Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz

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Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz (1960)

Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz (born September 29, 1904 in Bremen ; † February 16, 1973 there ) was a German diplomat , most recently State Secretary in the Foreign Office. When Denmark was under German occupation , the prevailing opinion - which has not gone unchallenged - made a significant contribution to the rescue of 7,000 Danish Jews from being transported to the extermination camps .

Life

Pre-war period

Duckwitz comes from a long-established Bremen merchant family. His great-grandfather was the Bremen merchant and mayor Arnold Duckwitz . As a young man he was a soldier in a volunteer corps . After graduation, he began at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg economics to study and graduated in 1924 Corps Rhenania Freiburg on. He broke off his studies and joined Kaffee Hag in 1927 . For the company he went to Copenhagen in 1928 as branch manager . Enthusiastic about Adolf Hitler's ideas , he became a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party as early as 1932 . From 1933 he worked in the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP (APA), which was headed by Alfred Rosenberg . There he worked as a Scandinavia consultant. After Seraphim, Duckwitz was one of the longest-serving employees of Rosenberg in the APA. After the Röhm putsch , Duckwitz began to turn away from the party internally, but without resigning. In 1935 he quit his service for the NSDAP and switched to the shipping business, which led to the move to New York City , where he worked for the Hamburg-America Line .

Second World War

Duckwitz's role in saving the Danish Jews

According to the prevailing opinion, Duckwitz played a central role in saving the Danish Jews . On September 1, 1939, Duckwitz entered the service of the Reich Ministry of Transport , which appointed him as a shipping expert in Copenhagen. In 1941 he moved to the area of ​​responsibility of the Foreign Office . As part of this activity, he passed on his knowledge of German plans to deport Jews from Denmark in September 1943 , making use of his contacts with Danish shipowners . Through his negotiation policy, he helped Jews flee to Sweden . After Werner Best received the deportation order on September 18, 1943, the German Reich Plenipotentiary in Denmark , who leaked the date of a planned arrest operation against Duckwitz, Duckwitz negotiated with the Swedish government three days later in Stockholm about the admission of Jewish refugees, under Best's tolerance . This saved 7,000 Danish Jews from deportation, 477 were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp , 90% of whom survived. On March 29, 1971, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial honored him for his role in saving the Danish Jews as Righteous Among the Nations . Yad Vashem's assessment of Duckwitz's contribution to saving the Danish Jews is unreservedly positive.

Duckwitz lived during and after the Second World War in Landhaus Frieboeshvile , Lyngby Hovedgade 2, Kongens Lyngby, Lyngby-Taarbæk Kommune . There is a commemorative plaque there today .

More recently, the role traditionally attributed to Duckwitz in saving Danish Jews has been questioned. In 2006, the historian Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson, contrary to prevailing opinion, argued that Duckwitz did not play a significant role in the rescue of Danish Jews and that the central role that is generally attributed to him is undocumented. He wrote that the Danish historian Hans Kirchhoff had embellished Duckwitz's vita during the Nazi era. There are many inconsistencies between Duckwitz's own account of his role in saving the Danish Jews and other sources.

The historian Brunstin-Berenstein (1908–1997) wrote in 1989 that Duckwitz had viewed his own role in saving Danish Jews in too positive a light. His own account contains a number of errors. Although Duckwitz had informed the Danes about the German plans, he later presented them as being by himself. In particular, Duckwitz only obeyed an order from his superior Werner Best. The myth of Duckwitz's great merits and his personal initiative to save the Danish Jews is untenable. Kirchhoff last contradicted this in 2015 with a differentiating analysis of the processes and the role of Duckwitz.

Contacts to the resistance

Via Paul Kanstein , the deputy envoy in Copenhagen, Duckwitz got in touch with the resistance fighters of July 20, 1944 , in particular with Ulrich von Hassell , Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg and other employees of the Foreign Office. Had the coup been successful, Duckwitz, as the new envoy (he should have replaced Best), should have resolved the occupation regime in Denmark and Norway .

post war period

After the end of the Second World War, Duckwitz did not return to Germany , but stayed in Copenhagen, which had meanwhile become a second home for him, and worked there as a representative of the West German Chambers of Commerce to establish economic contacts. When the Foreign Office was re-established, he was hired there and began working at the Consulate General in Copenhagen as head of the economic department before moving to Helsinki in 1953 as consul . In 1955 he returned to Copenhagen and became ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1958 he became head of the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office in Bonn . He called for the Hallstein Doctrine not to be applied to the states invaded by the German Reich such as Poland, and not to Israel either . One has to put moral before political categories here. When he was unable to assert himself with this view, he switched to the post of German ambassador in India to New Delhi . In 1965, he was at his own request in the retirement staggered.

