Fritz GA Kraemer

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Fritz Gustav Anton Kraemer (born July 3, 1908 in Essen , † September 8, 2003 in Washington, DC ) was Senior Civilian Advisor to the Chief of Staff of the Army in the United States Department of Defense . He was a key figure in US foreign and security policy throughout almost the entire Cold War era and a formative personality of the neoconservative movement in the US, to which he was not a member.

Origin, youth, studies and first years of work

Kraemer's family

Kraemer's father Georg Kraemer (* 1872 in Berlin) was a lawyer, and as a public prosecutor he worked successively in Frankfurt an der Oder , Memel , Essen and Koblenz . Kraemer's mother Anna Johanna Goldschmidt came from a middle-class family; her father Anton Goldschmidt was a chemical industrialist in Düsseldorf . Fritz Kraemer later described his mother as a "power woman" who went to school in England and traveled to Syria and Egypt . Kraemer's parents married in 1907, both of whom were of Jewish descent and converted to the Protestant faith as a student. Fritz Kraemer remained silent even to his closest friends about the Jewish origin of his parents and about the deportation and death of his father on November 1, 1942 in the Theresienstadt ghetto . The parents' marriage broke up in 1914 when Fritz Kraemer was six years old. The two children Fritz and Wilhelm (* 1911) stayed with their mother. Kraemer later attended the humanistic Arndt-Gymnasium in Berlin-Dahlem , when he was 16 he went to school in England for some time. His father Georg Krämer, a veteran of the First World War and first public prosecutor in Koblenz, was evicted by the National Socialists in 1935 and deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in July 1942 , where he died on November 1 of the same year.

Studies and first professional years in Europe

Kraemer studied at the London School of Economics and at the Universities of Geneva and Frankfurt am Main . In Frankfurt am Main he obtained his doctorate in law in 1931 and in political science at the University of Rome in 1934 . At this age, Kraemer had already mastered six languages ​​(German, Latin, ancient Greek, English, French and Italian).

From 1933 he became legal advisor to the League of Nations in Rome. In the same year he married Britta Bjorkander from Sweden. Kraemer, a Lutheran , detested the Nazis and emigrated to Italy a few months after they came to power. There he became a lecturer at the University of Rome , where he taught in Italian and shortly thereafter obtained his second doctorate. In Mussolini's Italy, too, he made no secret of his rejection of the Nazi regime , which, among other things, earned him a trial against the German embassy that received much attention in the media and was ultimately won. Their naval attaché was offended by the fact that he had decorated his sports kayak with a “reactionary” imperial flag (see German-Italian flag affair ).

After Mussolini's compromise with Hitler and the formation of the " axis " between their countries in October 1936, Kraemer had to leave Italy. He fled to Great Britain in 1937 and emigrated to the United States in 1939 .

Emigration to the USA, military service

In the USA, Kraemer initially had to make ends meet as a farm and forest worker for four years. In 1943 he was drafted into the US Army, thereby acquired US citizenship and later moved ("with two doctoral degrees and a monocle") with the 84th US Infantry Division ("the Railsplitters") to Europe to fight Hitler. In 1944 he met Henry Kissinger , who was almost 16 years his junior at the Camp Claiborne military training camp ( Louisiana ) , whose talent he recognized and, according to Kissinger's portrayal, he was to exert great influence on. The two remained friends until their deep rift at the end of 1972.

Kraemer fought in the defense of the German Ardennes offensive ("Battle of the Bulge") as well as in battles in the Rhineland and in the Ruhr area, for which he was decorated with the Bronze Star Medal . In 1945 he was reunited with his wife and son, and in 1947 he returned to Washington D.C. and served in the ministerial bureaucracy. In 1948 he retired from active military service, and in 1963 from the reserve in the rank of lieutenant colonel .

Geostrategist in the US Department of Defense (1948–1978)

In 1948 he joined the US Department of Defense, where he became the leading civilian expert and advisor on security policy and geostrategy in 1951 . During this time and even after his retirement in 1978, Kraemer avoided any public attention for himself and did not publish any more. In order to maintain the greatest possible independence, he turned down several promotions, but remained "senior civilian advisor to the US Army Chief of Staff " in the Department of Defense ( Senior Civilian Advisor to the US Army Chief of Staff ). According to the New York Times , Kraemer's title changed several times in his decades at the Pentagon, but he always kept the same office "papered" with maps, "from which he often had to prepare briefings on such diverse topics as the political developments in Southeast Asia ," the economic development of China or the French attitude towards nuclear weapons ”.

Personalities promoted and shaped by Kraemer

Besides Henry Kissinger, one of the political talents he discovered in 1961 was the then 36-year-old Alexander Haig , who in 1969 became the Military Assistant of the then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. He had significant influence (according to their information) on the defense ministers James R. Schlesinger and Donald Rumsfeld . As a graduate of the US National War College (NWC), he taught and inspired several generations of officers, senior officials in the field of foreign and security policy, diplomats, US presidents (including Richard Nixon ), private citizens and selected journalists.

