Hilde Purwin

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Hilde Purwin (born September 16, 1919 in Obernissa near Erfurt , † March 29, 2010 in Bonn ; born Hildegard Gertrud Burkhardt ) was a German journalist . Her historical role as Felizitas Beetz during World War II in Italy has been featured in several books and films.

Hilde Purwin, 1953 in Bonn

Life

Career until 1945

Hilde Purwin was born in 1919 as the first of two children to Eduard and Martha Burkhardt, née Bähr. Her brother Rolf was born two years later. She spent early childhood in her native Obernissa until the family moved into a house on Belvederer Allee in Weimar . When she was 14 years old, her father, a teacher and former World War I aviation officer, died .

In 1938 she made her Abitur at the Weimar Realgymnasium for boys ( Schillerschule ) and then took her “budget year” with the Madaus family in Dresden . In 1939 a language diploma for Italian followed in Leipzig . In 1941 she was conscripted as a translator at the German embassy in Rome . In 1943 she married the general staff officer Gerhard Beetz . She was appointed by the security service of the Reichsführer SS as Felizitas on Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano ; In this way the National Socialists wanted to get into possession of the Ciano diaries, which were considered "explosive". For this purpose, a front company for import / export was founded near the German embassy in Rome, since the Axis powers had committed themselves in an internal agreement not to engage in any espionage . Her official activity was also given here as “translator”. As an interpreter, she was placed at the side of the Italian Foreign Minister Ciano during his stay in Allmannshausen , where she also got to know his wife Edda and his children better.

On his return to Italy, Ciano was arrested for voting for Mussolini's disempowerment as a member of the Grand Fascist Council , and was taken to Verona prison with Marshal Emilio De Bono and four other senior councilors . "Felizitas" Beetz was the only person who was allowed an unrestricted visit to Ciano's prison cell. However, his wife Edda did not see her as a competitor, but rather as an ally through whom she could exchange letters with her husband undetected and with whom she also planned to save the family and the diaries. In view of the life-threatening situation in which she had put herself - now as a double agent - she went to Lausanne to go to the address of Susanna Agnelli , who is friends with the Cianos and who was studying medicine there, in order to get a capsule of potassium cyanide from her .

Together with Count Pucci, she helped his family (including their diaries) to flee to Switzerland after Ciano was shot in January 1944 . At the beginning of April 1945 Hitler had ordered all Ciano documents to be destroyed; Hildegard Beetz, however, buried her copies of essential parts from the early days up to 1939 in her parents' garden in Weimar. These were Ciano's notes on conversations and correspondence with Hitler, Mussolini and the then German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop , which were published in London in 1948 under the title Ciano's Diplomatic Papers . In 1945, Benito Mussolini's diary notes were handed over to the OSS , which he had written during his imprisonment on the Gran Sasso , but which had been secretly stolen from him during the Skorzeny coup . In contrast to the historically significant notes of Ciano, the Mussolini notes essentially contained only insignificant, pathetic tirades typical of the dictator.

Press card for Hildegard Blum / Telegraf Berlin (1950)

Her role during the war years was also the subject of a number of book publications and feature films . She was portrayed in Il Processo di Verona (1963) by Françoise Prévost , in the television films Ich und der Duce ( Mussolini: The Decline and Fall of Il Duce , 1985) by Dietlinde Turban and in Edda (2005) by Petra Faksova .

Journalistic career after World War II

In 1946 she was a translator for the American military administration in Berlin ( OMGUS ). A year later, their "war marriage" was divorced; she received a new identity from the Americans as Hildegard Blum, born in 1920 . Richard W. Cutler , head of the American counterintelligence department (Counterintelligence) of the SSU, a successor organization of the OSS, tried to persuade her to act as an agent for the West in the looming Cold War . Under the code name Gambit , it was supposed to expose Soviet NKVD spies who were active in the western sectors of Berlin. However, she did not see this espionage activity as her purpose in life and preferred to write about the new development of Germany after the war. After she was almost abducted as a decoy by Soviet intelligence agents in the eastern sector of Berlin, she finally resigned from the American authorities. Shortly afterwards her journalistic career began with the Berlin Telegraf ; at that time still under her code name 'Blum', after former OSS contacts (including the later Chief of Station in Saigon , Tom Polgar ) advised her to switch to the journalistic profession.

Following her traineeship , she was sent to Frankfurt am Main by the publisher Arno Scholz to report on the Bizone Economic Council based there .

