Georg Wolff (journalist)

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Georg Wolff (born February 14, 1914 in Wittenberge ; † 1996 ) was a German SS-Hauptsturmführer and journalist . During the Second World War Wolff was head of division in Department III of the SD with the commander of the Security Police and the SD in Oslo. After the war, from 1952 until his retirement at the end of 1978, he held managerial positions as editor of the news magazine Der Spiegel .

Life

Georg Wolff was the son of the elementary school teacher Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff and his wife Dora. The parents' house on the mother's side belonged to the upper social class, the grandfather was an "accountant" at the railroad. The family had their own home and Wolff grew up in secure circumstances with his two years older brother Hans .

time of the nationalsocialism

Wolff joined the SA in 1933 after graduating from high school and handing over power to the National Socialists . After an internship with the daily newspaper Nordischer Kurier in Itzehoe , Wolff returned to Wittenberge and studied economics for a semester at the University of Kiel . After voluntary labor service and two years of military service, Wolff completed a newspaper studies course with Franz Six in Königsberg, which he broke off after two to three semesters. Because Six was a brigade leader of the SS , Wolff was able to advance through his mediation and without a degree in March 1938 as a full-time consultant at the SD head section in Königsberg. His superior there, SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt Gritschke, certified the NSDAP member ( membership number 4,982,494) in 1940 with “excellent performance”; According to the overall assessment, Wolff was "a National Socialist in every respect".

In 1940 Wolff worked in the SS-Einsatzkommando under SS-Standartenführer Walther Stahlecker in Norway , then until the end of the war as head of department in Department III of the SD with the commander of the Security Police and the SD in Oslo, where he was responsible for the "reports from Norway" to the Reich Security Main Office . SS General Six promoted Wolff to the best of his ability and recommended a detailed Wolff report on "current events" in Norway in a circular of February 13, 1942 to all officials at the Reich Security Main Office because of the "objective presentation and comparative evaluation". In the report, which also reached Reinhard Heydrich , Wolff analyzes why the "destruction of the Norwegian people's will to resist" did not succeed. In the SS Wolff rose to Hauptsturmführer, which corresponds to the rank of captain in the army. At the end of the war in 1945, Wolff, like his brother Hans, who had been the district court director in Köpenick and headed the domestic economy department of the Reichskommissar Norway in 1944, was taken prisoner in Norway.

post war period

After the war, Wolff and Horst Mahnke , with whom he had studied at Six in Königsberg, wrote the series “Am Caffeehandeligt” for Spiegel in 1950 , in which the two authors primarily blamed Jewish displaced persons (DPs) for coffee smuggling . In March 1952 Wolff was first head of the “International” or “Abroad” department of the Spiegel and then from 1959 to 1961 its deputy editor-in-chief. According to the research of the former Spiegel editor Peter-Ferdinand Koch, he cooperated on questions of international reporting with the former Goebbels adjutant, Wilfred von Oven , who worked for Spiegel as South America correspondent in the 1950s .

Wolff wrote over 80 cover stories for Der Spiegel for the period from 1952 to 1961 alone , including Charles de Gaulle (1952), the "Negro question" using the example of "Negro student Lucie" (1956), the Soviet political bureau member Jekaterina Furzewa ( 1957), John Foster Dulles (1953 and 1959), eight Spiegel episodes about Konrad Adenauer (1961/1962) and 15 episodes about world communism, which were published in 1961 under the title “Waiting for the last battle” at DuMont publishing house published. For a Spiegel story about the new Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard in 1966, Georg Wolff cooperated with his brother Hans, who was ministerial director in the Ministry of Economic Affairs under Ludwig Erhard. In addition, Wolff published a kind of “reflection essays ” in the journal for geopolitics , which was published by Leske-Verlag, of which Franz Six was managing director. In 1953 he wrote about the black population in colonial Africa: “The negro is intelligent, hard-working and eager to learn, but he is 'lazy'. He has no morals and no work ethic. "

In 1966 the “Humanities” department was created especially for Wolff, which he headed until his retirement on December 31, 1978. In this function, he also conducted interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre , Max Horkheimer , Arnold Gehlen and Martin Heidegger for the magazine . In 1986 he completed his unpublished memoirs, which came to the media scholar Lutz Hachmeister . Since his past as SS-Hauptsturmführer had become increasingly known, no obituary appeared in the mirror when he died in 1996 .

Fonts

  • Waiting for the last stand. Aspects of communism. Marx, Lenin, Mao . DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1961
  • Together with Horst Mahnke : 1954. Peace has a chance. Leske , Darmstadt 1953 (both authors were Spiegel editors, Six was managing director of the publishing house)
  • (Ed.): We live in the world revolution; Conversations with socialists . With an introduction by Dieter Brumm. Munich, List Verlag 1971

literature

  • Lutz Hachmeister : A German news magazine. The early “Spiegel” and its Nazi staff. In the other with Friedemann Siering (ed.): The gentlemen journalists. The elite of the German press after 1945 . Beck, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-406-47597-3, pp. 87-120
  • Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's will. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaen, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-549-07447-3 , chapter: Georg Wolff. From SD officer to “humanities scholar ” at Spiegel , pp. 145–171
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-10-039309-0
  • Peter-Ferdinand Koch: Unmasked. Double agents: names, facts, evidence . Ecowin, Salzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-7110-0008-8 pp. 212-225
  • Otto Köhler : Rudolf Augstein . A life for Germany . Droemer, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-426-27253-9
  • Involved in the coffee trade - Germany smuggler . In: Der Spiegel . No. 27 , 1950 ( online - first part of the series).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, p. 150 f.
  2. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, p. 153.
  3. ↑ Heiko Buschke: German press, right-wing extremism and the National Socialist past in the Adenauer era . Campus, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-593-37344-0 , p. 113
  4. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, pp. 153f. u. P. 162.
  5. ^ Lutz Hachmeister: A German news magazine. The early “Spiegel” and its Nazi staff. , 2002, p. 101.
  6. ^ Lutz Hachmeister: A German news magazine. The early “Spiegel” and its Nazi staff. 2002, p. 102.
  7. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, p. 160.
  8. ^ Andreas Förster: Brown past. A book sheds light on how closely the magazine Der Spiegel cooperated with Nazi perpetrators in its early years. In: Berliner Zeitung . April 14, 2011, accessed June 11, 2015 .
  9. ^ Peter-Ferdinand Koch: Unmasked. Double agents: names, facts, evidence . Ecowin-Verlag, Salzburg 2011, pp. 224–225.
  10. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, p. 151.
  11. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, p. 164.
  12. ↑ Quotation from Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, p. 164.
  13. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, p. 167.
  14. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, pp. 145f.
  15. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: Heidegger's Testament. The philosopher, the mirror and the SS . Propylaea, Berlin 2014, p. 171.
personal data
SURNAME Wolff, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist and SS-Hauptsturmführer
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Wittenberg
DATE OF DEATH 1996