Fritz Grobba

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Fritz Grobba (born July 18, 1886 in Gartz ; † September 2, 1973 in Bonn ) was a German diplomat who had been active in the Near and Middle East since 1913 .

Life

"Fritz Konrad Ferdinand Grobba" was born as "Arthur Borg" and later reversed and expanded his name "aborG" . Upon completion of the law school at the University of Berlin and the language studies, Arabic and Turkish, at the Department of Oriental Languages and the promotion began in 1913 as a candidate of the Dragomanats the German consulate in Jerusalem in the Ottoman Empire . Grobba later converted to Islam .

Between 1914 and 1918 he was a soldier in Palestine under General Kress von Kressenstein , was briefly editor for him of the "Mitteilungen des Bund der Asia-Kampf" and then began a diplomatic career in the Foreign Office . In 1923 he went as charge d'affaires to Kabul and entered there diplomatic territory. From 1926 to 1932 he was again in the Foreign Office in Berlin and then came to Baghdad as envoy in 1932 . Here Grobba negotiated military and training aid between Iraq and the German Reich and the exchange of maneuver observers. Grobba wrote a short Arabic version of " Mein Kampf ". Accompanied by Willi Georg Steffen , he was the first German envoy to go to Jedda in Saudi Arabia in January 1939 and there presented King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud with his credentials ; it was a branch post. From 1941 onwards, he was called “Representative of the Foreign Office for the Arab countries”. At the beginning of the Second World War , Iraq broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and Grobba was recalled to Berlin.

British-Iraqi War May 1941

In February 1941 Erwin Rommel took over the German Africa Corps in Libya. On April 6, the German war against Greece began with the Balkan campaign , which eased the situation for Rommel and the Italians during the " Africa campaign ", as the British shifted the bulk of their activities from North Africa to Greece.

In May 1941, Otto Abetz and François Darlan reached an intermediate stage of negotiations with the "Paris Protocols" which, if ratified , would have allowed the Germans a military presence in Syria, Tunisia and French West Africa . In return, the daily reparation costs of 20 million Reichsmarks cut to 15 million Reichsmarks, more French prisoners of war released from German captivity and traffic between occupied France and Vichy France easier.

After a coup d'état in Iraq by the former Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gailani, who was friendly to the axis, on April 1, 1941, the British moved a brigade from British India to Basra on April 12 , in order to establish a permanent military base there. In a declaration drafted by Undersecretary Woermann and initialed by State Secretary Weizsäcker, Gailani was given the advice to "take up armed resistance against England" and the assurance "that Italy and Germany would prepare support through arms and ammunition". On May 2, 1941, the British-Iraqi War broke out, in which the British wanted to regain control of their area of ​​influence.

The German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop organized a diplomatic campaign and sent Grobba with a small group of three diplomats, the Sumerologist Adam Falkenstein and four soldiers from the Brandenburg Special Unit to Iraq and the Parisian embassy employee Rudolf Rahn to Syria. Grobba came from Foggia , met Rahn on Rhodes and, after Rahn's plane had been painted over with the tricolor, both flew to Aleppo in the former French mandate Syria , which had been under Italian military control since the French surrender. Grobba immediately flew on to Mosul under the code name "Frank Gehrke" and arrived in Baghdad on May 11th. The Air Force formed the “Sonderstab F”, which was led from Greece by Air Force General Hellmuth Felmy , and sent the “Sonderkommando Junck” with two aircraft squadrons to Iraq, but this operation turned into a military disaster. It began with the fact that the German command officer, Major (and Field Marshal's son ) Axel von Blomberg, was shot down on the approach to Baghdad. Günther Pawelke , who had already been the legation secretary at Grobba in Baghdad, survived being shot down.

In Syria , Rahn tried to negotiate on the basis of the “Paris Protocols” and, via Ribbentrop, promised further consideration for the military cooperation of the French troops stationed in Syria and Lebanon. He got into the role of a military organizer, had the General Henri Dentz , the commander of the Vichy forces in Syria, within three days, two trains with 50 wagons with weapons for Iraqi troops loaded and accompanied the weapons transport on the Baghdad Railway by neutral Turkey to Mosul. He had the injured Fausi al-Kawukdschi brought to a hospital in Germany and equipped his unmanaged troops with weapons for the fight against the English. In between he flew to Ankara and met a visibly disinterested ambassador Franz von Papen , who was supposed to accelerate the transit of jet fuel from Romania through Turkey.

