Horst Mahnke

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Horst Mahnke (born October 28, 1913 in Berlin ; † November 8, 1985 ) was a German SS - Hauptsturmführer in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and after the Second World War editor and department head of the news magazine Der Spiegel from 1952 to 1960, then editor-in-chief of the magazine Kristall , Managing Director on the editorial advisory board of Springer Verlag and from 1969 to 1980 Managing Director of the Association of German Magazine Publishers .

Life

Horst Mahnke was the son of the businessman Paul Mahnke and his wife Ella, nee Groke. He attended secondary school in Königsberg and passed the Abitur examination there in 1934.

time of the nationalsocialism

Mahnke studied newspaper sciences as well as philosophy and German at the University of Königsberg from 1935 under Franz Six . He received his doctorate in 1941 with a thesis on the " Masonic Press in Germany". During his studies he was a department head in the NS student union . Mahnke was also working full-time for the SD from the beginning of October 1936 . He joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1937 (membership number 5,286,024) and became a member of the SS in the same year. His full-time work in the Reich Security Main Office from May 1939 included - under the SS brigade leader and department head of Office VII, "Philosophical Research" Six , with which he had already studied - the fight against Marxism . In 1940 Mahnke also became an assistant at the Faculty of Foreign Studies and its Foreign Studies Institute (DAWI) at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin .

Since October 12, 1940, Mahnke was married to Lotte, née Plew. The couple had two children.

Within the SS rose Mahnke 1942 Hauptsturmfuehrer on after serving as adjutant of his superiors Six of the summer 1941 director of the "Moscow Vorkommandos" Einsatzgruppe B was in the persecution of Communists and Jews before Moscow was involved. This advance detachment had its first deployment in Smolensk ; it participated in shootings there. In April 1943 he followed Six as personal assistant when he became head of the cultural policy department in the Foreign Office , which, together with the news and press department subordinate to Paul Karl Schmidt , steered the propaganda of the Nazi foreign ministry. Mahnke was considered the most important employee of Six. In addition to his new position in the Foreign Office, he continued to perform anti-Marxism tasks in the Reich Security Main Office and lectured as a lecturer in the university's Faculty of Foreign Studies.

post war period

Mahnke was arrested on January 29, 1946 and interned in the British internment camp in Bad Nenndorf until mid-1948 . Referring to the fact that German prisoners were beaten and tortured there, he was sentenced on September 10, 1948 by the Benefeld-Bomlitz court to only a fine of 400 DM . First of all, on July 16, 1949, the city of Hanover's denazification committee forbade him to work as a "teacher, youth worker, journalist, editor" because he had " significantly promoted National Socialism ". After these restrictions were lifted by the Appeals Committee on March 31, 1950, nothing stood in the way of his journalistic career.

After Mahnke first since 1949 in the Hamburg free port had worked as a market observer for the coffee retailer association, he wrote in 1950 in the news magazine Der Spiegel along with the future Head of "International" and deputy editor of the magazine Georg Wolff anti-Semitic series , implicated On Caffeehandel where he before especially Jewish displaced persons (DPs), who had remained in Germany after the liberation from the concentration camps, were responsible for the coffee smuggling, which cost the state one billion DM. In 1952 he became editor and head of the “International” section of Spiegel and until 1960 was mainly responsible for the magazine's series. This also included the series articles by the former press chief at the Nazi foreign ministry, Paul Karl Schmidt, alias post-war bestselling author Paul Carell . When Mahnke became editor-in-chief of Axel Springer's magazine Kristall in 1960 , he also took “Paul Carell” with him. Together they published in the Kristall Carell series “Operation Barbarossa” and “Scorched Earth”, which glorified the Wehrmacht by, for example, calling the attack on Norway a “masterpiece of the organization”. These series, which also appeared in book form, found millions of buyers as book bestsellers from 1963 and 1966. Like Paul Karl Schmidt, Horst Mahnke was also listed as an informal employee by the BND ; Mahnke under the code name "Klostermann". According to an announcement by the news magazine Der Spiegel in June 2013, the BND confirmed that Mahnke was an informant for the secret service until 1973. As a member of the advisory team of the publisher Axel Springer, Mahnke provided his four BND agent leaders with numerous internal information about the publisher's personnel policy, information about the company's strategic orientation and the alcohol problems of an editor-in-chief who was involved in a traffic accident.

