Friedrich Wilhelm Hack

Friedrich Wilhelm Hack (born October 7, 1887 in Freiburg im Breisgau ; † June 4, 1949 in Zurich-Hottingen ), in Japan generally Dr. Called Hack , was a German entrepreneur and Japanese networker.

Life and professional training

Friedrich Wilhelm Hack was born on October 7, 1887, the son of the doctor Wilhelm Hack and his wife Henriette, née Berner, in Freiburg im Breisgau. He grew up in Freiburg, attended school here and moved to Berlin on October 31, 1906. Here he studied law and received his doctorate in 1910 at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität on the subject of "Investigations into the status of the Abbey of Fulda and Hersfeld in the 13th century". Friedrich Hack then graduated from the Faculty of Economics at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1912 .

Working in Japan

From Freiburg, Friedrich Wilhelm Hack went to East Asia as secretary of the South Manchurian Railway , whose president at that time was Gotō Shinpei . Here he worked as an assistant to the German advisor Karl Thiess (1879–1941). In 1914, Hack took part in the siege of Tsingtau as a volunteer during the First World War. In this short time he was in the news department of the Chief of Staff Waldemar Vollerthun (1869–1929), reporting directly to him, as an interpreter. After the German surrender in November 1914, he was interned as a prisoner of war in Japan and was taken to the Fukuoka POW camp with prisoner number 1154. Here he consolidated the Japanese language and was used as an interpreter in the camp . During the detention, he helped other inmates break out of the camp. Therefore, in February 1916, he was sentenced to 1½ years in prison for aiding and abetting to escape. Shortly before the camp was closed, representatives of Japanese corporations came to the prison camp and selected individual prisoners to help develop business contacts with Germany. Wilhelm Hack agreed. In February 1919 he was released from the camp and started working for the Mitsubishi company in Tokyo.

In 1920 Friedrich Wilhelm Hack traveled to Germany in order to initiate new business contacts under the changed conditions after the defeat of Germany in the First World War and the process of disintegration of the imperial army and the navy. Here, together with Albert Schinzinger (1856–1926), who worked for Krupp AG for many years, he became a business partner for armaments contracts for the Reichswehr Ministry, especially the naval command. Friedrich Hack became a consultant and representative of the Japanese Navy in Germany. At the same time, they maintained close business relationships with the Ernst Heinkel company and initiated business here in the area of air armaments and naval armaments, which were still banned for Germany under the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. As a result, he came into close relationships with influential Japanese political and military figures. When Schinzinger died in 1926, Hack was a co-founder of the Schinzinger & Hack Co. to keep the business between Germany and Japan going well. The business object of the founded company was also the sale of military goods to the Japanese army as well as the initiation of technical developments and know-how transfer in the interests of both countries.

In 1933 Friedrich Hack became managing director of the German-Japanese Society , which was brought into line and whose president Admiral Paul Behncke had become that same year . At the same time he worked from 1934 as a freelancer for the Ribbentrop office in Berlin. From here he was commissioned to conduct exploratory talks with representatives of the Japanese government. His existing contacts should form the starting point for the negotiations between Germany and Japan on the Anti-Comintern Pact .

On the occasion of sales negotiations that were conducted jointly with Heinkel-Werke in Japan in 1935 , Friedrich Hack got into conversation with the military attaché Ōshima Hiroshi and organized a meeting between Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ōshima. In October 1935, the first meeting between Ōshima, Wilhelm Canaris and Werner von Blomberg took place in Freiburg, in which Hack also took part. As a result of this conversation, on November 15, 1935, he was also a participant in the consultation in the Joachim von Ribbentrop house in Berlin-Dahlem Lentzallee. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Ōshima, Wilhelm Canaris and Hermann von Raumer were involved. The Anti-Comintern Pact was signed in Berlin on November 25, 1936. In February 1937 Hack received a Japanese medal together with Ribbentrop, Canaris, Raumer and the military attaché in Tokyo Eugen Ott for his efforts from the military attaché Ōshima Hiroshi .

At the beginning of 1936 Friedrich Hack took part in a joint German-Japanese film production. The first agreements on this were made on February 8, 1936 in Tokyo. In July of the same year he was arrested by the secret state police , but had to be released again because of the Japanese intervention. He was then "sidelined" for business on charges of homosexuality, which had not been proven. Friedrich Hack then fled from Japan to Switzerland via Paris . Here he lived in seclusion from August 25, 1939, in self-chosen exile .

When the USA entered the Pacific War in 1941, Friedrich Hack resumed his mediating work and tried to end the war. He came into contact with Allen Welsh Dulles and brokered this conversation with Naoe Saskai, Yoshirō Fujimura in order to find suitable steps to end the war with one another.

For the next few years he lived in the Dolder Grand Hotel in Zurich-Hottingen . Friedrich Hack died on June 4, 1949 in Zurich.

See also

• German-Japanese relations

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Hans-Joachim Schmidt: Short biographies "H". In: Tsingtau and Japan 1914–1920: Historisch-Biographisches Projekt. Retrieved November 9, 2015 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Gerhard Krebs: Operation Super Sunrise? Japanese-United States Peace Feelers in Switzerland, 1945 . The Journal of Military History , Volume 69, No. 4 (October 2005), p. 1085.
3. ↑ Berthold J Sander-Nagashima, The German-Japanese Navy Relations 1919-1942 (dissertation) Universität Hamburg 1998, pp. 58f.
4. ^ William Craig, The Fall of Japan