Hans Humann

Hans Humann (* 1878 in Smyrna , Ottoman Empire (today İzmir), † October 7, 1933 in Neubabelsberg near Potsdam ) was a German officer , naval attaché and publisher. During the First World War, Humann was one of the most important representatives of Imperial Germany in the Ottoman Empire and in the 1920s he was editor of the widely read Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung . Humann was a witness and supporter of the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians , which he later described approvingly.

Live and act

Youth and Beginnings

Humann was born in 1878 as the son of the German archaeologist Carl Humann , who discovered the Pergamon Altar , and his wife Louise in the Turkish city of Smyrna, today's İzmir . Humann's sister Maria (1875–1970) married the archaeologist Friedrich Sarre in 1900 , later director of the German Oriental Museum in Berlin.

Humann spent the first twelve years of his childhood in Turkey, where he developed a strong affinity for everything Turkish and grew up together with the later Turkish politician Enver Pascha . The friendship between the two men lasted a lifetime and was considered particularly close. Both spoke to each other and were in constant contact by letters. Humann's friend Franz von Papen outlined the closeness of the two men by characterizing them as “milk brothers”. The American Morgenthau later reported that employees of the German embassy had told him that the man of German descent was “more of a Turk” than the Turkish leader Enver.

After his return to Germany in 1890 and completing his school education, Humann embarked on a career as an officer in the Imperial Navy towards the end of the 1890s , for which he was especially noted, not least because of his predilection for seafaring and his "tall and stately" appearance was considered suitable.

As the protégé of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz , the State Secretary in the Reichsmarineamt , Humann rose in quick succession to the position of frigate captain in the Imperial Navy . One of the reasons for Humann's rapid career was probably the ideological similarities between him and his superior Tirpitz, whose pan-Germanic and monarchist ideas he shared.

German representative in the Ottoman Empire

In the autumn of 1913, Humann was sent to Constantinople by the German naval command, where he initially worked without clearly defined responsibilities. In the first few months of his presence, he essentially limited himself to commanding the Lorelei , the yacht of the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire , Baron Hans von Wangenheim (1859-1915). In addition, he practiced de facto as a naval attaché as early as 1914 , without officially holding this title for the time being. He then received the official rank of naval attaché on October 19, 1915 and held this office until the end of September 1917, when he was ordered back to Germany. During this time, according to Ernst Jäckh , Humann also had access to the surroundings of Kaiser Wilhelm II, to whom he was able to send reports - bypassing his superior, the ambassador. Ambassador Paul Graf Metternich had a bad opinion of Humann, whom he described as an " arch-scoundrel ". The American Ambassador Morgenthau described the Humann Attaché years as a "man of great influence," the him as "relentless" ( implacable ) and "cruel" ( truculent had noticed).

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Humann drafted the successfully implemented plan to remove the German warships SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau from the control of the superior British navy by granting them refuge in (initially) neutral Turkish ports. There he had the two ships "flagged" from German to Turkish emblems and nominally handed them over to the Turkish government. This used the ships to enforce Turkey's entry into the war on the part of the Central Powers, which she wanted but rejected by the majority of the population: by having the ships sailing under the Turkish flag but commanded by German crews bombard Russian positions in the Black Sea and they then alternately declared as German (during the bombardment) or Turkish (when staying in Turkish ports), Russia was provoked, according to Humann's ideas, to declare war on the Ottoman Empire. For this reason, an obituary in the Orient-Rundschau from 1933 ascribed him great “services to Turkey's entry into the world war”.

The historian Malte Furmann sees Humann in the years 1914 to 1917 as the “most important mediator” between the Turkish leadership, the German Supreme Army Command and the German Navy . Through his "bosom friendship" with Enver Pascha, to which he still had unlimited access, Humann had acquired a wealth of power that went "far beyond his nominal position" and thus practically dominated the German Mediterranean division and the imperial embassy in Istanbul. In addition, he contributed significantly to the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War. Furmann's colleague Ulrich Trumpener has a very similar opinion; According to him Humann was in the years 1915-1917 "probably the most valuable contact man for CUP regime, the Germans had." (... probably the most valuable contact man to the CUP regime the Germans had.)

Humann and the Armenian Genocide

In historical research, Humann is considered to be one of the most important witnesses to the genocide of the Armenians carried out on the territory of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. In his capacity as a German diplomat in Turkey, he wrote various reports and notes that document the widely disputed massacre of the Armenian population in Turkey. So Humann wrote to Berlin in 1915:

“Armenians and Turks cannot live together in this country. One of the races has to go. I don't blame the Turks for what they do to the Armenians. I think that is completely justified. The weaker nation must disappear. ”On July 15, 1915, he stated in another report, becoming more precise, that“ the Turkish government is using the war time and the otherwise tied interests of Europe to settle the whole Armenian question brevi manu [unceremoniously] by force “After the German Vice Consul in Mosul , Walter Holstein, had reported on June 10, 1915 that 614 Armenians exiled from Diyarbakır had been killed on the journey to Mosul, Humann told a correspondent on June 15, 1915 that he was deeply disgusted about this Had expressed: “The Armenians were now more or less exterminated. That is hard, but useful. ”Later, Humann urged the German Foreign Minister Richard von Kühlmann not to criticize the Turks for“ our [...] political interests ”in the Armenian affair, otherwise one would run the risk of alienating the war allies and thus indirectly endangering German interests in the Middle East, which, according to Humann, are particularly dependent on good personal relationships in the oriental countries.

Even after the war, Humann stuck to his approval of the Turkish approach. So he justified the murder of the Armenians in articles in the DAZ in the 1920s .