Even the “Führer directive No. 30” of May 23, 1941 did not change the course of the war. From May 28, the British stood before Baghdad, on May 31 the Iraqi government fled to Iran . Mohammed Amin al-Husseini , the “Grand Mufti of Jerusalem”, set the stage for a pogrom in Baghdad , during which the Jewish ghetto of Baghdad was destroyed at the beginning of June on the Jewish festival of Shavuot and 179 Jews died before going to Berlin escaped. In the investigation report, Grobba's anti-Semitic propaganda work was also held responsible for the Farhud .

On June 3, Grobba fled to Syria, which is why the British set up a special force to arrest him. Grobba flew back to Berlin via Athens on June 5th .

After the British had defeated the Iraqi troops, war broke out between the British and the Vichy French in Syria and Lebanon on June 8, 1941, and finally, on July 14, 1941, the Acre armistice between Generals Henry Maitland Wilson and Dentz. Units of the Free French were also used against the Vichy French in the war.

Rahn, who had meanwhile been appointed ambassador, and his companions were able to escape via Turkey. If you follow Rahn's description in his autobiography, which he wrote in 1947 in the Nuremberg witness prison , he and Grobba, as diplomats and secret agents, developed military activities that ultimately had no effect, except that Rommel was able to survive the summer of 1941 in North Africa because the British were briefly detained in Iraq and Syria.

Berlin

Back in Berlin, Grobba received from Ribbentrop the function of a “representative of the Foreign Office for the Arab countries”, or “Arabia representative” for short, but he was then a victim of the Mufti's leadership claims and of his dispute with Gailani, and was then defeated in a dispute with Werner Otto von Hentig and was pushed out of the function. He was transferred to Paris, where he was supposed to sift through captured French files in the "Historical Archives Commission". Since he tried to interfere in oriental politics from there too, he was initially deported to the archives of the Foreign Office in Hermsdorf / Glogau and was then responsible for chemical issues in the Saxon government in Dresden until the end of the war . For Grobba, Hentig, Canaris and Weizsäcker were representatives of the “traditionally secondary German Middle East policy”, who had missed the opportunities that Grobba (also in contrast to Rahn) had seen in an active Middle East policy - possibly out of opposition to Hitler .

After the end of the war

After the end of the war, Grobba briefly served as a senior public prosecutor in Meiningen , where he was arrested by the Soviets and taken into Soviet captivity for ten years. When he returned home, ex-generals Hellmuth Felmy and Walter Warlimont, under the direction of Franz Halder for the “Historical Division” of the USArmy, completed the study MS P-207 “The German Exploitation of the Arab Native Movement in World War II”. After 1957, Grobba wrote an eighty-page supplement. The old enmities from the Nazi era were thus continued.

From 1959 Grobba lived on his ambassadorial pension and the war victim pension in Bad Godesberg , traveled again to Iraq to visit his old friends and wrote his memoirs , which were criticized by Kohlhaas, Pawelke and von Hentig.

In a so-called standard work on the role of the AA from 2010, Independent Historical Commission - Foreign Office : The Office and the Past , Grobba's role as an active Nazi putschist in Iraq in 1941 on behalf of his office with the aim of conquering the Middle East from the Caucasus and the extermination of the Jews in Palestine , not mentioned.

Fonts

  • The claim for damages due to positive breach of contract in the contract for work , Gartz (Oder) 1913 (= Diss. Jur. Greifswald 1913).
  • The grain industry in Syria and Palestine since the beginning of the World War , Orient-Buchhandlung H. Lafaire, Hanover 1923.
  • Iraq. Junker & Dünnhaupt, Berlin 1941, 2nd edition 1943.
  • German-Arab relations. in: Yearbook of the Friends of German-Arab Understanding . Bonn-Venusberg 1963, p. 9ff.
  • Men and Powers in the Orient. 25 years of diplomatic activity in the Orient , Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1967.
  • Propaganda against England in the Middle East. in Bernd Philipp Schröder: Germany and the Middle East in World War II. Series: Studies and documents on the history of World War II, published by the Working Group for Defense Research 16. Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1975, ISBN 3-7881-1416-9 , pp. 278–282.

