Herbert Engelsing

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Herbert Engelsing (born September 2, 1904 in Overath ; † February 10, 1962 in Konstanz ) was a German lawyer and production group leader for Reich German film.

Live and act

Herbert Engelsing, who came from the Bergisches Land , studied law , literature and art history and received his doctorate in law . He then worked as a lawyer before training as a production manager at the Tobis film company from June to the end of 1935 . At the end of 1935 Engelsing was brought to the board of Tobis-Europa-Film AG. Here he took care of the distribution of films such as Willi Forst's lively comedy Allotria (1936).

Since moving to Tobis Tonfilm-Syndikat AG in 1937, Engelsing also worked as a production group leader; a position that he held for several film companies until the end of the war in 1945. With the express permission of the Reich Ministry of the Interior , the high-ranking film official was allowed to marry a " half-Jewish " woman in 1938 . The films supervised by Engelsing include the forest productions Serenade and Bel Ami as well as the propaganda films Der Fuchs von Glenarvon , Mein Leben für Irland and Jakko .

Herbert Engelsing, who had also become a party member in 1933, repeatedly used his diverse contacts as a production group leader for Tobis-Film to help the persecuted and those at risk. The director and actor Paul Verhoeven, for example, called him his "Guardian Angel". When Engelsing's friends from what the Gestapo later called the “Rote Kapelle” resistance group, Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack, Adam Kuckhoff and numerous other artists, intellectuals, officers and workers, were arrested in 1942, he used his connections and helped the families . Among other things, he and his wife Inge hid one of the couples from the resistance group in their house in Grunewald. After July 20, 1944, Engelsing appeared together with the actors Viktor de Kowa and Anneliese Uhlig as exonerating witness for an officer friend before the Reich Court Martial and was subsequently expelled from the Reich Chamber of Culture. After the war, the writer Günther Weisenborn wrote that Tobis production manager Engelsing, who is familiar with film and political figures, “tolerated our work and encouraged it wherever possible. He was a so-called contact man, that is, our organization used the connections he had with important personalities of the Third Reich. "

At the end of the war, he had made one last entertainment film with director Gustav Fröhlich on the island of Mainau on Lake Constance in the summer of 1944 , and he brought his family from Berlin to safety on Lake Constance. Here in the spring of 1945 agents of the Zurich-based CIC , the intelligence service of the US Army, contacted Engelsing and used him as a source of information for information about actors in the Nazi state. At the beginning of 1950 Engelsing made himself available as a witness in the preliminary investigation against the then representative of the prosecution in the "Red Chapel Trial", Judge General Manfred Roeder. However, the proceedings were terminated.

Herbert Engelsing was admitted to the bar in the French military courts in 1945 and in the fall of 1945 at the Constance district court. He ran a criminal and civil law practice there. In addition to the usual mandates, he also represented victims of Nazi Aryanization as well as German and French Sinti families in restitution proceedings. But he also took on mandates for some former southwest German military economic leaders in denazification proceedings. His family emigrated to the USA in the late 1940s. Attempts to regain a foothold there in the film business failed. Engelsing remained a lawyer until his untimely death in 1962.

Filmography

literature

  • Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 2: C - F. John Paddy Carstairs - Peter Fritz. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 558.
  • Stefan Roloff: The Red Chapel. The resistance group in the Third Reich and the history of Helmut Roloff , Munich 2002
  • Silke Kettelhake: Tell everyone, everyone about me! The beautiful short life of Libertas Schulze-Boysen 1913 - 1942 , Munich 2008
  • Ingeborg Malek-Kohler: In the slipstream of the Third Reich. Encounters with film artists and resistance fighters . Foreword: Theodor Eschenburg, Freiburg 1986
  • Michael Verhoeven: Paul, me and us. Die Zeit and the Verhoevens , Berlin 2005

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Engelsing, Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and film producer
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Overath
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 1962
Place of death Constancy