Kurt Lüdecke

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the German boxer see Kurt Lüdecke (Boxer) .

Kurt Georg Wilhelm Lüdecke (born February 5, 1890 in Berlin , † 1960 in Prien am Chiemsee ) was a German businessman. He was best known as a political adventurer and business man who at times played an important role in Adolf Hitler's environment .

Life

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Lüdecke came from a wealthy Berlin family. He was the youngest of three sons of Albert Lüdecke and his wife Elsie. His father was the director of a chemical factory in Oranienburg .

Lüdeckes school time in Berlin ended with a fiasco: He was expelled from school and had to move to Braunschweig, where he graduated with the one-year-old in 1907. After his military service with the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regiment , Lüdecke began a restless travel life that led him all over Europe in the following years: He first went to London and then settled in France.

In 1910, Lüdecke claims to have made so much money through gambling in France that from then on he was able to lead an independent and luxurious life. However, the files of the public prosecutor's office at the Superior Court in Berlin suggest that his earlier prosperity had other reasons: In January 1911, following a complaint, investigations were initiated against Lüdecke, which brought him into connection with "extortion on a homosexual basis": Lüdecke was in homosexuals Circles known for finding rich friends and forcing them to pay after intercourse. The historian Lothar Machtan has therefore put forward the thesis that Lüdecke did not make his fortune with roulette , but as a gigolo and blackmailer: he traveled through Europe in the years before the First World War and created the foundations for a lavish lifestyle through impostures .

From 1914 Lüdecke belonged to the Prussian army, with which he took part in the First World War until 1916 without ever serving at the front. Instead he worked in a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg . There he began to be interested in the " race question " after hearing lectures from Alfred von Domaszewski .

From 1920 Lüdecke worked in the United States for the industrialist Henry Ford's private secret service based in New York City . This organization was dedicated, among other things, to the task of conducting smear campaigns against influential Jews in the United States and spying on the private lives of opponents of Ford or other people he hated in order to get their hands on compromising information about them.

In May 1921 and again - after a temporary absence - in April 1922, Lüdecke settled in Munich, where he was preparing an exhibition of German pictures in New York. He was probably sent to Germany by the Ford office, and given adequate financial resources, to find political allies for Ford's anti-Semitic campaign there. In the following years he made numerous contacts with circles and personalities of the nationalist movement. B. to Ernst von Reventlow .

In August 1922 Lüdecke listened with enthusiasm to a Hitler speech in Munich. As a result, he came into the environment of Hitler, who on the one hand gladly used him as a broker of funds and contacts abroad and as an informant with many relationships, but on the other hand showed him considerable mistrust. Lüdecke was repeatedly suspected of spying on the NSDAP and its leadership in favor of competing or hostile organizations. Significantly, at the beginning of 1923 Lüdecke was arrested for a few weeks - without ever knowing this background - following a tip from Hitler to the Munich police headquarters on suspicion of having committed treason. After his release he was used by Hitler as before as a middleman and broker of financial donations for his party. Among other things, Lüdecke traveled to Mussolini in September 1922 and 1923 in order to audition in Hitler's favor.

After the failed Hitler putsch in 1923, Lüdecke visited Hitler in custody in Landsberg and was still involved in the Volkisch bloc and the newly founded NSDAP until 1925. In the following years Lüdecke again distanced himself from the NSDAP in order to try his luck abroad again.

In 1932 Lüdecke returned to Germany several times, where he again came into contact with Hitler and the NSDAP leadership. In the spring of 1933 he suggested the establishment of the Foreign Policy Office of the NSDAP under Alfred Rosenberg. For reasons that were not fully understood, he was arrested in May 1933 on Hermann Göring's orders , but was soon released again on Hitler's instructions, with Göring being made by Hitler to apologize to Lüdecke for the inconvenience suffered. Since Lüdecke - probably caused by Hitler's intervention in his favor during his imprisonment in April / May 1933 - to overestimate his position in the esteem of the dictator - in the following months with extensive financial demands on Hitler his annoyance, he was im Arrested again in autumn 1933. As a result, he spent a few months as an honorary prisoner with preferential conditions in the Oranienburg concentration camp until April 1934. During a leave of imprisonment he was allowed to visit Hitler in the Reich Chancellery, who finally ordered his release.

In the course of 1934 Lüdecke emigrated to the United States.

Role in National Socialism

From 1923 to 1933 he probably stayed mostly outside the Weimar Republic - from 1926 in the United States. He worked as a journalist for the Völkischer Beobachter . In March 1933 he returned and became a member of the NSDAP; possibly he had applied for membership as early as 1922. Because of confrontations with party comrades like Hans Frank in Germany, he spent eight months in a concentration camp until he was able to escape on March 1, 1934.

Lüdecke was back in the United States at the time of the Röhm Putsch , in which his lawyer Alexander Glaser was killed. Apparently disappointed by the events, in 1937 he published a book dedicated to Gregor Strasser and Ernst Röhm about his experiences with Hitler, entitled I Knew Hitler: The Story of a Nazi Who Escaped the Blood Purge . The manuscript - about the quality of the conversations with Hitler by Hermann Rauschning and Carl Friedrich Goerdeler's X-Files - he might have previously offered for sale to the German embassy in the United States, which, however, refused. According to this, he had privately equipped an SA department, donated 100,000 gold marks to the party , had traveled to the United States with Siegfried and Winifred Wagner , where he had met Henry Ford with their help to persuade him to donate. According to its own statements, Lüdecke established the connection between the NSDAP and Mussolini . The latter donated money to the party via Lüdecke. The book had a significant impact on the Allies and was even included in the standard Soviet work "History of Diplomacy" by W. P. Potjomkin .

Lüdecke's application for US citizenship was rejected in December 1938. On February 9, 1942, he was arrested as a public safety enemy alien . Lüdecke litigated against the expulsion of this group of people ordered by Harry S. Truman on July 14, 1945 and lost in June 1948, whereupon he was transferred to the American occupation zone . He was imprisoned in the United States for four years.

plant

• Kurt GW Lüdecke: I Knew Hitler: The Story of a Nazi Who Escaped the Blood Purge . E. Scribner's Sons, New York 1937 (Jarrolds, London 1938).

literature

• Arthur L. Smith: Kurt Lüdecke: The Man Who Knew Hitler . German Studies Association: German Studies Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (Oct. 2003), pp. 597-606.
• Sidney Aster (ed.): The "X" documents (Carl Goerdeler). Piper, Munich 1989.
• Hermann Rauschning: Conversations with Hitler . Europa Verlag, Zurich and New York 1940.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Machtan: Mystery , p. 302.
2. ↑ Machtan: Mystery , p. 303.
3. ↑ Machtan: Mystery , p. 303.
4. ^ Matthias Damm: The reception of Italian fascism in the Weimar Republic. Baden-Baden 2013, p. 81.
5. ^ Kurt Hiller : Heads and Trots: Profiles from a quarter of a century . Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 1950.
6. ↑ Ursula Seiler: Who Financed Hitler? ( Memento of the original from July 12, 2013 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. Journal No. 47, partly taken from I knew Hitler , 2005. 
7. ↑ Ludecke vs. Watkins, 335 US 160 (1948) , US Supreme Court , June 21, 1948.