literature

  • Fritz Grobba in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  • Wilhelm Kohlhaas : Hitler's adventure in Iraq. An experience report. Freiburg 1989, ISBN 3-451-08605-0 .
  • Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Martin Cüppers : Crescent moon and swastika. The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 978-3-534-19729-3 .
  • Rudolf Rahn : Restless Life, Notes and Memories. Düsseldorf 1949.
  • Jobst Knigge : German war target Iraq. The German grip on the Middle East in World War II. Via the Caucasus and Cairo to the oil of the Orient. Plans and reality. Kovac, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8300-3030-0 .
  • Wolfgang G. Schwanitz : "The spirit from the lamp": Fritz Grobba and Berlin's politics in the Near and Middle East. In the S. (Ed.): Germany and the Middle East. Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, Leipzig 2004, ISBN 3-937209-48-4 , pp. 126-150.
  • Wolfgang G. Schwanitz: Jihad made in Germany. German Islamic Politics in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Politics, economy, military and culture. Trafo, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89626-528-8 .
  • Karl-Volker Neugebauer : The German military control in unoccupied France and in French Northwest Africa 1940-1942. On the problem of securing the southwest flank of Hitler's continental empire. Boldt, Boppard 1980.
  • Francis R. Nicosia : Fritz Grobba and the Middle East Policy of the Third Reich. In: Edward Ingram (Ed.): National and International Politics in the Middle East. Essays in Honor of Elie Kedourie . Frank Cass, London & Totowa NJ 1986, pp. 206-228.
  • Maria Keipert et al. (Ed.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Volume 2: G-K. Editors: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2005, ISBN 3-506-71841-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Time Magazine May 26, 1941, World War: MIDDLE EASTERN THEATER: The Battle Joins, including the short biography of Grobba with mention of the pseudonym, time.com
  2. ↑ Interpreter especially for communication between the state authorities and the embassies and consulates in the Orient
  3. ↑ Time Magazine May 26, 1941.
  4. ↑ Protocol of May 28, 1941: After 7 days of negotiations, the German Walter Warlimont and the Vichy-French War Minister Charles Léon Clément Huntziger signed this protocol, which promised concrete French support for the war in other theaters.
  5. ↑ Grobba: Men and Powers in the Orient. P. 218.
  6. ^ Rahn, Restless Life. P. 226, Grobba, p. 235.
  7. ↑ Grobba, p. 234
  8. ↑ There are different versions of the details, Grobba, p. 237; Rahn, p. 238.
  9. ↑ Rahn, p. 245 ff; the meeting with Papen on p. 250
  10. ^ Printed by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen , 1939–1945 Germany 2nd World War in chronicles and documents. 1962 p. 350.
  11. ↑ Norman A. Stillman , The jews of arab lands in modern times , New York, 1991, pp. 117-119; The Report of the iraqi commission of inquiry on the furhud (1941), in: Norman A. Stillman, pp. 405-417; Shlomo Hillel , Operation Babylon , Hänssler, 1992, p. 21
  12. ↑ Rahn, p. 266; P. 225
  13. ↑ Grobba, p. 318
  14. ↑ Grobba, p. 313
  15. ↑ Grobba, p. 317; Rahn p. 266
  16. ↑ Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Middle East Political Retrospective Dr. Fritz Grobbas .
  17. ↑ see instead Bernd Philipp Schröder: Germany and the Middle East in World War II. Series: Studies and documents on the history of the 2. WK., Ed. Working group for military research , 16. Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1975 ISBN 3-7881-1416-9 , passim (Grobba: 28 mentions in the directory of persons, often several pages representation); also in the excursion "Orient Legions" pp. 215–232. The book contains one of the few photos of the Gr. from his active time in the Middle East
  18. ↑ Record of Aug. 7, 1941. PA of the AA UStS Iraq, 3
  19. ↑ According to Schwanitz, Grobba stands out in this volume with regard to "with regard to the Middle East [...]" ( PDF; 121 kB - here last page, last paragraph).
personal data
SURNAME Grobba, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gehrke, Franz (pseudonym); Borg, Arthur (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Gartz
DATE OF DEATH 2nd September 1973
Place of death Bonn