Hans Reinhard Count von Kageneck

Hans Reinhard Graf von Kageneck (born November 24, 1902 in Freiburg ; † September 15, 1996 in Freiburg ) was a German civil servant, diplomat and holder of the Swedish Order of Vasa (KVO 1938). Kageneck was best known as a close associate (adjutant) of Hitler's vice chancellor and ambassador Franz von Papen and as a member of the young conservative resistance group against National Socialism in Papen's vice chancellery, the " Edgar-Jung-Kreis ".

Live and act

Hans von Kageneck on February 21, 1938 to the right of Franz von Papen and Wilhelm Freiherr von Ketteler at the Vienna Central Station.

Hans Graf von Kageneck came from the old noble family Kageneck . After attending school, he studied economics at the University of Freiburg. During the Weimar period, von Kageneck was one of the right-wing opponents of the Weimar Republic. In contrast to the National Socialists, he did not want to replace the existing state with a populist system of the masses, but rather to establish rule of the elites through a conservative revolution . During these performances he met with numerous other young conservatives such as Edgar Julius Jung , Herbert von Bose , Wilhelm Freiherr von Ketteler , Fritz Günther von Tschirschky and Friedrich-Carl von Savigny .

In the autumn of 1933, Kageneck joined Franz von Papens, the conservative vice chancellor in the right-wing coalition government of Adolf Hitler that was formed in January of the same year . In the office, Kageneck initially took over the post of second adjutant to the vice-chancellor.

Together with his like-minded fellows, Kageneck worked in the - supposedly secure - position of the vice chancellery in 1933/34 to get the Nazi state "on the right track" in the young conservative sense. Their plans to “correct course” envisaged, based on the official authority and the authority of the aged Reich President von Hindenburg over the armed forces, to postpone the “national revolution” of 1933 a second, “conservative” revolution. These intentions naturally brought Kageneck and the other “men from the Vice Chancellery” in opposition to the National Socialist leaders who had completely different goals.

During the political cleansing campaigns of June and July 1934 (" Röhmputsch "), in the course of which Hitler had his internal party competitors eliminated, the Jung group was also broken up. While Bose and Jung were arrested or shot on site, Savigny and Tschirschky were arrested. Kageneck and Ketteler only escaped being murdered by an SS (or Gestapo) roll command because they managed to leave the Vice Chancellery undetected on the day in question. Kageneck then initially moved to Sweden.

At the beginning of August 1934, Kageneck traveled on Papen's order to Gut Neudeck in East Prussia, the country seat of Hindenburg, where he had his son Oskar give him two sealed envelopes with the will of the Reich President . After he had handed it over to Papen in Berlin, he passed it on to Hitler. While the (allegedly) part of these documents, a proclamation to the people, was published in the press after Hindenburg's death, the other, a letter to Hitler, has disappeared.

At the end of 1934, at Papen's request, he accompanied Papen to Austria, where Hitler had appointed him as a special ambassador to Germany following the murder of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss by Austrian National Socialists.

In the run-up to the annexation of Austria to the German Reich on March 12, 1938, Kageneck and Ketteler withdrew Papen's diplomatic files about Papen's activities in Austria from access to the German regime by moving them to a safe place in Switzerland. Both returned to Vienna just before the German troops marched in. While Kageneck left on March 13th with the von Papen family on a plane to Berlin, Ketteler was abducted by agents of the SD on the night of March 14th and murdered at an unknown time. When Kageneck found out about it, he left for Sweden for a few weeks in order to evade the access of the SD and Gestapo. At the end of 1938 he officially resigned from service in the Reich.

From 1939 until the end of the Second World War , interrupted by his temporary participation in the war in the east, Kageneck lived as a farmer on his family's estate in Freiburg im Breisgau, which he took over as the landowner around 1942. In 1945 Kageneck was named by Papen's defense attorney Egon Kubuschok as a witness at the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , but he was not questioned in the public session on June 19, 1946, but only submitted an affidavit .

After 1945, Kageneck continued to live as a landowner near Munzingen near Freiburg.

literature

• Norbert Frei : The Führer state. National Socialist rule 1933 to 1945. CH Beck, 2013. ISBN 3-406-64450-3 . (P. 25)
• Rainer Orth : "Hans Graf von Kageneck", in: Ders .: "The official seat of the opposition" ?: Politics and state restructuring plans in the office of the Deputy Chancellor in the years 1933–1934 , Böhlau, Cologne 2016, pp. 224–228 and 605-609. ISBN 3-412-50555-2

Individual evidence

1. ^ Supplement to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 22, 2005.
2. ↑ Eugene Davidson: Unmasking of Hitler , 2004, p. 109.