Karl Boy-Ed

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Karl Boy-Ed, here as a frigate captain of the German Imperial Navy

Karl Boy-Ed (born September 14, 1872 in Lübeck , † September 14, 1930 in Grönwohld ) (pseudonym: Nordmann) was a German naval officer , diplomat and spy .

biography

Early years (1872-1911)

Karl Boy-Ed as a toddler with his mother

Karl Boy-Ed was born in 1872 as one of four children of the writer Ida Boy-Ed (1852-1928) and the Lübeck businessman Carl Boy (1845-1900). His maternal grandfather was a member of the Reichstag and journalist Christoph Marquard Ed . Among the family's friends were the Lübeck writers Heinrich and Thomas Mann .

His brother Walther saw the light of day two years later. Both were in Travemünde when the news of Ketterler's death arrived . Walther then signed up almost immediately as a volunteer for the expeditionary force to China .

In April 1891 Boy-Ed joined the Imperial Navy as a cadet , where he was promoted to the rank of captain of the sea and was taken on to the staff of the State Secretary of the Reichsmarineamt Alfred von Tirpitz , of which he became a protégé. Tirpitz subsequently made Boy-Ed head of the intelligence department (ie secret service) in the Reichsmarineamt from 1906 to 1909.

Naval attaché in Washington (1911–1917)

In 1911 Boy-Ed was posted to the United States as a naval attaché at the German Embassy in Washington, DC . There he was first noticed as a member of the high society, in which the tall and monocle-armored officer enjoyed great popularity thanks to his dashing demeanor, his agility and his sociable manner. Among his acquaintances in Washington was Franklin D. Roosevelt , who was represented from 1913 as Undersecretary of State for Naval Affairs in the Wilson administration and had a professional relationship with the Boy-Ed.

From 1913 Boy-Ed worked closely with the attaché for military affairs , Franz von Papen , and the commercial attaché Heinrich Albert . After the outbreak of World War I , the three of them organized various espionage and sabotage activities in the United States from New York , the main aim of which was to disrupt the warfare of the Entente powers and to counteract American engagement in Europe. Boy-Ed and Papen issued, among other things, forged passports to German army reservists living in the States in order to enable them to enter Germany through the British naval blockade and thus to participate in the war; They tried to blow up the railroad tracks and the Welland Canal to Canada in order to impede the importation of war goods from the neutral USA to Canada, which was fighting on the Entente side against the German Reich. Boy-Ed and Papen founded the company in Connecticut with the aim of burdening the production capacities of war-relevant American industrial companies with private contracts in such a way that they no longer had any production resources free to use weapons, ammunition and other weapons for warfare for the Allied powers To be able to produce goods. The goods ordered in this way were stored in the states as supposed private property in the company's warehouses and thus withheld from the European theater of war. The information was passed on in the trial against Papen by the prosecution's key witness Horst von der Goltz .

After von Papen, like all German naval and military attaches, had been expelled from the United States at the request of President Wilson in December 1915, Boy-Ed remained at his post and from then on acted as the central figure in German disruptive actions in the States. When the burden of proof against Boy-Ed grew , especially after the demolition on Black Tom Island , the most important transshipment point for ammunition deliveries from the States to Europe, he too was finally in the spring of 1917, shortly before the USA entered the World War, withdrawn from his post at Wilson's request from the Foreign Office in Berlin and ordered back to Berlin.

Later life (1917–1930)

Karl Boy-Ed's tomb in the Lübeck Burgtorfriedhof

After his expulsion from the United States, Boy-Ed was allowed to return to Germany as a diplomat under safe conduct. There he was awarded the Order of the Red Eagle by Kaiser Wilhelm II for his services and worked in the press office of the Navy Ministry for the rest of the war. In this position he did again in 1918 with a book about the submarine war and the United States.

After 1918 Boy-Ed lived on his Gut Grönwohldhof near Hamburg and gave lectures. On March 8, 1921, he gave a much-noticed lecture “on the situation and attitude of German-Americans” at the non-profit organization . On February 10, 1921, in Hamburg, he had married Virginia, a daughter of the former Bishop Alexander Mackay-Smith of Pennsylvania , who was in Germany at the time , and an American whom he had known before his expulsion.

The marriage resulted in a daughter, Virginia Ida Boy-Ed (born March 11, 1922 in Hamburg, † 2006 in Barryville), married Mrs. Stacy Lloyd.

In 1930 he died on his birthday in a riding accident.

Reputation and aftermath

Negative reputation in the United States

In the United States of America Boy-Ed and his accomplices von Papen and Albert became famous as "Teutonic Schemers" and "Prussian Plotters" because of their conspiratorial activities. This picture was essentially built up by the semi-official American Propaganda Institution Committee on Public Information . Boy-Ed, in particular, who was identified in the press with the formulaic recurring attribute “the notorious German Captain”, assumed the rank of a particularly disreputable figure in the public eye. Its negative reputation was reflected, among other things, in the twenty-part silent film serial Eagle's Eye (running time 600 minutes) from 1918, in which - with propaganda still during the war - the activities of the German spy ring in Washington and New York were retold and in which Boy- Ed was played by John P. Wade .

The negative image of Boy-Ed in the USA was still so solidified in the post-war years that the American embassy in Berlin refused him a visa to enter the USA as a “ persona non grata ” in 1926 . When Boy-Ed turned to the US State Department with his request, there were violent protests in the American public: numerous petitions from "patriotic citizens" were directed to the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Frank Billings Kellogg , in which they vehemently urged him not to allow Boy-Ed to enter the United States. In this context, Time Magazine headlined in May of that year ominously suggestive “Is Boy-Ed Coming?” And stated that the news of Boy-Ed's entry request had “shaken the Americans to the core” with horror (“felt the marrow of their bones chill with affrighted horror "). It also recalled the “cowardly and shameless” attempts by Boy-Ed to prevent the United States from supporting the Entente States through (criminal) methods such as “arson, explosives and murder”.

Reputation in German historiography and the public

In contrast to the enormous publicity that Boy-Ed, Albert and von Papen received during and after the war in the United States, the three were for a long time almost completely unknown in their homeland as personalities. While von Papen later drew great attention in German historiography and the public through his chancellorship in 1932 - which he assumed as a man not even known by name to a large part of the ruled - and his involvement in the Nazi regime in German historiography and the public, Boy-Ed is to this day it has remained rather a "blank slate" in Germany. To this day he is hardly known to the public, in historiography he only appears as a marginal figure in other contexts. There is still no Boy Ed biography.

Works

  • The United States of America and the Submarine War. Sigismund, Berlin 1918.
  • Conspirator? The first 17 months of the war in the United States of North America. Scherl, Berlin 1920.

literature

  • Chad Millman: The Detonators: The Secret Plot to Destroy America and an Epic Hunt for Justice. New York, NY [u. a.] 2006, ISBN 0-316-73496-9
  • Michael Wala: Weimar and America (Transatlantic Historical Studies (Ths)). Verlag Steiner (Franz), 2001, ISBN 978-351-507865-8
  • Richard, Folmar: Call Down the Hawk: The Special Agents. Trafford Publishing, July 5, 2005, ISBN 978-141-205401-0

Web links

Commons : Karl Boy-Ed  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rubric: Chronicle. In: Vaterstädtische Blätter , year 1920/21, No. 13, edition of March 13, 1921, p. 52.
  2. Boy-Ed Marries American Girl War Tore Him from in 1917 . In: Evening Star , February 11, 1921, p. 3. Retrieved August 24, 2016.