Kurt von Lersner

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Kurt von Lersner

Kurt Freiherr von Lersner (born December 12, 1883 in Saarburg , Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine , † June 7, 1954 in Düsseldorf ) was a German diplomat and politician ( DVP ). Lersner was the "second leader" of the German delegation to the peace negotiations at Versailles from July 1919 to spring 1920, a member of the Reichstag for the Weimar Republic and Konrad Adenauer's emissary after the Second World War.

Live and act

German Empire (1883 to 1914)

Lersner was born in 1883 as the son of the Prussian officer and landowner Alphons Freiherr von Lersner and his wife Emmy, née Jacobson. After attending high schools in Cologne , Karlsruhe and Darmstadt and training in banking, he studied law at the universities of Bonn , Berlin , Heidelberg and Paris . From 1902 he was a member of the Corps Borussia Bonn . After a brief activity as a trainee court clerk (1906) Lersner was accepted into the German diplomatic service . In the following years until the outbreak of the First World War , he was deployed in rapid succession to various diplomatic missions of the German Reich abroad . After serving as an embassy attaché in Paris (1907–1910), he was sent as an embassy attaché to Brussels (1910), again to Paris (1911–1913) and finally as embassy secretary to Washington, DC (1913/14). There he made friends with, among others, Franklin D. Roosevelt , then Deputy Minister of the Navy in the government of Woodrow Wilson , and with Franz von Papen , military attaché at the German embassy.

First World War and Versailles Peace Negotiations (1914 to 1920)

Lersner signing a diplomatic document in the clock room of the French Foreign Ministry

Immediately after the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Lersner returned to Germany. In 1915 in Sofia (Bulgaria) he was involved in the drafting of the alliance agreement signed on September 6th. At times he was reactivated as Rittmeister of the reserve to fight at the front. In 1916 he was reinstated as a diplomat. As a legation councilor and representative of the Foreign Office , he was posted to the main headquarters , where he spent the next two years until the end of the war as a liaison between the Chancellor and the Foreign Office to the highest military command. In addition to the Quartermaster General and de facto German war dictator Erich Ludendorff , Lersner had close contact with the Reich Chancellors Georg Michaelis and Georg von Hertling and with the Foreign State Secretaries Arthur Zimmermann and Paul von Hintze .

In 1917 he was involved in the smuggling of Lenin from Switzerland through Germany to Russia , which was controlled by the Supreme Army Command , with the aim of revolutionizing the tsarist empire and thus eliminating it as an enemy of the war. In the spring of 1918 Lersner belonged to the peace delegation led by Richard von Kühlmann at the negotiations of Brest-Litovsk .

After the end of the fighting in November 1918, Lersner represented the German government from November 1918 to February 1920 in the negotiations with the Allied powers that led to the end and settlement of the war: From November 1918 to April 1919 he was part of the German delegation to negotiate the Armistice in Spa . He was then sent to the peace negotiations in Versailles as German government commissioner from April to July . After the adoption of the Versailles Peace Treaty , he acted - as the successor to Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau - from July 1919 to February 1920 as chairman of the German peace delegations in Versailles and Paris . Together with Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George , Lersner was the first to sign the Treaty of Versailles. In the period that followed, Lersner also signed a declaration to the Allies on behalf of the German government in which the German Reich undertook to annul Article 61 of the Weimar Constitution , and German Austria was represented in the Reich Parliament - as a preparatory step for the annexation of Austria to the German Rich - assured. The extradition of a few dozen German "war criminals" demanded by the Allies failed not least because of Lersner's threat to the Reich government to resign from his post if this demand was granted.

Weimar Republic and the National Socialist Period (1920 to 1945)

After the end of his diplomatic activity in France, Lersner returned to Germany. He wrote three memory books in which he described his experiences during the peace negotiations and expressed his criticism of the Versailles peace order. Lersner was initially politically active in the German People's Party (DVP). From June 1920 to May 1924 he sat for them as a member of the first Reichstag of the Weimar Republic , in which he represented constituency 31 (Leipzig). After the local organization of the DVP refused to nominate him again for the May 1924 election, he left the DVP to join the DNVP , which stood further to the right .

