Hans-Konrad Schmeißer

Hans-Konrad Schmeißer (born November 24, 1919 in Dortmund , † January 31, 1966 in Pinneberg ) was a German journalist and legal adviser for the interest group of German tree nurseries .

Career

In 1925 Schmeißer moved with his parents to Stettin, where his father, Ernst Schmeißer, was appointed president of the regional court on September 1, 1933. In 1938 he obtained his university entrance qualification in Stettin and worked for the Reich Labor Service until August 1939 . In August 1939 he was drafted to the cavalry in Stolp , later to the artillery. He was used in the attack on Poland and in the western campaign in France.

As part of a study leave, he studied one semester at the University of Königsberg . He fell ill and went to see his parents in Stettin .

From 1941 he studied medicine and law, first in Berlin, then in Würzburg . In the winter semester of 1941/1942 Schmeißer met Aloys Peter Masloh (* 1912 Diefflen ; † 1992) scientific assistant to Ernst Wolgast at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Schmeißer later said that he had a transfer to Switzerland for Ernst Wolgast for Wilhelm Canaris entertained and went to Innsbruck in this context . In Würzburg, he was charged with defeatist statements at the university's three-party council. His father intervened, which saved him a sentence. In 1944 he was again drafted into the Wehrmacht to a state rifle unit in Eger.

With the support of his father, he was sent to Bad Kissingen for an officer training course . He was transferred to Würzburg and arrested there for allegedly defeatist statements. The air raid on Würzburg in February 1945 led him to freedom and he migrated to Osnabrück where he was taken prisoner of war by the British. In the summer of 1945 he was released from captivity in Stade . He married Ingeborg H. in Osnabrück. The connection - which was divorced in 1946 - resulted in a daughter. He then worked as an interpreter in an English club.

In 1946, Schmeißer met Masloh in the nearby St. Maria (Volkach) monastery in Würzburg , where his brother worked as a master baker. Masloh helped found the CSU in Würzburg . From April 1, 1946 to January 10, 1947, Schmeißer was employed in the legal department of the Bavarian special ministry under the direction of Jürgen Ziebell . During this time Masloh, who lives in Würzburg, visited him several times in Munich. At the end of 1946 Masloh escaped from Würzburg to his sister in Landau because of "business manipulations". In Landau, Masloh was recruited by the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage and at the beginning of 1947 he visited Schmeisser in Wiesbaden, where he worked in the legal department of the Hessian Ministry of Agriculture, and offered him a job in the field of important political affairs between Germany and France. Schmeißer was hosted by Masloh in Landau in August 1947 and introduced him to Jean Alexandre Dieudonné (1906–1992) (head of the SDECE in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse ), who named him Rene Levacher. From November 1948 to February 1949 he headed a liaison office of the French government to the presidium of the CDU in Cologne around Konrad Adenauer in French-occupied Boppard and later in Freiburg im Breisgau . At first he did not know that they were officials of the SDECE. Masloh claimed that he was doing research for Marie-Pierre Kœnig in Baden-Baden . He examines the historical claims of Germany and France in border areas. Schmeisser could help him with this. He would still have enough time to finish his training. At first Masloh gave him orders, after a few weeks he met Capitaine Robert Laurent. He headed the Sûreté générale et des Renseignements généraux department based in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse.

From 1947 to 1951, Masloh Schmeißer paid 300 to 400 German marks a month from SDECE funds.

His fields of work were:

1. Efforts to unite Palatinate and Bavaria can be established.
2. Contact with the supporters of this idea.
3. Information about the attitude of such circles in the Palatinate towards France.
4. Tracking of political developments in Rhineland-Palatinate, Rheinhessen and Bavaria.

Document theft from the Bavarian State Chancellery

In November 1947, Schmeißer donated his fiancée, Dorothy Schretzmair, to steal documents from the Bavarian State Chancellery, today the Schack Collection . The commissioning SDEC was interested in files on the Rhine Palatinate, the former Bavarian part of what is now Rhineland-Palatinate. Bavarian and French politicians each supported - separately and in different directions - attempts at separation, similar to the allegedly independent, actually French protectorate of Saarland.

