Jörg Kastl

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Hans Jörg Kastl (born June 21, 1922 in Berlin ; † January 9, 2014 there ) was a German lawyer and diplomat . In the 1960s he was press officer for the then Federal Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder and later the German ambassador to Argentina (1975–1977), Brazil (1977–1980) and the Soviet Union (1983–1987). Under the impression of the exploitation of the poor in Latin America, Kastl co-founded the Berlin Community Foundation . Kastl was the father of two children and was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit .

Life

His father was the lawyer and privy councilor Dr. H. c. Ludwig Kastl . Jörg Kastl attended the humanistic grammar school in Neubeuert . He studied law at the Universities of Lausanne and Munich as well as acting with Otto Falckenberg in Munich. Jörg Kastl passed the first state examination in 1941 and the second state examination in 1943 at the age of 21 . During the Second World War he was a lieutenant in the reserve . He married the sculptor Margarete von Faber du Faur (1919–2012), the daughter of Moritz von Faber du Faur and his wife Armgard. The Kastl couple appear in Hermann Lenz 's autobiographical novels as Jörg and Diana Schmöller and also play a role in the correspondence between Lenz and Hanne Trautwein . Among other things, Kastl suggested to the “half-Jew” Trautwein during the Third Reich to go into hiding at the Paulihof in Hausham .

After the end of the war Kastl first worked as a court intern, but he actually wanted to become an actor. After a few engagements at theaters in Bavaria, he turned away from acting because of bad reviews and followed his father's advice to go into diplomacy.

In 1950 he joined the Foreign Service . In 1951 he became vice-consul outside his civil service career , and in 1952 he was briefly accredited at the German embassy in Paris. From 1953 to 1957 he was accredited at the embassies of the Federal Republic of Germany in Buenos Aires and Asunción .

Until 1967, Kastl was the lecturer in the first class of the Legation Council for Foreign Minister Gerhard Schröder (CDU) . From 1967 he headed the Eastern Europe department.

Ambassador to Buenos Aires (1975–1977)

From 1975 to 1977 Kastl was the ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Buenos Aires. His activity fell in the early days of the Argentine military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, which killed up to 30,000 people. Kastl, like the German Foreign Office, was criticized by the victims' organization “Coalition against Impunity” for not doing enough to help Germans and Germans of descent arrested by the military as “enemies of the state”, of which at least a hundred were taken by the military after their violent “ Disappearance ”were secretly murdered in custody.

Kastl testified before the Nuremberg Public Prosecutor in 40 preliminary investigations conducted in Germany against 77 Argentine soldiers on the " disappearance " of German citizens.

The staff of the German embassy in Buenos Aires during the time of the military dictatorship of Jorge Rafael Videla are accused by relatives of the disappeared that good economic relations with Argentina were paramount, while the acute danger of torture and murder by the military was neglected. The embassy referred the family members of "disappeared" people to allegedly "well-informed" military personnel such as Mayor Peirano - who, however, was a member of the Batallón de Inteligencia 601, which was itself massively involved in the dictatorship's human rights violations .

Kastl told Frieder Wagner that he had learned from Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher that Klaus Zieschank, who had been kidnapped by the military, was dead - which the German government was hiding from the public at the time:

“Then in the summer I (found out) in a different way, which I couldn't announce at the time ... Klaus Zieschank is dead ... At that time I received a secret decree, signed by Genscher: We know he is dead, and you have this message with you to keep himself under threat, under threat of your immediate recall ... I still don't know where he got it from? "

- Jörg Kastl : 2: 52-3.25 / 10: 25 Jörg Kastl

“We knew from the start that people were being tortured horribly and then disappeared . I told many to get out of here! The military do tabula rasa . "

- Jörg Kastl

The Foreign Office instructed the embassy to liberate German citizens captured by the Argentine authorities from prisons through diplomatic channels. Kastl declared, however, that nobody would have been released that way. According to the assessment of the Nuremberg Human Rights Center , Kastl went in favor of Elisabeth Käsemann and other German victims of the dictatorship despite such instructions “far beyond the prescribed consular care.” He and his embassy staff collected information, visited sites of arrests, compiled lists and confronted the dictatorship with these facts.

