Gottfried von Nostitz-Drzewiecky

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Gottfried von Nostitz-Drzewiecky (born August 19, 1902 in Dresden , † April 13, 1976 in Gauting ) was a German diplomat .

Life

After graduating from high school, Nostitz studied law in Freiburg im Breisgau , where Hans von Kageneck was one of his fellow students, and in Munich . In 1927 he joined the Foreign Service. After passing the diplomatic-consular exam, he was initially used as an attaché in the Foreign Office in Berlin.

From 1934 to 1938 Nostitz was a legation secretary in the German embassy in Vienna , led by Hitler's special envoy Franz von Papen . He was then appointed as a Legation Councilor in the Foreign Office, where he was primarily entrusted with protocol issues. In 1940 Nostitz was assigned to the German consulate in Geneva , where he remained active until the end of the war. A promotion that was actually due based on Nostitz's age and the good assessments by his superiors was omitted - Nostitz himself later stated that he had been given to understand discreetly that the personnel department did not dare to propose him for promotion to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop , there he was considered politically unreliable.

In March 1946 Nostitz returned to Germany, where he stayed with his parents, who had settled in Bavaria, for the following years. Nostitz's denazification proceedings in 1947 before the Wolfratshausen Spruchkammer ended with the classification in Group V “exonerated” and with the express declaration that, despite his membership in the NSDAP and his membership in the SS - to which he was a sponsoring member - and in the NSKK was proven to be an opponent of the Nazi regime and actively participated in the resistance. The widows of Helmuth von Moltkes, Adams von Trott zu Solzs and other leading members of the attempted coup of July 20, 1944 , among others, confirmed that Nostitz had leaked information about foreign policy developments to the men of July 20 from Switzerland. Other witnesses, such as the Swiss Carl Jacob Burckhardt and the later President of the Bundestag Eugen Gerstenmaier , also confirmed the humane attitude that Nostitz had on his foreign post, which was contrary to the political goals of the Nazi government: He had the passports from abroad Germany extended Jews who fled to Switzerland at the Geneva Consulate - although this was prohibited by the implementing provisions of the Nuremberg Race Laws - and thus spared them trouble with the Swiss authorities. From 1947 to 1950 Eugen Gerstenmaier employed him as a consultant in the central office of the EKD relief organization in Stuttgart. In 1950 Nostitz was accepted into the diplomatic service of the Federal Republic of Germany as a legation councilor . From 1953 to 1957 he was employed as counselor at the German diplomatic mission in The Hague , after which he was employed as consul general in Sao Paulo from 1957 to 1964 . From 1964 to 1967, Nostitz finally served as the German ambassador to Santiago de Chile. In April 2016, Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier admitted that the Federal Foreign Office and the embassy staff at the time had “grave negligence for years because of the Colonia Dignidad sect settlement in Chile. "From the sixties to the eighties, German diplomats looked the other way at best - at least they did clearly too little to protect their compatriots in this colony" ".

Today Nostitz's estate is stored in the Political Archives of the Federal Foreign Office . His previously unprinted memoirs are in the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

Honors

• 1965: Large Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany

swell

• Nostitz estate, Political Archive of the Federal Foreign Office.

literature

• Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 3: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: L – R. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-71842-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Johannes Michael Wischnath: Church in Action: the Evangelical Relief Organization 1945-1957 and its relationship to the Church and Inner Mission , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1986, p. 461 (online at Google Books).
2. ^ Sect settlement in Chile - Steinmeier zu Colonia Dignidad: "German diplomats did too little" , Der Tagesspiegel , April 26, 2016, accessed on April 27, 2016.