After the Prussian strike of the Papen government in July 1932, when the Prussian state government was ousted and the government of Prussia was taken over by the Reich government, Franz von Papen appointed his old friend Lersner as his personal representative to the southern German state governments. His main task there was to calm them down and to dispel fears of new blows - now against their independence. In 1932 Lersner Papen also introduced Kurt Freiherr von Schröder , who established contact between Adolf Hitler and Papen at a meeting in his house on January 4, 1933 , which led to the formation of the Hitler government and ultimately to the National Socialist seizure of power at the end of January 1933.

In the further course of the 1930s, Lersner acted as Papen's representative in Geneva and the Saar region and as a business representative for IG Farben in Turkey . As a so-called “ half-Jew ” - according to the Nuremberg Laws he was considered to be a “ first-degree Jewish hybrid ” - Lersner found himself increasingly troubled in Germany: in 1939 he feared that the Gestapo was after him. In order to withdraw their access to it, Papen, who was sent to Turkey as German ambassador that year, took Lersner with him to this secure outpost (cf. Exile in Turkey 1933–1945 ). Lersner worked as a cultural attaché at the embassy in Ankara .

During the Second World War , Lersner acted as a middleman for peace explorations that the group around Wilhelm Canaris initiated behind Hitler's back with the Allies. From Ankara, Lersner Paul Leverkuehn put in contact with the American special envoy for the Balkans, George H. Earle , a close friend of US President Roosevelt, and thus helped to organize a secret meeting between Canaris and Earle at the end of January 1943.

Post-war period (1945 to 1954)

Kurt von Lersner's gravestone in the old cemetery Nieder-Erlenbach

After the end of the Second World War, Lersner fell into American captivity. Not least because of his numerous connections in the United States and France, he was soon released. As a result he was in contact with the American military governor in Germany, Lucius Clay . From 1947 to 1949 Lersner also acted as Konrad Adenauer's liaison to the former French head of state Charles de Gaulle , whom Lersner knew personally from earlier times. During numerous visits to de Gaulle, who at that time was temporarily on the political side and lived withdrawn from his country estate, Lersner observed his gradually changing image of Germany between 1947 (“the [dismembered] Germany of 1648 must be restored”) and 1949, when the Franco-German friendship slowly grew, and informed the CDU politician about it.

After 1950 Lersner worked in heavy industry.

He is buried in the listed family grave in the old cemetery Nieder-Erlenbach .

Fonts

  • Requirements and effects of the restriction of a power of attorney according to HGB § 50 Paragraph 3. Slea (dissertation)
  • As chairman of the peace delegation in Paris. Hamburg s. a. [1920].
  • Versailles! Berlin 1921. (New editions 1922, 1923)
  • Germany and the question of guilt. Berlin 1923.

literature

  • Lersner, Kurt, Freiherr von in Reichs Handbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft - The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Second volume, pp. 1104–1105, Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1931
  • 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 .
  • Horst Mühleisen :  Lersner, Kurt Freiherr von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , p. 323 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Horst Mühleisen: Kurt Freiherr von Lersner. Goettingen 1988.
  • Kurt Freiherr von Lersner (-Nieder Erlenbach) , Internationales Biographisches Archiv 27/1954 of June 28, 1954, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Kurt von Lersner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Korps-Lists 1910, Vol. 19, p. 745.
  2. ↑ Hans-Joachim Böttcher: Ferdinand von Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha 1861-1948 - A cosmopolitan on the Bulgarian throne . Osteuropazentrum Berlin-Verlag (Anthea Verlagsgruppe), Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-89998-296-1 , p. 298-299 et al. a .
  3. ^ New York Times, September 23, 1919.
  4. ↑ Michael Mueller: Canaris. The Life and Death of Hitler's Spymaster. 2007, p. 211.
  5. ^ Ulrich Lappenküper: The German-French Relations 1949–1963. 2001, p. 1204.
personal data
SURNAME Lersner, Kurt von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lersner, Kurt Freiherr von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat and politician (DVP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH December 12, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Saarburg , Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1954
Place of death Dusseldorf