According to the New York Times, the personalities with whom Kraemer was closely connected and whom he often helped to their positions include the Generals Creighton Abrams , Vernon A. Walters (later US Ambassador to the United Nations) and Edward Lansdale , a theorist of "counterinsurgency" ( counterinsurgency ).

Ongoing influence after retirement

When Kraemer had reached retirement age of 70 in 1978, he could still have struggled to stay in the Pentagon. According to L. Colodny and T. Shachtman, however, he refrained from doing so because he found himself on the sidelines under Jimmy Carter's Defense Secretary Harold Brown and his preferred military technocrats . However, his retirement in no way meant the end of Kraemer's influence. “Still extremely vigorous, Kraemer moved his consulting activities to his own apartment, where he continued to collect information and spread ideas. As Ed Rowny reports, Kraemer enjoyed regular visits from many he had influenced, including Walters , Haig , Jackson , Perle , Wolfowitz, and even Rumsfeld . The visitors kept Kraemer up to date and were in turn advised on current developments. "

It is unclear how long Kraemer influenced US foreign policy decisions in this way. In any case, until a few months before his death, he exchanged views with numerous influential figures in US politics; his last visit to the Pentagon took place on the occasion of the inauguration of Joe E. Schmitz as Inspector General in 2002.

Death and burial in Arlington

Fritz GA Kraemer died on September 8, 2003 in Washington D. C. and was buried with military honors in Arlington National Cemetery with a special permit, because he had been a civilian for decades . Those in attendance included former US Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger and his former students Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. Kissinger spoke at Kraemer's funeral, although the latter had not exchanged a word with him since 1973 in protest against Kissinger's equalization policy with communist North Vietnam .

Kraemer's legacy

The World Security Network Foundation

In 2001, the current geostrategist and investor Hubertus Hoffmann , who was supported by Fritz Kraemer as a student, founded the World Security Network Foundation (WSN) with Kraemer's knowledge and support, initially based in New York and now in London. The Foundation feels committed to Kraemer's ideas for securing peace, in particular the promotion of tolerance and human rights within the framework of a sober, realistic and creative security policy. Today the WSN is the largest security network worldwide.

Kraemer as the subject of research

For research into contemporary history and political science, the person of Fritz Kraemer is of interest from several points of view. On the one hand, it has not yet been clarified which political decisions made by the USA during the Cold War, to what extent and in what way, were influenced by stimuli from Fritz Kraemer. On the other hand, the formative influence of Kraemer on the neoconservative movement in the USA has only just been explored. After all, the historically and politically highly educated Kraemer, to whom a scientific career was open, himself developed a number of political ideas without further systematizing them. In view of the actual influence that Kraemer's thinking had, an attempt at such a systematization is obvious.

Trivia

Fritz GA Kraemer should not be confused with the brigade leader of the Waffen-SS Fritz Kraemer (1900-1959). The two even faced each other for a short time during the Battle of the Bulge at the beginning of 1945 (without direct combat contact).

Book sources by and about Fritz Kraemer

  • Hubertus Hoffmann: True Keeper of the Holy Flame - The Legacy of Pentagon Strategist and Mentor Dr Fritz Kraemer. Verlag Inspiration Un Limited, London / Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-9812110-5-4 .
  • Fritz Kraemer on Excellence. , New York 2004. (edited by Hubertus Hoffmann with contributions by Henry Kissinger , Alexander Haig , Donald Rumsfeld and others).
  • Fritz Kraemer: The relationship between the French alliance treaties and the League of Nations Pact and the Locarno Pact - a legal-political study. (= Frankfurt treatises on modern international law. Issue 30). Leipzig 1932. (= Kraemer's dissertation for Dr. iur. At the University of Frankfurt / Main from 1931).

Other sources about Fritz Kraemer

  • Len Colodny, Tom Shachtman: The Forty Years War. Harper / Collins, New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-06-168829-4 . (with about 80 references to Fritz Kraemer among others as "godfather of the neocons" ).
  • Peter F. Drucker : The Man Who Invented Kissinger. New York 1979. (extended edition 1998, ISBN 0-471-24739-1 . Pp. 141–157; chapter on Fritz Kraemer in his autobiography: Adventures of a Bystander )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ NY Times, November 19, 2003.
  2. ↑ The Forty Years War, p. 278.
personal data
SURNAME Kraemer, Fritz GA
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kraemer, Fritz Gustav Anton (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American Pentagon advisor
DATE OF BIRTH July 3, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH eat
DATE OF DEATH September 8, 2003
Place of death Washington, DC