Hans-Joachim Rechenberg

Hans-Joachim Rechenberg (also Hans Rechenberg ; born September 20, 1910 in Kemnitz near Triebel ; † December 7, 1977 ) was a German journalist, press officer for Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk during National Socialism, press officer in Joseph Goebbels ' Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and during World War II Propaganda and in the post-war period V-Mann of the Federal Intelligence Service .

Life

time of the nationalsocialism

Rechenberg joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) on August 30, 1930 and was given membership number 297504. In 1933 he took part in the Reichstag fire process as a representative of the Prussian press service , entered the Prussian civil service and became a councilor at the age of 25. In this position he was deputy head of the press office of the Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan , Hermann Göring , and press officer in the Prussian State Ministry. From February 1938 he was press officer for Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk . He also headed the press office of the Reichsbank in Berlin . In March 1939 Rechenberg was appointed to the senior government council.

At the beginning of the Second World War , Rechenberg volunteered for military service, “flew as a 'war reporter' in 1940 to London and jumped over Corinth with the paratroopers”, for which he “received the Iron Cross ”. In 1940 he propagated the Nazi war in the magazine Wille und Macht , the leader's organ of the National Socialist youth , by emphasizing the "unique destruction of the Polish state structure in the campaign of the 18 days", praising the "National Socialist war economy" as the "armory of victory" and claimed that Germany's struggle was aimed at "the bearers of world domination who for decades abused their power and mercilessly passed on to the order of the day over the misery of the peoples and only serving their own benefit". Rechenberg worked during the war as a press officer in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP) and in May / June 1940 government spokesman for the business press conference. After giving a presentation on the war situation in Crete at a “ministerial conference” of the Propaganda Ministry led by Joseph Goebbels , Goebbels noted in his diary on June 18, 1941: “Rechenberg makes an impeccable impression. He has matured a lot through the fight. ”Under Major General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke , Rechenberg came to Africa as a lieutenant and“ war reporter ”, went missing in Tunisia on May 6, 1943 and was taken as a prisoner of war in Concordia in the US state of Kansas spent.

In the 1941 yearbook "Die Wehrmacht" he published the war report "Paratroopers in the Southeast - Corinth and Crete".

post war period

After his release from US-American captivity, Rechenberg settled in Bad Tölz in 1946 and looked after his former boss, Reich Economics Minister Walther Funk, as a “legal assistant” in the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals . In addition to radio, Rechenberg also took care of former Wehrmacht generals who were now interned, so that his former superior Major General Ramcke wrote in his memoirs in 1951 : "As a journalist, Hans Rechenberg had made particular efforts to better treat and free the prisoners." the 1950s temporarily the German national and anti-American magazine progress .

At the trial of Ramcke, who died on March 21, 1951 for war crimes in the battle for Brest, etc. a. sentenced to five and a half years in prison for taking hostages and murdering French civilians, he met the Swiss banker and escape helper for Nazi criminal François Genoud , with whom he worked until his death. When, in 1960, on the death of his former boss, the Reich Economics Minister and Reichsbank President Walther Funk, who was incarcerated in Spandau's war crimes prison until May 1957, he and the former SS economic leader Hans Kehrl on behalf of the "former employees and friends who made him (Funk) and his Loyal companion ", wanted to place an ad in the daily newspaper Welt , it was rejected. Rechenberg worked together with Genoud in the marketing of Martin Bormann's estate and in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. At that time already managed by the Federal Intelligence Service as V-Mann 7396, Rechenberg was supposed to take care of the interim financing of Eichmann's defense. Genoud and Rechenberg hoped for a financially lucrative business with "Eichmann memoirs". In 1962, Rechenberg recruited Franz Rademacher , a former Jewish advisor to the Foreign Office , for the German Federal Intelligence Service as a “former Nazi functionary with excellent contacts in Algeria” .

literature

• Willi Winkler : The shadow man. From Goebbels to Carlos: The Mysterious Life of François Genoud . Rowohlt, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-87134-626-2
• Willi Winkler: Adolf Eichmann and his supporters. A small addendum to a known legal case . In: Werner Renz (Ed.): Interests around Eichmann. Israeli justice, German law enforcement and old comradeships . Campus, Frankfurt a. M. 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39750-4 , pp. 289-318

Web links

• Hans Rechenberg In: Der Spiegel, June 22, 1960

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Willi Winkler: The shadow man. From Goebbels to Carlos: The Mysterious Life of François Genoud . Rowohlt, Berlin 2011, p. 66.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Heike Fortmann-Petersen: Register of speakers in the 1938 press conference (PDF; 90 kB). In: Hans Bohrmann and Gabriele Toepser-Ziegert, Institute for Newspaper Research of the City of Dortmund: Nazi press instructions of the pre-war period , edition and documentation, vol. 6 / IV: 1938, register, p. 57
3. ^ War propaganda 1939–1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry . Edited and introduced by Willi A. Boelcke . Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1966, p. 69.
4. ↑ Newspaper Studies . Monthly for international newspaper research . Vol. 14 (1939), Issue 5, Duncker & Humblot Verlag, p. 355.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Willi Winkler: The shadow man. From Goebbels to Carlos: The Mysterious Life of François Genoud . Rowohlt, Berlin 2011, p. 67.
6. ↑ Hans Rechenberg: National Socialist War Economy - the armory of victory . In: Will and Power . 8th year, issue 7, April 1940, p. 1. Quoted from Willi Winkler: Der Schattenmann. From Goebbels to Carlos: The Mysterious Life of François Genoud . Rowohlt, Berlin 2011, p. 67.
7. ^ War propaganda 1939–1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry . Edited and introduced by Willi A. Boelcke. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1966, p. 207.
8. ^ The diaries of Joseph Goebbels . On behalf of the Institute for Contemporary History, ed. by Elke Fröhlich. Part I: Records 1923-1941. Volume 9: December 1940 to July 1941. Saur, Munich 1998, p. 384.
9. ↑ Willi Winkler: The shadow man. From Goebbels to Carlos: The Mysterious Life of François Genoud . Rowohlt, Berlin 2011, p. 67 ff.
10. ^ Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke: Paratroopers. Then and after . Frankfurt a. M. 1951, p. 260.
11. ^ Kurt P. Tauber : Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism Since 1945 . Vol. 1. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown 1967, p. 277.
12. ↑ Willi Winkler: The shadow man. From Goebbels to Carlos: The Mysterious Life of François Genoud . Rowohlt, Berlin 2011, p. 69.
13. ↑ Hans Rechenberg In: Der Spiegel , June 22, 1960.
14. ^ Willi Winkler: Adolf Eichmann and his supporters. A small addendum to a known legal case . In: Werner Renz (Ed.): Interests around Eichmann. Israeli justice, German law enforcement and old comradeships . Campus, Frankfurt a. M. 2012, pp. 289-318, here pp. 309 ff.
15. ^ Willi Winkler: Adolf Eichmann and his supporters. A small addendum to a known legal case , p. 309 ff .; Klaus Wiegrefe : The Curse of Evil Deed. The fear of Adolf Eichmann . In: Der Spiegel , No. 15/2011, April 11, 2011.
16. ↑ Willi Winkler: The shadow man. From Goebbels to Carlos: The Mysterious Life of François Genoud . Rowohlt, Berlin 2011, pp. 130 ff.
17. ↑ Klaus Wiegrefe: On Pullach payroll. With an eavesdropping attack on the BND in 1962, the CIA tracked down a prominent Nazi criminal. In Damascus, Franz Rademacher spied for the German secret service . In: Der Spiegel No. 41/2011, October 10, 2011, p. 40 f.