Hans Strack (diplomat)

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Hans Strack (born July 18, 1899 in Essen ; † July 21, 1987 ) was a German ministerial official and diplomat , who was last ambassador to Chile between 1959 and 1964 . The filling of the post as ambassador in Chile and the re-entry into the foreign service was preceded by a process after Strack was accused of bribery in the course of the so-called "Strack affair". During his tenure, the proceedings began regarding the extradition of Walther Rauff , who during the Nazi era was a group leader in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), who was instrumental in the use of gas vans to murder Jews and other prisoners from concentration camps and who was the head of a task force in the North African campaign was.

Life

Studies and entry into the foreign service

After attending school, Strack studied economics at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster and had been a member of the Catholic student union AV Zollern Münster since 1922. After completing his studies, he was an assistant at the local institute for economics and social sciences between 1922 and 1924, before he worked as an authorized representative in the private sector from 1924 to 1925 . In 1926 he completed his doctorate as Dr. rer. pole. at the University of Münster with a dissertation entitled The German Grain Trade in the Post-War Era. After a subsequent activity from 1926 to 1928 at the professional office of commercial corporations under public law in Essen , he entered the foreign service for the first time in 1929 . and found in the following period on October 1, 1936 he joined the NSDAP . He was deployed in the diplomatic missions in Memel and Chicago . During World War II he was from August 1943 Consul General in that time Hungarian Cluj and experienced there the deportation of Hungarian Jews by the Eichmann commando and his Hungarian helpers, in October 1944 he was in the Legation in Budapest when the Arrow Cross successfully there with German support coups.

The Strack case

In the post-war period , Strack was initially back in the private sector between 1945 and 1948 and then from 1948 to 1949 in the administration for the economy of the United Economic Area . After the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany on May 23, 1949, he became an employee of the Federal Ministry of Economics , where he was head of Section VA 8 (Middle East) until January 1953 , which was renamed Section VB 10 (Middle East) in 1951. In this function he was also the head of the German delegation to the German-Turkish economic negotiations. On the basis of untruthful allegations, which were also made by the ambassador to Turkey at the time , Wilhelm Haas , Hans Strack, who was the lecturer at the time in the Legation on Reuse in the Foreign Office , was given Kamal En-Din by the press attaché of the Consulate General of Egypt in Frankfurt am Main in autumn 1952 Galal was called bribery and officials of the Foreign Office accused him of passive bribery. Strack was seen as an opponent of the reparation policy .

He was then head of Section VB 6 (Far East) in the Federal Ministry of Economics between January 1953 and 1959. As such, he was promoted to Ministerial Council on December 1, 1954 . On November 30, 1953, Strack, who in January 1953 had been assigned Section VB 8 (Far East) under pressure from the Foreign Office, filed a complaint with the public prosecutor at the Bonn Regional Court against unknown persons, which resulted in criminal investigations against the State Secretary in Foreign Affairs Office and later President of the European Commission Walter Hallstein , Head of the Political Department of the Foreign Office and later Permanent Representative of Germany to NATO Herbert Blankenhorn , Head of the Department for Trade Policy of the Foreign Office and later Ambassador to France Vollrath von Maltzan and the Deputy Head the trade policy department and later Director General for the Overseas Territories at the EEC Commission Helmut Allardt (8 Js 1827/53). After all efforts to settle this matter out of court had failed, the accused had to answer for defamation before the district court in Bonn in the spring of 1959. Federal Minister of Economics Ludwig Erhard also gave a statement in the process . On April 22, 1959, the judgment of the 1st major criminal chamber of the Bonn Regional Court was issued: Blankenhorn received a prison sentence of four months, the execution of which was suspended on probation. On April 13, 1960, Blankenhorn was acquitted in the revision instance (2nd criminal division of the Federal Court of Justice ). Hallstein had already been acquitted in the first instance for lack of evidence. In any case, this lengthy process ended with the complete rehabilitation of Strack. In June 1959 he was supposed to be head of a delegation for economic negotiations with Japan , but this failed because Japan refused him as head of the delegation, as he was two ranks below the head of the Japanese delegation, Ministerial Director Ushiba, as Ministerialrat .

Ambassador to Chile and the extradition proceedings of Walther Rauff

Most recently, after the end of the proceedings, Strack was taken back into the foreign service and in August 1959 he succeeded Carl von Campe as ambassador to Chile . He remained in this position until he retired in 1965, after which he was replaced by Gottfried von Nostitz-Drzewiecky . During this time, the conservative “Germans abroad” received special support in Chile.

During his tenure, the process of extraditing Walther Rauff , who during the National Socialist era was a group leader in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), was instrumental in the use of gas vans to murder Jews and other prisoners from concentration camps and head of a task force in the North African campaign was. In 1962, the Federal German judiciary brought before the Foreign Office (AA) for an extradition application against Rauff.

Since the German embassy in Santiago had doubts about the success of the application, they asked the "well-known Jewish lawyer and professor of criminal law" Miguel Schweitzer for an opinion. Schweitzer, who became Pinochet's Justice Minister after the coup and joined his defense team after his arrest in London in 1998, came to the conclusion that the Supreme Court relied on the extradition because of the statute of limitations in Chile and the political nature of the crimes would, would refuse. Ambassador Strack agreed with this assessment. The embassy tried anyway and, after consulting with the AA, took Novoa as a lawyer. Formal proceedings should have been initiated in Chile for acts that were criminal in both countries and not statute-barred in Chile. The German judiciary accused Rauff of acts in 1942, for which the Chilean limitation period was 15 years. Novoa had to argue that the German arrest warrant's interruption of the statute of limitations also applied to Chile. Since there was no Chilean-German extradition agreement, many procedures were not regulated. The German arrest warrant was sufficient for preliminary extradition detention. Rauff was arrested in Punta Arenas on December 3, 1962 at 11 p.m. and flown to Santiago the next day. During the interrogation he made a "calm impression".