In August 1948 there was trouble because of the documents looted in Munich with which Masloh tried to do business. The organization was blown and Masloh parted ways with Schmeisser and Schretzmair. François Durtal made a confiscated villa in Boppard available to Schmeisser and Dorothy and commissioned them to monitor Soviet agents in the Rhineland and Westphalia. They should also get in touch with figures on the Parliamentary Council . After Masloh was no longer under surveillance, the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution of Hesse in Wiesbaden turned Schmeißer on the left and sent him to Paris as a journalist .

West integration in Cologne

Schmeißer was introduced by Adolph Reifferscheidt to Herbert Blankenhorn in an official capacity of the French government. During regular negotiations from June 1948 to early 1949 he received material from Herbert Blankenhorn about the deliberations of the Parliamentary Council and information about politicians who were of interest to French authorities. Herbert Blankenhorn acknowledged the receipt of reimbursement for expenses for the consultation. One of the topics of the consultation was a scenario in which the Red Army marched into Cologne . In this case, Schmeißer offered to evacuate Herbert Blankenhorn and Konrad Adenauer to Spain.

It is controversial whether Konrad Adenauer was so enthusiastic about the Russian spider that he also requested evacuation planning for his relatives via Blankenhorn. Later, in 1951, there were plans for a slumbering West German army corps, in the event of a defense a cadre division of an Adenauer government in exile. Schmeisser claims that a request by Blankenhorn to defuse the difficult financial situation of the CDU before the federal elections in August 1949 was approved.

Furthermore, Konrad Adenauer developed into the protagonist of Western integration . Aloys Peter Masloh tried to use the information Schmeißer had collected according to his own interests. He tried to exchange the knowledge about the financing of the Cologne CDU for an entry permit for Otto Strasser, who was exiled in Ottawa . Masloh told Schmeißer that he could offer his reports to Die Weltbühne because he knew Maud von Ossietzky . From October 1949 to April 1950, Smeißer had an office in Ludwigshafen.

Schmeisser affair

• The issue of SPIEGEL from July 9, 1952 contained the article SECRETS: On the phone carefully , in which Schmeißer claimed that Konrad Adenauer made secret political information available to the SDEC in 1948 through Herbert Blankenhorn, the CDU general secretary in Cologne at the time , and that the then CDU economic advisor Reifferscheidt 1948 propagated the cession of the left (German) bank of the Rhine to France.
• At the instigation of State Secretary Otto Lenz and at the request of the Bonn Public Prosecutor's Office, an attempt was made to confiscate the issue nationwide on July 8, 1952, but only partially succeeded.
• As a result, Schmeisser was acting as an agent for the French government, subject to an international arrest warrant executed by the French government against Schmeisser, and Schmeisser was extradited to the Adenauer government.
• As a result, Adenauer, Blankenhorn and Reifferscheidt filed a lawsuit against Spiegel employees the suit was a comparison in 1957 Pinneberg ended.

In 1961 Schmeißer received his doctorate in law from the University of Erlangen with a thesis on "The legal problems of advertising radio" .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Regional Court of Stettin. territorial.de. Retrieved August 17, 2018.
2. ↑ Aloys Peter Masloh (1912 Diefflen near Dillingen 1992) [1]
3. ↑ The mirror , one day affairs spies-in-the-State, [2]
4. ↑ Birgit Ramscheid, Herbert Blankenhorn (1904–1991): Adenauer's foreign policy advisor, 2006, p. 182 [3] [4] p. 183 [5] ; Günther Dahlhoff , Konrad Adenauer: domestic politics 1949–1953 and their meaning, [6]
5. ^ "Rudolf Augstein: Dear mirror readers" in Der Spiegel , July 16, 1952. Retrieved October 3, 2018.
6. ↑ Herbert Elzer, The Schmeisser Affair: Herbert Blankenhorn, the "Spiegel" and the activities of the French secret service in post-war Germany (1946–1958), Steiner, January 1, 2008, 372 pp . 41 [7] [8] [ 9] , Review: [10] , Der Spiegel , July 9, 1952, SECRETS Be careful on the phone [11]