However, in 2014, a few months before his death, Kastl stated in an interview in the documentary Das Mädchen - What happened to Elisabeth K.? : “The cheese man crossed the firing range and got into the line of fire, it's that simple. […] She was shot and buried, and not without reason. [...] She would also have been ready to drop bombs. [...] Because, as I said, she came to Argentina with very explosive thoughts. ”Kastl was able to refer to information from the US sources, albeit exaggerated and unconfirmed. Kastl's supervisor at the time, Hans-Dietrich Genscher , did not give an interview for this film, despite the approval. Hildegard Hamm-Brücher and Klaus von Dohnanyi were self-critical.

The US government under Jimmy Carter had waited four months before sending its ambassador Raul Hector Castro to Buenos Aires in 1977 . It also made further arms deliveries dependent on compliance with human rights . The German government under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt , on the other hand, gave German corporations the opportunity to supply weapons to the military. The military government in Argentina spent a third of the national budget on armaments and security.

Ambassador to Brasília and Moscow

From 1977 to 1980 Jörg Kastl was ambassador in Brasília , from 1983 to 1987 in Moscow . This led to conflicts with Federal Foreign Minister Genscher, whose attitude towards the USSR he found "far too soft".

In 1985 Kastl informed the Foreign Office in Bonn by telex that Salzgitter AG was involved in the construction of the poison gas plant near Rabita by Muammar al-Gaddafi .

On January 9, 2014, Kastl died with his family in Berlin.

Honors

publication

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b "The inside is not affected by the external circumstances". Hanne Trautwein - Hermann Lenz. The Correspondence 1937-1946 , ed. by Michael Schwidtal, Insel Verlag 2018, ISBN 978-3458177722 , p. 790 and ö.
  2. ↑ Margarete von Faber du Faur was also called "Diana" in real life, cf. the obituary on trauer.sueddeutsche.de
  3. ↑ AA personnel policy . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1967 ( online ).
  4. ↑ Ostpolitik . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1967 ( online ).
  5. ^ Coalition against Impunity - "Truth and Justice for the German Disappeared in Argentina". ( Memento of August 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Website of the organization “Coalition against Impunity”; Retrieved May 24, 2013
  6. ↑ ¿Pecado de omision? [Guilty for omission?] Deutsche Welle
  7. ↑ Frieder Wagner, so.fdlive.com
  8. ↑ a b Dieter Maier: The Foreign Office and the murder of Elisabeth Käsemann in Argentina in 1977 . ( Memento of March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ; PDF; 118 kB) June 2012, on the website of the Nuremberg Human Rights Center (NMRZ); Retrieved June 2, 2015
  9. ↑ Death from political inaction . Süddeutsche.de
  10. ↑ Thomas Gehringer: The Political Murder of Elisabeth Käsemann - How the Foreign Office and the DFB failed in Argentina. Tagesspiegel , online June 4, 2014
  11. ↑ zeitenspiegel.de  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Focus . February 2005@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.zeitenspiegel.de  
  12. ^ Bonn made the investigation against the builders of Gaddafi's poison gas factory more difficult . In: Der Spiegel . No. 24 , 1990 ( online ).
predecessor Office successor
Horst-Krafft Robert German ambassador in Buenos Aires
1975–1977 		Joachim Jaenicke
Horst Röding German ambassador in Brasilia
1977–1980 		Franz Jochen Schoeller
Andreas Meyer-Landrut German ambassador in Moscow
1983–1987 		Andreas Meyer-Landrut
personal data
SURNAME Kastl, Jörg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kastl, Hans Jörg (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 2014
Place of death Berlin