Later years

In November 1917, Humann ended his activity in Turkey and returned to the German Reich. There he initially served the imperial government as an advisor and reporter on various matters relating to the Ottoman Empire and the war front in the Middle East. From May to September 1918 he was in command of the German battle cruiser SMS Moltke . In 1919 he headed the intelligence department in the Reichsmarineamt in Berlin. In July 1920 Humann received his departure from the Reichswehr Ministry . Evidence suggests that he had worked with the Kapp putschists in March of that year , which is why the press had urged his dismissal.

After Humann retired from military service, his friend, the entrepreneur Hugo Stinnes , brought him into the private sector and made him the publishing director of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (DAZ), which belongs to the Stinnes group . Under Humann's aegis, the DAZ stubbornly advocated a return to the monarchy in the 1920s . In addition, Humann ran the apology of the genocide against the Armenians with the help of the newspaper . One of the first official acts of Humann as the publishing director of the DAZ was the kicking out of an old adversary from Istanbul days, the deputy editor-in-chief Max Rudolf Kaufmann . The Swiss businessman, together with Paul Weitz and the Social Democrat Friedrich Schrader, correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung in Constantinople, was arrested there in 1916 and later deported to Germany because he massively criticized German-Turkish militarism in internal letters and the desolate situation of the Turkish troops had denounced on the Caucasus front.

Politically, Humann, like his boss Stinnes, was close to national-conservative circles in the 1920s and 1930s. He maintained contacts with Edgar Jung and was one of the most important advisors to the conservative center politician Franz von Papen , whom he advised in May 1932 in a personal conversation to accept the offered Reich Chancellery. He was also one of the founding members of the League of Asian Fighters.

Hans Humann died in Neubabelsberg in October 1933 after a long illness. After a funeral service in the Catholic parish church in Nowawes, he was buried in the cemetery in Klein-Glienicke. The funeral speech was given by Humann's friend von Papen. In it he praised his “merits in the navy and the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” and rhetorically placed him in the row of “intellectual fighters” for “this new […] Germany […] that we are about to build today.” Others The funeral speeches were held by Erich von Müller as a representative of the navy and Hugo Stinnes junior as a representative of the DAZ publishing house.

literature

• Vahakn N. Dadrian : Lieutenant Commander and Marine Attache Hans Humann , in: Ders. The History of the Armenian Genocide , 2003, pp. 271-273.
• Jürgen Gottschlich : Aiding and abetting genocide. Germany's role in the annihilation of the Armenians. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-86153-817-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ birthplace of Ulrich Trumpener: Germany and the End of the Ottoman Empire. In Marian Kent: The Great Powers and the End of the Ottoman Empire. 2nd edition, Frank Cass, London / Portland OR 1996, pp. 107–136, on p. 110. Year of birth according to Michael Epkenhans [Ed.] / Albert Hopman: The eventful life of a “Wilhelminer” , 2004, p. 1208; Date and place of death according to the obituary for Hans Humann in Orient-Rundschau 15 (1933) 11, p. 120.
2. ^ Franz von Papen: From the failure of a democracy .
3. ^ Henry Morgenthau / Peter Balakian : Ambassador Morgenthau's Story , 2003, p. 257. "Humann was more of a Turk than Enver and Talat."
4. ↑ Ernest Jackh : The Rising Crescent. Turkey Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow , 1944, p. 134.
5. ↑ Ernest Jackh: The Rising Crescent , 2007, p. 134 “As naval attache Hans Humann had direct access to the Kaiser's entourage over the head of any ambassador. It was an outstanding position of extraordinary influence, to say the least. "
6. ^ ^{A b} Vahakn N. Dadrian: The History of the Armenian Genocide , 2003, p. 273.
7. ^ Henry Morgenthau / Peter Balakian: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story , 2003, p. 257.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Malte Furmann: The dream of the German Orient. Two German colonies in the Ottoman Empire. 2006, p. 362.
9. ↑ Trumpener: Germany and the End of the Ottoman Empire. 1996, p. 111.
10. ↑ quoted from Dietrich Möller, Stephanie Rapp: Turks, Germans and "the great misfortune" of the Armenians. In: Deutschlandfunk , broadcast background , April 23, 2005.
11. ↑ quoted from Vahakn N. Dadrian: Foreword. In Wolfgang Gust: The Armenian Genocide. Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915/16. S. xxiii.
12. ↑ Hamburg Institute for Social Research: Mittelweg 36 , 1995, p. 34 ; Knut Krohn: Simply closed your eyes to the horror . Stuttgarter Zeitung April 19, 2005
13. ^ Gary Staff / Tony Bryan: German Battlecruisers 1914-18 , 2006, p. 14.
14. ^ Raffael Scheck: Alfred Von Tirpitz and German Right-Wing Politics, 1914–1930 , 1998, p. 98.
15. ↑ Max Rudolf Kaufmann: Experiences in Turkey 50 Years Ago: Journal for Cultural Exchange, Volume 12, Institute for Foreign Relations, pp. 237–241 (1962)
16. ↑ La Section de Renseignements de l'Etat-Major général de l'Armée suisse au Département politique, Diplomatic Documents of Switzerland, 1919, 7a, Doc. 146, January 30, 1919, pp. 291–293 ( digitized version )
17. ^ Franz von Papen: Vom Scheitern einer Demokratie , 1967, p. 398. The offer to become Chancellor was made to Papen at the end of May 1932 by Kurt von Schleicher. Undecided whether he should accept the office, Papen said he asked for a day to think about it. Then he went to Neubabelsberg to ask his "old friend" Humann for advice. During a joint boat trip on the Wannsee, the latter strongly encouraged him to accept it.

Web links

• Stephan Berkholz: Aiding and abetting genocide - Germany's responsibility to the Armenians. In: Deutschlandradio Kultur , broadcast Lesart , June 6, 2015.