Hilde Purwin and Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in the NRZ building in Essen in 1980.
NRZ archive photo: Knut Garthe

In 1950 she moved to the provisional federal capital Bonn, where she married the journalist Carl-Heinz Purwin (1915–1996) in 1952. Their son Ulrich was born in the same year. Hilde Purwin was permanently employed as the Bonn correspondent for the Neue Ruhr Zeitung (NRZ) ; she performed this task until she retired. In 1952 she was one of the founding members of the German Press Club, along with 22 other Bonn correspondents, and in the following years also sat on the board of the Federal Press Conference . She had a number of television appearances, including with Werner Höfer and Reinhard Appel , and also took part in many radio broadcasts. In 1970 she received the Federal Cross of Merit 1st class from the then North Rhine-Westphalian Prime Minister Heinz Kühn . In addition to Conrad Ahlers , her close circle of friends also included the journalist Katharina Luthardt ( Rudolf Augstein's second wife ), the SPD MP Renate Lepsius and the historian Susanne Miller .

In 1984 she retired. She continued to work as a freelance journalist for a few years. Her unpublished memoirs and some original documents from the time as “Felizitas” have been in the archive of the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Rome since 2007 .

Hilde Purwin died in Bonn in 2010 at the age of 90.

On September 16, 2019, a commemoration ceremony was held for the 100th birthday of Hilde Purwin in the village church of Simon Petrus in Obernissa. The event was organized by Pastor Christian Dietrich with the support of the State Center for Civic Education Thuringia and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Central Germany . The memorial speech was given by the journalist Karl-Heinz Baum . On the same day, the radio station WDR5 broadcast the article "100th birthday of Hilde Purwin" in the radio series ZeitZeichen .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Erich Kuby : Treason in German. How the Third Reich ruined Italy. Hamburg, Hoffmann and Campe 1982, ISBN 3-455-08754-X , p. 280ff.
  2. ↑ Edda Ciano : My Truth. As told to Albert Zarca. Translated into English from French by Eileen Finletter. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London 1977, ISBN 0-297-77302-X , pp. 225ff.
  3. ↑ Susanna Agnelli : We always wore sailor clothes. Piper Verlag, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-492-10726-5 . P. 180/181.
  4. ↑ Erich Kuby: Treason in German. How the Third Reich ruined Italy. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1982, p. 379ff.
  5. ↑ The OSS therefore named these carbon copies the Rose Garden Papers ; s. also cia.gov: The Ciano Papers: Rose Garden (accessed November 12, 2015)
  6. ^ Ray Moseley: Between Hitler and Mussolini. The double life of Count Ciano. Henschel Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-894-87311-6 , pp. 284ff.
  7. ↑ Il Processo di Verona in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  8. ↑ I and the Duce in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  9. ↑ Edda in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  10. ^ Richard W. Cutler: Three Careers, Three Names: Hildegard Beetz, Talented Spy. In: International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. Volume 22, 3, 2009, ISSN  0885-0607 , pp. 515-535.
  11. ↑ according to "Familien-Stammbuch": marriage certificate from the registry office in Bonn, on April 23, 1952
  12. ↑ Heinz Murmann : With “C” it's finer. The German Press Club Bonn from 1952 until today. Bouvier, Bonn 1997, ISBN 3-416-02713-2 , p. 49.
  13. ↑ Gunnar Krüger: We're not an exclusive club! The federal press conference in the Adenauer era. LIT-Verlag, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8258-8342-6 , p. 48, p. 142.
  14. ^ Hans-Henning Zencke : Plea for grace for Bonn. Notes on a troublesome policy. Econ Verlag, Düsseldorf 1984, ISBN 3-430-19934-4 , p. 96.
  15. ↑ Thüringer Allgemeine: Burn for democracy
  16. ↑ 100th birthday of Hilde Purwin (accessed on September 18, 2019)

literature

  • Helmut Schmidt. Doers, practitioners, pragmatists , lucky with presidents, chancellors and women. A gallery in Bonn. , published by Werner Höfer, Belser Verlag, Stuttgart and Zurich 1976. ISBN 3-7630-1174-9
  • Agile, agile . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1960 ( online ).

Web links

Commons : Hilde Purwin  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Purwin, Hilde
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Burkhardt, Hildegard Gertrud (birth name); Beetz, Hildegard (after the 1st marriage); Felizitas (alias); Blum, Hildegard (post-war identity); Gambit (alias)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German journalist
DATE OF BIRTH September 16, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Obernissa near Erfurt
DATE OF DEATH March 29, 2010
Place of death Bonn