Karl Ritter (diplomat)

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Karl Ritter (born June 5, 1883 in Dörflas ; † July 31, 1968 in Murnau am Staffelsee ) was a German diplomat , ambassador to Brazil , member of the NSDAP , special commissioner for the Munich Agreement , senior civil servant in the Foreign Office during the Second World War and convicted War criminal in the Wilhelmstrasse trial .

Life

Ritter attended grammar school in Erlangen and Kempten . From 1901 he studied law , history and geology in Munich , Berlin and Erlangen and obtained his doctorate in 1905. jur., after which he volunteered for the Kölnische Zeitung as a Berlin stock exchange correspondent for two years . In 1907 he began a legal clerkship in the Bavarian civil service . After the second state examination and a year-long study at the Hamburg Colonial Institute , he went to the Reich Colonial Office in 1911 , which sent him to Buea in the government of the German colony of Cameroon from 1912 to 1914 . From 1914 to 1915 he was a soldier in the First World War and was then used in various upper Reich authorities.

From 1918 he worked in the Reich Economics Office and the Reich Ministry of Finance and finally in 1922 he became head of the departments for economics and reparations in the Foreign Office (AA) . In 1924 he became ministerial conductor. Here he was significantly involved in the project of the German-Austrian customs union , which failed in autumn 1931 due to resistance from the French.

In 1936 he briefly took over the trade policy department before he was transferred to Brazil. From 1937 to 1938 he was ambassador in Rio de Janeiro , where the embassy came into conflict with the government of Brazil over demands to allow the activities of the NSDAP / AO . Allegations by the Brazilian government under Getúlio Vargas that a coup attempt carried out by fascist integralists in 1938 had been carried out with German support led to a crisis between the two countries and to the declaration by then Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha that Ritter was undesirable in Brazil without the international law term “ persona non grata ”. However, this resulted in his recall. Curt Prüfer became his successor as ambassador on June 1, 1939 . During the Wilhelmstrasse trial, Ritter stated that he had been forced to join the NSDAP while he was in Brazil (judgment, p. 158).

In 1938 he was chairman of subcommittee B of the "International Commission for the Assignment of the Sudeten German Territory" in the negotiations for the Munich Agreement . From 1939 Ritter was appointed as ambassador z. b. V. provided with various special tasks. In the autumn of 1939, Ritter was concerned with the economic policy part of the German-Soviet negotiations that had led to the German-Soviet non-aggression pact . Ritter and his deputy Karl Schnurre were delegation leaders in the negotiations in Moscow, which resulted in additional agreements to the German-Soviet economic agreement concluded in 1940 and 1941 .

At the beginning of the war, Ritter was entrusted with the management of all tasks related to the economic war in the AA. From October 1940 he was the liaison between AA ( Ribbentrop ) and the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) on this issue . One of his employees was as Agent for the American secret service OSS active resistance fighters Fritz Kolbe , who was given access to military and political classified in this way.

process

At the end of the war, Ritter was imprisoned and charged with the following crimes in the Wilhelmstrasse Trial in 1947:

  • I: Crimes against peace: preparing, initiating and conducting wars of aggression and wars in violation of international treaties ... (p. 6).
  • III: War crimes: murder and mistreatment of members of the belligerent powers and of prisoners of war (p. 61).
  • V: War crimes and crimes against humanity: atrocities and offenses against the civilian population. Persecution of Jews, Catholics and other minorities (p. 78).
  • VI: War crimes and crimes against humanity: robbery and looting (p. 187).
  • VII: War crimes and crimes against humanity: slave labor (p. 241).

In point I, Ritter was declared not guilty:

"There was no evidence that he knew the aggressiveness of these wars" (p. 43).

As regards point V, the court came to the following conclusions:

"He gave himself no illusions about the Jewish policy ... and the fate of deportees to the East Jews if he had no direct knowledge of the extent of the method and the circumstances of the eradication measures have had on the Jews also highly probable." ( P. 158).
"Knowledge that a crime has been committed or is about to be committed is sufficient for a conviction only in cases in which there is a legal obligation to prevent or oppose an act" (p. 159).

These findings related to Ritter's involvement in the deportations of Jews from Denmark, France and Hungary.

Only in point III was Ritter found guilty, in all other points he was called not guilty in the sense of the indictment due to a lack of solid evidence . In point III, too, only two cases remained:
The involvement of the AA in an order regarding the legal non-enforcement of lynching against Allied airmen (p. 64).

"We don't just see Ritter as an errand boy ... he wasn't the author of this murder policy, but he carried it out."

