Ludwig Kleinwächter (diplomat)

Ludwig Kleinwächter (born October 9, 1882 in Czernowitz , Austria-Hungary , † March 12, 1973 in Vienna ) was an Austrian diplomat .

Life

Ludwig Kleinwächter was the offspring of a respected family, his father was the economist Friedrich Kleinwächter . After graduating from the Staatsgymnasium Czernowitz in 1903, Ludwig studied law in Berlin and at the Franz-Josefs-Universität in Czernowitz, where he received his doctorate sub auspiciis in 1909 . He then studied at the Consular Academy in Vienna and began a career as a diplomat in the Austrian-Hungarian Foreign Ministry in 1911 . From 1912 to 1916 he was consul in New York and in 1916 in Buffalo . From June 1916 until the United States entered the First World War in the spring of 1917, he served at the embassy in Washington . From December 1917 to February 1918 he was employed in the Saint Petersburg Prisoners of War Commission. From April 1918 to November 1918 he was head of the civil internees department in Kiev .

After the war, Ludwig Kleinwächter served as a diplomat for the Republic of Austria. He married in 1921 and had two daughters. In April and May 1921 he was a member of the delegation to the Conference of the Successor States of the Monarchy in Rome . In February 1922 he returned to the USA and was head of the consulate in Chicago until 1925 (in 1924 he was appointed consul general, 2nd class). From June 1925 to December 1926 he was counselor in the Austrian embassy in Washington. He then worked for a few years for the Federal Press Service in Vienna, interrupted by a stay in Canada , where he headed the Consulate General in Ottawa from 1930 to 1932 (in 1931 appointed General Conul 1st class). During the period of the authoritarian corporate state , Kleinwächter was a member of the Patriotic Front .

After Austria was " annexed" to Hitler Germany , he was dismissed from the diplomatic service and arrested on March 12, 1938 as a " half-Jew ". On April 2, 1938, he was taken to the Dachau concentration camp on the so-called transport of celebrities , where he was given prisoner number 13,904. On September 23, 1938 he was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp , from where he was released on May 3, 1939. His dismissal from the diplomatic service was changed to a transfer to retirement with the award of half of the rest benefit. In November 1939 he was imprisoned in the Gestapo for 18 days . During the Nazi regime he managed to do various odd jobs until the end of the war.

At the end of April 1945 he returned to Ballhausplatz and offered his services for the reconstruction of the republic. The provisional government Renner nominated him because of his experience as a diplomat in the United States for permanent representatives of the Office of Foreign Affairs at the American delegation to the Allied Commission for Austria . After the National Council election in November 1945 , the new Figl Federal Government sent him to Washington as envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary , where he arrived in February 1946. Together with his colleague Hans Thalberg , he rebuilt the Austrian legation. At first they lived in a hotel. Writing paper, which they received from Vienna by the box, was from the Nazi era and had a swastika , which is why Kleinwächter and Thalberg burned it in the hotel room's bathtub as a precaution.

As an envoy, Kleinwächter soon began to spread the government line of the “ victim doctrine ” to the American public, that is, the narrative of Austria as the “first victim” of National Socialist aggression. That both he and Thalberg had been persecuted by the National Socialists helped. He successfully recruited US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes for support for Austria's request for urgently needed UNRRA aid . After the UNRRA program expired in 1947, Kleinwächter succeeded in ensuring that Austria was given special consideration in the subsequent Marshall Plan and received a large proportion of the aid money.

Another diplomatic success of Kleinwächter was the signing of the first Fulbright Agreement between Austria and the USA in June 1950. In December 1951, shortly before his retirement, he was promoted to ambassador . From 1952 Kleinwächter was chairman of the Austro-American Institute of Education .

Trivia

Ludwig Kleinwächter was featured on the cover of the first issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel on January 4, 1947.

Honors

• 1935: Grand Officer's Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy
• 1936: Officer's Cross of the Austrian Order of Merit

literature

• Gertrude Enderle-Burcel , Rudolf Agstner , Michaela Follner: Austria's top diplomats between Kaiser and Kreisky. Biographical handbook of diplomats in the Foreign Service 1918 to 1959. Ed. By the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance and the Austrian Society for Historical Source Studies, Fassbaender, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-902575-23-4 , pp. 273-275.

supporting documents

1. ↑ An interesting doctorate. In:  Czernowitzer Tagblatt , July 14, 1909, p. 4 (online at ANNO ). .
2. ^ ^{A b} Günter Bischof : Ludwig Kleinwaechter and the Marshall Plan. In: austria.org. Austrian Embassy in Washinton, DC, accessed April 27, 2019 . 
3. ^ Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider, Rudolf Leo: "dachaureif" - The Austrian transport from Vienna to the Dachau concentration camp on April 1, 1938. Ed .: Documentation Center of the Austrian Resistance and Central Austrian Research Center for Post-War Justice. Vienna 2019, ISBN 978-3-901142-75-8 , p. 153.
4. ↑ Cover pictures: SPIEGEL titles - the best covers of the first decade. In: Spiegel Online . January 3, 2017, accessed May 5, 2019 . 
5. ↑ Staff news . In:  Salzburger Chronik with the illustrated supplement "Oesterreichische Woche" , February 28, 1935, p. 4 (online at ANNO ). .
6. ↑ Staff news . In:  Salzburger Chronik with the illustrated supplement "Oesterreichische Woche" , February 17, 1936, p. 4 (online at ANNO ). .

predecessor	Office	successor
Edgar Leo Gustav Prochnik	Austrian ambassador in Washington, DC (from 1946 as envoy of the Austrian government) 1951–1952	Max Loewenthal-Chlumecky