Fritz Schönberg (diplomat)

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Fritz Schönberg (born December 12, 1878 in Berlin ; died February 9, 1968 ) was a German diplomat.

Life

Fritz Schönberg was the son of a hotel owner. He attended the Kölln grammar school , the grammar school in Freienwalde and the Humboldt grammar school in Berlin. From 1898 he studied law in Berlin and in 1900 passed a diploma examination in Turkish at the Seminar for Oriental Languages . In 1902 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on commercial law, entered the Dragoman service of the Foreign Office and was employed as a diplomat in the Ottoman Empire until the end of the war in 1918. From 1919 to 1922 he was consul chargé d'affaires in Kaunas in the newly founded Lithuania . From 1926 to 1932 he was consul in Galatz in Romania .

In January 1938 he became consul general in Salonika . After the German-Italian conquest of Greece in 1941, Schönberg was actively involved in the ghettoization and deportation of Saloniki's Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp . On March 15, 1943, he reported the first deportation of Jews from Salonika to the Foreign Office and supported the proposal to deport local Jews of other nationalities.

He returned to Berlin in mid-1943 and retired in November 1944. In the 1960s, the Koblenz public prosecutor's office investigated him and Günther Altenburg, the German agent at the time, in Athens .

literature

  • Biographical manual of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Volume 4: p . Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service, edited by: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-71843-3 , p. 151ff.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann : The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Munich: Karl Blessing, 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 , pp. 255f.
  2. ↑ Document VEJ 14/237 in: Sara Berger u. a. (Ed.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 14: Occupied Southeast Europe and Italy . Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-055559-2 , pp. 577-579.
  3. ↑ The Office and the Past . 2010, p. 666
personal data
SURNAME Schoenberg, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 1968