Grave in the Riensberg cemetery

From his time as head of the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, Duckwitz had close contacts with the then Governing Mayor of Berlin Willy Brandt , with whom he shared the view of the need for a new Ostpolitik . When Brandt became Federal Foreign Minister in 1966, he brought Duckwitz back into active service as State Secretary in October 1967 , an office that he also retained under Walter Scheel . After the Warsaw Treaty on German-Polish Relations - here Duckwitz was the negotiator of the Federal Republic of Germany - had been signed, he finally retired. He died on February 16, 1973 and was buried in the Riensberg cemetery in Bremen (grave V101, coordinates: 53 ° 5 ′ 37.2 ″  N , 8 ° 51 ′ 36.3 ″  E ).

His second nephew Edmund Duckwitz was the German ambassador to Mexico from 2010 to 2014 .

Honors

Publications

  • Erindringer om et hus i Lyngby. Lyngby 1966. ("Memories of a house in Lyngby")
  • The turning point in the east. In: Foreign Policy. Born in 1970, issue 1.
  • Jeg ved, hvad jeg har at gøre , Verlag Inter Nationes, Bonn 1985. ("I know what I have to do")

literature

  • Johannes Dose : Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz in Denmark. 1943-1945. 2nd expanded edition. Foreign Office - Referat 012-9, Bonn 1992 ( series of reports and documentations. ISSN  0172-7575 ).
  • Therkel Straede : October 1943 - the Danish Jews - rescue from extermination. Published by the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Danmark - Udenrigsministeriet, Copenhagen 1993.
  • Therkel Straede: The human wall . Denmark in October 1943. Saving the Jews from extermination. Tiderne Skifter, Copenhagen 1997, ISBN 87-7445-592-3 .
  • Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 1: Johannes Hürter : A – F. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2000, ISBN 3-506-71840-1 .
  • Boris Ruge (Red.): In memory of Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz 1904–1973. Foreign Office, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-937570-15-2 ( PDF download ).
  • 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 .
  • Hans Kirchhoff : The gode tysker. GF Duckwitz. De danske jøders redningsmand. 1. udgave, 1. oplag. Gyldendal, Copenhagen 2013, ISBN 978-87-02-09843-3 .
  • Hans Kirchhoff: Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz (1904–1973) - The Good German , in: Bremisches Jahrbuch Volume 94, 2015, pp. 192–203.
  • Roland Kaufhold : A late rehabilitation. A memory by Peter Finkelgruen of a former resistance fighter (Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz and Michael Jovy) , Jüdische Zeitung March 2014, No. 97, p. 15. A shortened version: http://www.hagalil.com/2013/12/edelweisspiraten -2 /

Movie

  • The Schindlers - Rescuers with a diplomatic passport , TV documentary (ZDF) etc. a. about Duckwitz, by Dietmar Schulz, 2007.
  • Resistance under Hitler , TV documentary (Radio Bremen) by Reinhard Joksch, 2017.

Web links

Commons : Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1996, 129/973.
  2. ↑ Hans-Günther Seraphim (ed.): The political diary of Alfred Rosenberg . 1934/35 and 1939/40. Documentation. Munich 1964, p. 52. (The editor was the brother of Peter-Heinz Seraphim )
  3. ↑ Sebastian Werner: The national ideologue. In: Ronald Smelser , Enrico Syring , Rainer Zitelmann (eds.), Die Braune Elite 2. 21 further biographical sketches, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt, 2nd updated edition 1999, p. 23
  4. ^ The Office and the Past (paperback edition 2012), p. 248.
  5. ^ The Righteous Among The Nations
  6. ↑ www.yadvashem.org: Duckwitz, Georg Ferdinand (pdf, November 16, 2003; last accessed October 7, 2018)
  7. ↑ Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson: “I know what to do.” En kildekritisk belysning af Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz 'role i redningen af ​​jøderne i 1943. In: RAMBAM. Tidsskrift for jødisk kultur og forskning, 15: 2006, p. 72–93, here p. 72 ( digitized version [PDF; 1.3 MB]): “ Min påstand er, at Duckwitz ikke spillede en betydningsfuld rolle i redningen af ​​jøderne til Sverige, and at the central role han he blevet tildelt he udokumenteret. "
  8. ↑ Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson: “I know what to do.” En kildekritisk belysning af Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz 'role i redningen af ​​jøderne i 1943. In: RAMBAM. Tidsskrift for jødisk kultur og forskning, 15: 2006, pp. 72–93 ( digital copy [PDF; 1.3 MB]).
  9. ^ Tatiana Brunstin-Berenstein: The Historiographic Treatment of the Abortive Attempt to Deport the Danish Jews . In: Michael R. Marrus (Ed.): The Nazi Holocaust. Part 5: Public Opinion and Relations to the Jews in Nazi Europe . Volume 2, Walter de Gruyter , Berlin / Boston 1989, ISBN 978-3-11-184855-6 , pp. 570-607, 584 (quote: “The myth of Duckwitz 'great merit and his personal initiative to save the Jews of Danmark is untenable. ”)
  10. ↑ "I wouldn't be a diplomat without my uncle"
  11. ^ Archives Corps Rhenania Freiburg
personal data
SURNAME Duckwitz, Georg Ferdinand
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH 16th February 1973
Place of death Bremen