Gerhart Feine

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Gerhart Feine (* 17th June 1894 in Göttingen ; † 9. April 1959 in Copenhagen ) was a German diplomat in the era of National Socialism and the Federal Republic.

family

Gerhart Feine was born as the son of Paul Feine and Gertrud. Agricola was born on June 17, 1894 in Göttingen. His father was a professor for Protestant theology at the University of Göttingen . Matthias Claudius was one of his direct ancestors. He was married to the native American citizen Marie Dorothee geb. Hackfeld, daughter of the American diplomat JF Hackfeld . He had three children with her.

Life

After attending the Piarist grammar school in Vienna and a grammar school in Breslau , Feine graduated from high school in Halle an der Saale in 1914 . He then studied law at the University of Halle and the University of Göttingen, which he completed in 1920 with the legal trainee examination. He then completed his legal clerkship in the Bremen Justice Service, which he completed in 1923 with the legal assessor exam. In November 1923 he joined the Foreign Service.

Until 1945 he was partly employed in the headquarters of the Foreign Office as well as in foreign posts in London , The Hague , Belgrade and Budapest . As a young attaché, he joined the private secretariat of the Reich Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann ( DVP ) and remained closely associated with him until his death in 1929. While he was still secretary of the legation in London, he was repeatedly the minister's companion on his trips abroad and during his spa stays in Bad Wildungen . When Germany's admission to the League of Nations was announced in 1926 , Feine entered the meeting room in Geneva at Stresemann's side.

After the handover of power to the National Socialists in 1933, Feine did not join the NSDAP, despite the fact that the Foreign Office's personnel policy was brought into line . From 1938 he was a delegation counselor in Belgrade, where he saw Yugoslavia joining the Tripartite Pact . He stayed at the embassy in April 1941 during the German attack on Yugoslavia (Belgrade was captured on April 12, six days after the attack began). He then worked with the envoy Felix Benzler in the " Foreign Office at the Military Commander- in- Chief " in occupied Serbia and his representative was absent. Benzler demanded the deportation of the Serbian Jews to Romania and tolerated their hostage-taking and gassing.

With the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 ( Margarethe company ), Feine was transferred to Hungary as Charge d'Affaires . The new German envoy, Edmund Veesenmayer , put political pressure on the Sztójay government to ensure that the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior cooperated with Adolf Eichmann in Budapest. When a run on the banks started on the first business day after the occupation, Feine demanded from the Hungarian State Secretary for Finance Béla Csizik that withdrawals be limited to 1,000 pengő and that the safe deposit boxes be locked, a measure that was particularly aimed at the Jewish population of Hungary. The Hungarian government immediately and in quick succession issued anti-Semitic decrees on wearing the yellow Star of David (April 5, 1944) and ghettoization (April 7, 1944), implementation of which began on April 16. The approx. 150 SS men of the Eichmann Command , which was put together especially for this purpose , in cooperation with the Hungarian police, militia, the local authorities and the Hungarian railroad were able to ghettoise the Hungarian Jews in the Hungarian province within a very short period of time and they - supposedly as workers - Have it transported to Auschwitz, the capital Budapest was initially excluded. From April 27, 1944 to July 11, 1944, there were 437,402 Hungarian Jews on 147 trains, according to the legation. It can be assumed that Feine learned of these events as a delegation councilor .

In autumn 1944, Feine helped save numerous Hungarian Jews from being deported to German forced labor camps. He first informed the Swiss embassy about the impending deportation of the Jews and then worked with the Swiss to maintain the diplomatic immunity of specially rented houses in which Jews found protection. In cooperation with the Swiss embassy employee Carl Lutz and the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg , he tried to prevent the deportation of the remaining Jewish population to the forced labor camps that Eichmann and Veesenmayer intended in cooperation with the Arrow Cross government . The issue of several thousand protective passports for the threatened Jews by Carl Lutz goes back to his initiative. His superiors could not reveal his activity as an informant.

After the end of the war he was interned in the British in Neumünster from 1945 to 1946 . After his release, Feine became involved in evangelical refugee aid in Bremen and was then appointed to the justice administration of the Bremen government chancellery as a senior councilor from February 1947. From 1949 to 1952 he was President of the State Justice Administration in Bremen. During this time he participated in the drafting of the Bremen Constitution of 1947 and was a member of the Constitutional Convention on Herrenchiemsee , which drafted the Basic Law .

After the Federal Foreign Office was re-established on March 15, 1951 in the new federal capital, Bonn , he was reassigned to the Foreign Service in December 1952 and called in as Consul General for the re-establishment of the Consulate in Geneva . From July 1953 he was also a permanent delegate to the United Nations (UN) organizations in Geneva. From 1956 to 1958 he was Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and from May 1958 until his death in 1959 Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Denmark .

In the opinion of his grandson, the historian Daniel Koerfer , and that of the historian Christopher R. Browning , his role, both in Budapest and later in the Foreign Service of the Federal Republic of Germany, was not adequately recognized in the October 2010 investigation by the Independent Commission of Historians - Foreign Office .

Publications

  • Gerhart Feine: The international legal position of the state ships. Berlin 1921.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Christopher R. Browning : Historian study "The Office". The end of all cover-ups. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . December 10, 2010.
  2. ↑ Christian Gerlach , Götz Aly : The last chapter. Realpolitik, ideology and the murder of the Hungarian Jews. DVA, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-421-05505-X , p. 119, fn. 133.
  3. ↑ Randolph L. Braham : The politics of genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary. Columbia University Press, New York 1981, ISBN 0-231-05208-1 , p. 507.
  4. ↑ Christian Gerlach, Götz Aly: The last chapter. Realpolitik, ideology and the murder of the Hungarian Jews. DVA, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-421-05505-X , pp. 186f.
  5. ^ Wolfgang Benz: Labor education camp, ghettos, youth protection camp, police detention camp, special camp, gypsy camp, forced labor camp: history of the National Socialist concentration camps. Volume 9, Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-57238-3 , pp. 357f.
  6. ↑ 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, p. 16.
  7. ↑ Article about Gerhart Feine on the website of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation .
  8. ↑ The Foreign Office and the Third Reich. Is it too easy for “The Office”? Daniel Koerfer in an interview with Frank Schirrmacher . In: faz.net . November 29, 2010.
  9. ↑ Feine is mentioned in this book according to the name register on pages 16, 260, 312ff. and 358 themed

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Fine, Gerhart
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Feine, Gerhard; Fine, Gert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH June 17, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Goettingen
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 1959
Place of death Copenhagen