Karl Graf von Spreti

Karl Borromäus Maria Heinrich Graf von Spreti (born May 21, 1907 at Kapfing Castle near Landshut , † April 5, 1970 in San Pedro Ayampuc , Guatemala ) was a German architect, politician ( CSU ) and diplomat .

family

Karl von Spreti, from the German-Italian noble family of the Counts von Spreti , was the second son of the landowner Adolf Graf von Spreti (1866–1945) and his second wife Anna Maria Countess Yrsch (1874–1944). He had three brothers Cajetan (1905–1989), Maximilian (1910–1945) and Franz (1914–1990).

Karl married the Austrian diplomatic daughter Helene Sabina Riedl von Riedenstein (1915–1995); The children Maria Gaetana (1943-2001), Arardo-Constantin (* 1946) and Alessandro (* 1958) came from the marriage.

Life and work

Karl von Spreti attended the humanistic grammar school and, like his great-great-grandfather Leo von Klenze , studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich from 1930 . He worked as a freelance architect and went to India in 1935 as one of the film technicians with director Franz Osten and worked as a film architect at Bombay Talkies until 1938 . In 1939/40 he was a soldier, then worked again as an architect in Ulm and Berlin. In 1944 he was drafted again and a short time later was taken prisoner by the Americans. After returning from captivity, he settled back as an architect in Lindau (Lake Constance) .

After serving as a member of the German Bundestag from 1949 to 1956 , Graf Spreti became Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Luxembourg (1956 to 1959). He then worked in Cuba (1959 to 1962), Jordan (1963 to 1965), the Dominican Republic (1966 to 1968) and Guatemala (1969 to 1970). During his service there he was kidnapped by the left-wing extremist guerrilla FAR on March 31, 1970 and murdered on April 5, 1970.

The central organ of the SED Neues Deutschland welcomed Spreti's murder and the Baader-Meinhof group took this as confirmation.

Political party

Before 1933 Graf Spreti belonged to the people's conservative movement, most recently to the Bavarian People's Party (BVP) . In 1945 he took part in the founding of the Christian Democratic Party CDP, of which he became district chairman in 1947 in Lindau. The CDP became part of the CSU in 1956 after the city of Lindau was reintegrated into the Free State of Bavaria.

MP

From 1948 to 1956 Spreti was initially a city ​​councilor in Lindau.

He had been a member of the German Bundestag for the CSU since the first federal election in 1949 and remained in parliament until March 5, 1956. Spreti represented the constituency of Kempten , in which he was directly elected in 1949 (constituency 46) and 1953 (constituency 241). In the Bundestag election in 1953 , he received 61.7% of the first votes.

In the German Bundestag he was, among other things, rapporteur for the Foreign Affairs Committee on the Luxembourg Agreement , the first agreement concluded in 1952 between the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel. He was a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Union.

From 1953 to 1956 he was also a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe . In 1954 he was the German candidate for the post of Deputy Secretary General and Head of Administration of the Council of Europe.

ambassador

Count Spreti became Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Luxembourg in 1956 (until 1959). He then worked in Cuba (1959 to 1963; Cuban Missile Crisis ), Jordan (1963 to 1965), the Dominican Republic and Haiti (1967 to 1969) and Guatemala (1969 to 1970).

In 1957, Count Spreti was discussed as the successor to Wolfgang Jaenicke as ambassador to the Holy See .

Honors

Graf von Spreti was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969 . The Karl Graf Spreti Foundation, based in Munich, is named after him. Spreti's daughter, Maria Gaetana, who was married to the New York gallery owner Pierre Matisse , had decreed in her will that her father's memory should be honored. After her death, a special fund was initially set up at the Bavarian People's Foundation in 2003. In 2008 this form of organization was dissolved in favor of an independent foundation, the Karl Graf Spreti Foundation. The foundation is financially supported by the Matisse Foundation . Scientific, artistic and cultural projects in memory of Karl Graf von Spreti on the one hand and the scientific penetration of Bavaria's external relations in their full range on the other hand are funded.