For 14 months, Strack prevented an extradition application for the SS Standartenführer Walther Rauff, who was in Chile, from being carried out. When Rauff was later arrested, his murders were barred. After Salvador Allende's election as Chilean President in 1970, Simon Wiesenthal saw the opportunity to extradite Rauff. Allende refused extradition for formal reasons: he informed Wiesenthal that, due to the separation of powers, only courts could decide on an extradition and suggested that the German authorities submit a new extradition request. This did not happen after the 1973 military coup . In 1972 Rauff made a voluntary testimony as a witness in the proceedings against Bruno Straßenbach , the head of the Hamburg Gestapo and the main organizer of the Einsatzgruppen. The interrogation took place by German judges in the German embassy in Santiago de Chile .

publication

  • The German grain trade in the post-war period , dissertation University of Münster, Münster in Westphalia 1926

literature

  • Johannes Hürter (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 4: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: S Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-71843-3 , p. 382f.

Background literature

  • Herbert Elzer: Call of the Levant. Legation councilor Hans Strack, the Federal Ministry of Economics and German-Egyptian foreign trade 1949–1953 . In: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte , Volume 101/2014 / Issue 1, pp. 1–22

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eckart Conze; Norbert Frei; Peter Hayes; Mosche Zimmermann: The Office and the Past - German Diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 ; P. 581.
  2. ↑ Personal details . 60th cabinet meeting on November 24, 1954 (Federal Archives)
  3. ↑ The responsible public prosecutor's office in Bonn had proposed that the civil servant Strack be given a declaration of honor. If the latter then withdraws his criminal complaint, the proceedings for false allegations of insignificance could also be discontinued.
  4. ↑ Granting of a statement authorization for the Federal Minister of Economics. 111th Cabinet meeting on January 4, 1956
  5. ↑ Strack case. 24th cabinet meeting on May 7, 1958 (Federal Archives)
  6. ^ Quarrel between officials. 21st cabinet meeting on March 4, 1954 (Federal Archives)
  7. ↑ Miscellaneous. 80th Cabinet meeting on May 4, 1955 (Federal Archives)
  8. ↑ Judicial Policy (Federal Archives)
  9. ↑ Major inquiry from the SPD regarding cases of corruption in the federal administration - printed matter 824 -. 55th cabinet meeting on February 18, 1959 (Federal Archives)
  10. ^ Trial against President Prof. Dr. Hallstein and Ambassador Blankenhorn. 57th cabinet meeting on March 6, 1959 (Federal Archives)
  11. ^ The matter between President Hallstein and Ambassador Blankenhorn. 61st cabinet meeting on April 3, 1959 (Federal Archives)
  12. ↑ Trial of Ambassador Blankenhorn. 104th cabinet meeting on April 13, 1960 (Federal Archives)
  13. ↑ STRACK AFFAIR: Turkish Games . In: Der Spiegel from October 8, 1958
  14. ↑ PROFESSIONAL INFORMATION: HANS STRACK . In: Der Spiegel from June 17, 1959
  15. ↑ STRACK: Off to Tokyo . In: Der Spiegel from July 1, 1959
  16. ↑ Personal details . 71st cabinet meeting on June 24, 1959 (Federal Archives)
  17. ↑ Personal details . 74th cabinet meeting on August 6, 1959 (Federal Archives)
  18. ↑ German ambassadors in Chile since 1871 ( memento of the original from September 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the homepage of the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Santiago de Chile @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.santiago.diplo.de
  19. ↑ Georg Dufner: Partner in the Cold War: The political relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and Chile , Verlag Campus Verlag, 2014, p. 109 ff., ISBN 3-5935-0097-3
  20. ↑ Nikolaus Barbian: Foreign Cultural Policy and “Germans Abroad” in Latin America 1949-1973 , Verlag Springer-Verlag, 2014, p. 351, ISBN 3-6580-5248-1
  21. ↑ Johannes Großmann: The International of Conservatives: Transnational Elite Circle and Private Foreign Policy in Western Europe since 1945 , Verlag Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2014, p. 304, ISBN 3-1103-5426-8
  22. ^ Ingo Kletten: A long post-story - The case of SS-Standartenführer Walther Rauff after 1945 in Chile on the homepage of the Nuremberg Human Rights Center (NMRZ) from June 3, 2008
  23. ↑ Martin Hubert: Coming to terms with the past and veiling the past. Review of Daniel Stahl: Nazi Hunt. South America's dictatorships and the prosecution of Nazi crimes , Wallstein Verlag . In: Deutschlandfunk
  24. ↑ Bernd Pickert: “ Twisted allegations. "In: the daily newspaper of June 1, 2005. On the allegations against Salvador Allende see also: Kersten Knipp:" Negligent science. “In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from June 13, 2005.
predecessor Office successor
Carl von Campe Ambassador to Chile
1959–1964 		Gottfried von Nostitz-Drzewiecky
personal data
SURNAME Strack, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH eat
DATE OF DEATH July 21, 1987