt Waldeck: Europe Between the Acts, 1951, p. 184.
5. ↑ quoted from Martin Walsdorff: Westorientierung und Ostpolitik, 1971, p. 47.
6. ↑ Manfred J. Enssle: Stresemann's Territorial Revisionism, 1980, p. 107.
7. ^ Jost Nikolaus Willi: The Jacob-Wesemann case 1935/1936. A contribution to the history of Switzerland in the interwar period, (= Europäische Hochschulschriften, series 3, vol. 13) Bern 1972, p. 253. (also dissertation, University of Basel, 1972).
8. ^ Henry Bernhard: Finis Germaniae. Notes and reflections, 1947, p. 61. Bernhard adds “How sad”.
9. ^ Freda Utley: The High Cost of Vengeance, 1949, p. 172.