After his death on April 13, 1970, a memorial service took place in the plenary hall of the Bundestag in the presence of Federal President Gustav Heinemann and Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt as well as other members of the Federal Government, the Bundestag and the diplomatic corps, in which Federal Foreign Minister Walter Scheel and Bundestag President Kai-Uwe von Hassel honored the deceased. He received a state funeral . He was posthumously awarded high Guatemalan and German medals. Guatemala's Foreign Minister Alberto Fuentes Mohr honored him with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Quetzal .

Karl Graf von Spreti had been a member of the Sovereign Order of Malta since 1938 . In 1952 he was appointed Knight of the Order of Knights of the Holy Sepulcher by Cardinal Grand Master Nicola Cardinal Canali and invested on May 1, 1952 by Lorenz Jaeger , Grand Prior of the German Lieutenancy ; at last he was its grand officer .

literature

• Jörg Zedler: Karl Graf von Spreti. Pictures of a diplomatic career (= Spreti studies. Vol. 1). Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-8316-0768-6 .
• Ryszard Kapuściński : Dlaczego zginął Karl von Spreti. Czytelnik, Warszawa 2010, ISBN 978-83-07-03222-1 .
• Heinrich Graf von Spreti :  Spreti, Count. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 753 f. ( Digitized version ).

See also

• List of killed ambassadors

Individual evidence

1. ^ Protocol of a kidnapping. Hamburger Abendblatt , April 11, 1970, accessed on August 10, 2015 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Tana Matisse, 58, a Force in Art Foundation ( English ) The New York Times. April 22, 2001. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
3. ^ Karl Graf von Spreti . Munzinger archive. June 15, 1970. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
4. ^ Bernhard Blumenau: The United Nations and Terrorism. Germany, Multilateralism, and Antiterrorism Efforts in the 1970s. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2014, ISBN 978-1-137-39196-4 , pp. 41-45 .
5. ↑ Baader-Meinhof international? . Federal Agency for Civic Education. August 31, 2007. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
6. ↑ Black to Black . The mirror. June 9, 1954. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Jörg Zedler: Karl Graf von Spreti. Pictures of a diplomatic career , Utz Verlag 2008
8. ^ Statements by the Federal Chancellor in the 33rd cabinet meeting . The Federal Archives. May 25, 1954. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
9. ^ Vatican ambassador suitable for Rome . The mirror. February 27, 1957. Retrieved June 7, 2017.
10. ^ Frank Lambach: Foray through a life in the diplomatic service. Experiences in the German Foreign Service in the 2nd half of the 20th century. epubli 2012, page 35.
11. ↑ "Would we then skillfully different?" . The mirror. April 13, 1970. Retrieved June 7, 2017.

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Graf von Spreti in the catalog of the German National Library
• www.spreti-stiftung.de
• Homepage of the Graf von Spreti family
• Guatemala: Memoria del Silencio - SECUESTRO Y EJECUCION ARBITRARIA DEL EMBAJADOR DE ALEMANIA, CHARLES OF SPRETI (Spanish)
• Funeral service Karl von Spreti Germany 1970 (video)

predecessor	Office	successor
Josef Jansen	German ambassador to Luxembourg 1956–1959	Bernd Eugen Mumm from Schwarzenstein
Henry Paul Jordan	German ambassador to Cuba 1959–1963	Paul von Stolzmann
Konrad von Schubert	German ambassador to Jordan 1963–1965	Hans-Joachim Hille
Wilhelm Helmuth van Almsick	German Ambassador to the Dominican Republic 1967–1969	Wolfgang Schultheiss
Franz Malsy-Mink	German ambassador to Haiti 1967–1969
Wilhelm Helmuth van Almsick	German ambassador to Guatemala 1969–1970	Wolfram Hucke