As chairman of the editorial advisory board of Axel Springer, Mahnke ensured the implementation of the editorial guidelines in the press organs of the publishing house and used a high-ranking network of informants to constantly provide Axel Springer with internal information from politics and the Spiegel publishing house before he became the managing director of the Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) advanced and coordinated their interests until he retired in 1980.

Fonts

  • The Masonic Press in Germany. Structure & history. Dissertation. University of Königsberg 1941.
  • with Georg Wolff : 1954. Peace has a chance. VS, Darmstadt 1953.

literature

  • Norbert Frei : Careers in the Twilight. Hitler's elites after 1945. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-593-36790-4 .
  • Lutz Hachmeister : The enemy researcher. The career of SS leader Franz Alfred Six. Munich 1998, ISBN 3-406-43507-6 .
  • Lutz Hachmeister: A German news magazine. The early “Spiegel” and its Nazi staff. In: Lutz Hachmeister, Friedemann Siering (ed.): The gentlemen journalists. The elite of the German press after 1945. Munich 2002, pp. 87–120.
  • Peter Hoeres : Foreign policy, the public, public opinion. German disputes in the "long 1960s" . In: Historical magazine . Volume 291 (2010), pp. 689-720 PDF .
  • Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 3: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: L – R. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-71842-6 .
  • Michael Wildt : Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office. Hamburg 2002.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Precise life data from: Heiko Buschke: German press, right-wing extremism and the National Socialist past in the Adenauer era . Campus, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-593-37344-0 , p. 113.
  2. ^ A b c d Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical manual of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 3: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: L – R. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2008, p. 167.
  3. Heiko Buschke: German press, right-wing extremism and the National Socialist past in the Adenauer era . Campus, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-593-37344-0 , p. 113.
  4. Michael Wildt: Generation of the Unconditional. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office. 2nd edition, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-930908-87-5 , p. 549.
  5. ^ Lutz Hachmeister: A German news magazine. The early “Spiegel” and its Nazi staff. In: Lutz Hachmeister, Friedemann Siering (ed.): The gentlemen journalists. The elite of the German press after 1945. Munich 2002, p. 102 f.
  6. ^ Lutz Hachmeister: A German news magazine. The early “Spiegel” and its Nazi staff. P. 103.
  7. Der Spiegel : Participated in the coffee trade - Germany's smuggler . No. 27, July 6, 1950 and following editions; see also Lutz Hachmeister : The enemy researcher. The career of SS leader Franz Alfred Six. Munich 1998, p. 323.
  8. Norbert Frei: Careers in the Twilight. P. 270.
  9. ^ Willi Winkler: Heap of rubble in history: Axel Springer: New database. ( Memento of the original from March 25, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 17, 2010. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sueddeutsche.de
  10. ^ Klaus Wiegrefe : Hidden research. The Federal Intelligence Service recruited journalists as informants in the 1950s and 1960s. Now he had to name his informers for the first time . In: Der Spiegel , No. 23 of June 3, 2013, p. 42f .; see also the more succinct online report BND reveals journalists as informants , in: Spiegel Online , June 2, 2013.
  11. Dirk Banse: The BND spied on Axel Springer . In: Welt Online , November 22, 2014.
  12. ^ Peter Hoeres: Foreign policy, public, public opinion. German disputes in the "long 1960s" . In: Historical magazine . Volume 291 (2010), pp. 689-720, here pp. 695-696. PDF