Herbert Müller-Roschach

Herbert Müller-Roschach (until 1955: Herbert Müller , born March 5, 1910 in Schwerin , † May 14, 1988 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German diplomat . His work as legation secretary in the "Germany Department " of the Foreign Office in National Socialist Germany , which is responsible for Jewish issues , was the reason for his early retirement in 1968.

Civil service career

On May 1, 1933, Müller joined the NSDAP . In 1936 he was given a position as a consultant in the Reich Office for Foreign Exchange Management and then in the Foreign Trade Department in the Reich Ministry of Economics . In 1938 he moved to the Foreign Office where he worked in the economic policy department from 1939 to 1940. After brief use in the embassy of the German Empire in Tehran in 1940, returned Müller 1941 in the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, where he from November as an auxiliary speaker and officials revoked the title of legation secretary in the for Jewish Questions and racial policies competent Germany Unit under D III under the direction of Undersecretary Martin Franz Julius Luther . In this function he took part on January 29, 1942 at a follow-up meeting of the Berlin Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories at Rauchstrasse 17/18. It was decided here which people in the occupied eastern territories of the Greater German Reich fell under the definition of a Jew and were thus to be destroyed as part of the Final Solution .

In January 1942 he allegedly volunteered at the responsible military district command in Berlin and was drafted for military service on April 1st. A few months later, during the Africa campaign , he was seriously wounded in El Alamein .

After his recovery he returned to the Foreign Office and in 1943 became personal advisor to Otto Abetz , the ambassador of the German Reich in the État Français in Vichy. As a member of the German embassy, ​​he followed the Vichy regime in 1944 to Sigmaringen in the Hohenzollern region , which Hitler had designated as the seat of the État-Français government in exile. After the end of the war, Müller was interned in the French occupation zone in 1946 , although it is not known whether he was denazified . Between 1946 and 1949 he stayed on a Black Forest farm and then worked as a consultant for the Economic Cooperation Administration in Baden-Baden. From 1950 to 1951 he was employed by the German delegation of the International Ruhr Authority .

On November 1, 1951, Müller was accepted back into the service of the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn as a consultant for the trade policy department . From 1952 to 1953 he headed Division II 5, from 1953 Division 214 "Mining Community" and from 1954 to 1956 Division 210 "Fundamental issues of intergovernmental and supranational organizations". In 1956 he was a Counselor at the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Belgrade, Yugoslavia sent. In 1957 he returned to the headquarters in Bonn, where he was employed as deputy head and finally head of Department 2 West I until 1960. In 1960 he was accredited as ambassador to Morocco and, on his return to Bonn in 1962, was promoted to Ministerial Director, where he headed Department 3 West II until 1966 and the newly established planning staff from 1963 to 1966. In 1966 he became the ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Portugal.

Dismissed as ambassador to Portugal

In connection with the jury trial against the former legation secretary Fritz Gebhardt von Hahn , who was accused of complicity in the murder of 30,000 Jews, incriminating documents with Müller's paraphe emerged in 1968 . This led to the suspicion of his complicity in planning the Holocaust . Questioned as a witness in the Hahn trial, Müller-Roschach denied having known anything about the Wannsee Conference, although it can be shown that he had attended the follow-up meeting only nine days later. The Frankfurt public prosecutor's office thereupon initiated an investigation into "aiding and abetting the murder of Jews", which was forwarded to the responsible public prosecutor in Bonn. Due to the ongoing investigations, Müller-Roschach was ordered back from Portugal by the Foreign Office in July 1968.

At the same time it was claimed in a newspaper article in Die Zeit that Müller-Roschach had started work against his will on November 11, 1941 in the Department for Germany, which was involved in drawing up the measures for the final solution to the Jewish question . Therefore, seven weeks after taking up his duties, he decided to resign from the "hell of this knowledge" and volunteered to report to the military district command.

In view of the unfolding scandal, the Foreign Ministry of the grand coalition , headed by then Foreign Minister Willy Brandt , decided to retire Müller-Roschach. The investigation is believed to have ended at the same time. A draft text for the certificate of discharge, in which Müller-Roschach was to be thanked by the Foreign Office for "the loyal service rendered to the German people", was rejected by the Office of the Federal President. When asked to revise the document, the Foreign Office responded with incomprehension, despite the well-founded suspicion of Müller-Roschach's involvement in the Holocaust .

After his discharge from the diplomatic service, Müller-Roschach was chairman of the Committee for International Affairs of the German Commission for Oceanography from 1969 to 1972 and was occasionally commissioned by the Foreign Office to provide expert opinions.

Web links

• Müller-Roschach, Herbert in Cabinet Protocols Online

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Diplomacy: From Memory . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1968 ( online ).
2. ↑ ^{a b} What did Müller-Roschach do? In: zeit.de . July 26, 1968, accessed May 15, 2020 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b} DIPLOMACY: From memory . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1968, pp. 24 ( online - 22 July 1968 ).
4. ↑ Ulrich Keitel: The Foreign Office in Twilight - or - How much attack surface does the Foreign Office offer? ( Memento from June 29, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Comment in Hessischer Rundfunk from July 17, 1968.
5. ↑ Diplomacy: From Memory . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1968 ( online ). see also Frank Schirrmacher : The perpetrators from the office. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , October 24, 2010.
6. ↑ Frank Schirrmacher : The perpetrators from the office. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung , October 24, 2010.

predecessor	Office	successor
Hansjoachim von der Esch	Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Rabat / Morocco 1960–1962	Walther Hess
Herbert Schaffarczyk	Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Lisbon / Portugal 1966–1969	Hans Schmidt-Horix