Gerhard Mertins

Gerhard Georg Mertins (born December 30, 1919 in Berlin ; † March 19, 1993 in Fort Lauderdale , Florida ) was a well-known member of the Waffen-SS at the time of National Socialism and one of the best-known arms exporters in the Federal Republic of Germany after the Second World War .

Life

Before 1945

Gerhard Mertins grew up in Berlin. During the time of National Socialism he completed military training at the cadet school boarding school Insel Scharfenberg near Berlin. During the Second World War he made a career as a career officer. Mertins served under Otto Skorzeny and was one of the three officers of the SS command that took part in the company Eiche on September 12, 1943 to liberate Benito Mussolini , who was interned in the Gran Sasso . Between 1940 and 1943 he was wounded five times. For his jump operation on Crete (Agyia) and the "great defensive success" in the middle section of the Eastern Front operation from October 1, 1942 to February 15, 1943, where he commanded the 4th Company of the Parachute Pioneer Battalion, he was awarded the German Cross in Gold awarded. With parts of his Parachute Battalion 5 he got into the Falaise pocket in 1944 , but was able to escape from it on August 20. On December 6, 1944, as captain and leader of Parachute Pioneer Battalion 5, he received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross . The last rank was that of a paratrooper major.

After 1945

After the war, Mertins attended higher commercial school and became assistant to the general director of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg. Among other things, he was responsible for the export of the Beetle . From 1947 he lived in Bremen , where he started his own business and founded a wholesale business for industrial supplies and a taxi company. For Mercedes he handled export business in the Middle East and Africa.

In Bremen he became the leader of the “Green Devils”, an association in which former paratroopers gathered. The “Green Devils” of Mertins campaigned for the remilitarization of Germany and organized events with Otto Ernst Remer and the mutual aid community of soldiers of the former Waffen SS , of which Mertins was a member. A 1951 dossier from the United States Army Intelligence Service ( CIC) revealed that Mertins was active in various “neo-Nazi” organizations. He was classified as an important supporter and promoter of the Socialist Reich Party .

In September 1951 Mertins went to Egypt . There he worked closely in the staff of Wilhelm Fahrmbacher , who was military advisor to the central planning staff of the Egyptian army from March 1951 to August 1958 . Until 1955 Mertins was head of the advisory group for airborne troops in the Egyptian Ministry of Defense and instructor of an Egyptian elite parachute regiment. After his stay in Egypt, Mertins traveled to different countries and pursued various activities. He trained the parachute regiment in Syria and acted as a sales consultant for various German companies, in particular for a company owned by Herbert Quandt that sold Mercedes-Benz vehicles to the Middle East. This made him interesting for various secret services, such as the American CIC, from which he received regular payments for his information. Under the code name "Uranus", Mertins was listed as an employee of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1956 . In a short biography he wrote himself, Mertins stated "1956-1962 - establishment of a German export organization in the Middle East including the countries of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and others".

Arms trade - Merex AG

Together with Otto Skorzeny, with whom he worked in 1954 during his stay in Egypt, Mertins founded the export company Merex AG in 1963 in Vevey , Switzerland , which exported German weapons abroad for years. "Merex" was an acronym for Mertins-Export.

According to his own statements, from 1965 he maintained a "permanent cooperation" with the Iranian secret service SAVAK and worked closely with the Federal Intelligence Service until 1969 and, at its instigation, also with other western secret services. Mertins became known to a wider public through the sale of North American F-86 fighter jets to Pakistan . The jets came from the holdings of the Bundeswehr Air Force and, with the help of the BND and the approval of German authorities, had been shipped to the end customer via Iran. Mertins is said to have acted as a middleman for Samuel Cummings , an international arms dealer, in this deal .

After the news magazine Spiegel revealed that Mertins had delivered war equipment to crisis areas, the Bonn public prosecutor's office brought charges against him for illegal arms trafficking . Mertins was acquitted in 1980 and received federal compensation of five million Deutschmarks . He was able to prove that the Federal Intelligence Service commissioned the exports and thus acted on behalf of the state.

1960s and 1970s

In 1967 Mertins acquired the Buschhof estate in Thomasberg near Königswinter , part of which he converted into a hotel in 1971 . In 1972 a restaurant and leisure facilities were built.

Mertins had a special relationship with Chile . At the end of 1975 he received the head of the Chilean secret service Manuel Contreras, who had entered Germany under a false name, and later traveled with him to Iran. In 1978 Mertins founded the "Freundeskreis Colonia Dignidad ", to which various West German politicians belonged and which supported the German settlement in the south of Chile, which had fallen into disrepute due to allegations of torture. The “Circle of Friends” temporarily comprised 120 people.

Films about Gerhard Mertins

• The BND files: The secret service and its first arms dealer by Rainer Kahrs . 2019, 45 minutes.

literature

• Arms and the Man II - The Shady Mr. Mertins. In: Ken Silverstein, Daniel Burton-Rose: Private Warriors. Verso, New York 2000, ISBN 1-85984-756-0 , pp. 109-140.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearer 1939–1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd Edition. Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 538.
2. ↑ Peter F. Müller, Michael Mueller, Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, Against Friend and Enemy: Der BND: Geheime Politik and dirty business , Rowohlt 2002, p. 336
3. ^ Romano Mussolini: My father, il Duce. Kales Press 2006, p. 29: "For more than sixty years, my father's liberation from Gran Sasso was attributed solely to Skorzeny, even though Mors and Mertins played crucial roles."
4. ↑ Hans-Martin Stimpel, Die deutsche Fallschirmtruppe 1942 to 1945 , Volume 2, Mittler 2001, p. 214
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Peter F. Müller, Michael Mueller, Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, Against Friend and Enemy: Der BND: Geheime Politik and dirty business , Rowohlt 2002, p. 337
6. ↑ Peter Hammerschmidt, The Post-War Career of the “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie and the Western Intelligence Services , Dissertation 2013, p. 343
7. ↑ Ken Silverstein, Daniel Burton-Rose, Private Warriors . Verso, New York 2000, ISBN 1-85984-756-0 , p. 118
8. ↑ Ken Silverstein, Daniel Burton-Rose, Private Warriors . Verso, New York 2000, ISBN 1-85984-756-0 , p. 112
9. ^ ^{A b} Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World. Inside the Global Arms Trade. Penguin Books, London 2011, p. 22
10. ↑ Erich Schmidt-Eenboom : Undercover. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998, p. 259.
11. ^ With Billetal and BND . In: Der Spiegel . 47/1974 of November 18, 1974, p. 65.
12. ^ Anthony Sampson : The Arms Bazaar in the Nineties: From Krupp to Saddam. Houlder and Stoulton, 1991, p. 209.
13. ↑ Erich Schmidt-Eenboom : Undercover. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998, p. 260.
14. ↑ Gero Gemballa: "Colonia Dignidad", a German camp in Chile. Rowohlt Verlag, 1988, p. 156
15. ↑ Gero Gemballa: "Colonia Dignidad", a German camp in Chile. Rowohlt Verlag, 1988, p. 155.
16. ^ Radio Bremen press release on The BND files: The secret service and its first arms dealer

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerhard Mertins in the catalog of the German National Library