And in the case of the murder of escaped Allied prisoners of war , he was convicted because, in his function in the Foreign Office, he should have pointed out to the OKW that the Swiss embassy, ​​as the protective power of British prisoners of war, was truthfully informed about the death of the escaped prisoners, according to: Article 77 of the Geneva Convention of 1929 and Article 14 of the Hague Regulations of 1907. Instead, he helped ensure that the Swiss Embassy received an untrue and misleading note.

The problems of the trial showed up in the “dissenting opinion of the judge Leon W. Powers” (p. 280ff), one of the three judges of the American military tribunal, who dismantled these two points in detail and rejected the conviction (p. 298).

Ritter was sentenced to a four-year prison term (valid from 1945) and released on May 15, 1949, one month after the verdict was pronounced. Ritter's defender was the defense attorney Horst Pelckmann , who was replaced by Erich Schmidt-Leichner .

No information is available about the years after the war.
He was the father of the communist Karl-Heinz Gerstner , who worked as a young diplomat in the German embassy in Paris under Otto Abetz in occupied France, became an important journalist in the GDR and was listed as an IM knight by the Stasi . Karl Ritter had two sisters, Martha Sieger lived in Coburg . The younger sister was Barbara Kluftinger, she was the wife of Hermann Kluftinger , who until 1928 was director and shareholder of the Kottern spinning and weaving mill in Kottern near Kempten (Allgäu) . Until 1955 he was director of the mechanical cotton spinning and weaving mill in Augsburg .

Fonts

  • New - Cameroon  : The v. Territory ceded to France to Germany in the agreement of November 4, 1911; Described on the basis of d. so far available Mitteilgn . Jena: Fischer, 1912 publications by the Reich Colonial Office; No. 4 ( online full text )
  • Germany's Experience with Clearing Agreements , in: Foreign Affairs , 1935, pp. 465-475

literature

  • 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 et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-71842-6 , pp. 684 f
  • Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann : The Office and the Past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 3-896-67430-7 , ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2
  • Hans-Jürgen Döscher : The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the "final solution". Berlin: Siedler 1987, ISBN 3-88680-256-6 .
  • Hermann Graml : Europe's way to war. Hitler and the Powers 1939. Munich: Oldenbourg 1990, ISBN 3-486-55151-5 .
  • Robert MW Kempner u. a., Ed .: The verdict in the Wilhelmstrasse trial  : D. official wording d. Decision in case no. 11 d. Nuremberg military tribunals against von Weizsäcker u. others, with different reasons for the judgment, rectification decisions, d. basic legal provisions, e. Delay d. Court persons u. Witnesses. Introductions by Robert Kempner a. Carl Haensel . Edited with co-author from CH Tuerck. (officially recognized. Translated from the English), Bürger Verlag, Schwäbisch Gmünd 1950 DNB
  • Sebastian Weitkamp: Brown diplomats. Horst Wagner and Eberhard von Thadden as functionaries of the "Final Solution". Dietz-Verlag, Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-8012-4178-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Maria Keipert: Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945 , Volume 3, pp. 684f
  2. ↑ Nicolas Forster: Brazil on the eve of the Second World War: a situation analysis with special reference to the "Força Expedicionária Brasileira" . Vienna, Univ., Diss., 2010 pdf , p. 217ff; P. 228ff. On p. 174 Forster quotes, however, that Ritter was declared a persona non grata .
  3. ↑ All page references in the text: judgment.
  4. ↑ See also the letter from Ernst Wilhelm Bohles to Ritter from June 25, 1938 reproduced by Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann: The Office and the Past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic , Karl Blessing Verlag, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 , pp. 140f. Ibid. Elsewhere, however, it is stated that Ritter was not a member of the NSDAP: ibid. P. 361. Keipert and Forster also have no membership.
  5. ↑ Graml, p. 113.
  6. ↑ Sebastian Weitkamp: Brown diplomats. Horst Wagner and Eberhard von Thadden as functionaries of the “Final Solution”. Dietz-Verlag, Bonn 2008, ISBN 978-3-8012-4178-0 , p. 291.
  7. ^ Paul Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse. The history of German diplomacy 1930–1945 , Nest, Frankfurt 1956 (1954), p. 247
  8. ^ Hamburger Abendblatt, April 16, 1949.
  9. ^ Interrogation of Hermann Kluftinger (December 5, 1947, Kempten)
predecessor Office successor
Arthur Schmidt-Elskop Ambassador of the German Reich in Brazil
1937–1938 		Curt Max examiner
personal data
SURNAME Ritter, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Dörflas
DATE OF DEATH July 31, 1968
Place of death Murnau am Staffelsee