Martin Luther (Undersecretary of State)

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Martin Luther
On January 8, 1942, Heydrich invites Undersecretary Martin Luther to attend January 20, 1942
Minutes of the meeting of the Wannsee Conference

Martin Franz Julius Luther (born December 16, 1895 in Berlin ; † May 13, 1945 there ) was an advisor to Joachim von Ribbentrop during the Nazi era , initially in the Ribbentrop department , and from 1938 in the Foreign Office of the German Reich. From 1941 he held the position of Undersecretary of State .

As head of Department D (Germany) in the Foreign Office , Luther was responsible for the cooperation with Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) as well as for the department D III ("Jewish question, racial policy, information of diplomatic missions abroad about important domestic political processes"). In close cooperation with the Eichmann department , Luther made Department D one of the authorities involved in the “ final solution to the Jewish question ”. In practice, the Federal Foreign Office's contribution to the Holocaust consisted primarily of diplomatically preparing and securing the deportations from occupied and friendly countries. At the Wannsee Conference , Luther recommended that Nordic countries should be postponed for the time being in view of the low number of “Jews” and expected difficulties and that the focus should be on south-east and west Europe.

Life

Early years

In his youth Luther attended a humanistic grammar school , which he left with the Abitur. In 1914 he joined the Prussian army as a war volunteer, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War , in which he participated in a railway unit until 1918. In the last year of the war he reached the rank of lieutenant . After the war, he led a moving company, which also Furnishing performed.

Career in National Socialism

On March 1, 1933, Luther joined the NSDAP . At the same time he began to work in the SA in Berlin-Dahlem . In 1933/34 Luther acted as head of the economic advice center in Berlin. In 1936 he took over a post in the Ribbentrop office under Joachim von Ribbentrop .

When Ribbentrop was appointed German ambassador to London in 1936, he commissioned Luther to carry out his move from Berlin and had him furnish the interior of the London embassy . After Ribbentrop was appointed Foreign Minister in the spring of 1938, Luther brought Luther to the Foreign Office , where he initially took over the management of the newly established NSDAP Special Unit. On May 7, 1940, he became head of Department D (Germany) in the Foreign Office and thus responsible for the field of propaganda in the Foreign Ministry as well as for maintaining contacts between the Ministry and all party branches, in particular the SS and SD . He used his position to attract more young, convinced National Socialists to the Foreign Office.

In 1941 Luther was promoted to ministerial director with the official title "Undersecretary of State". One of his tasks in this position was to compel the foreign governments dependent on Germany to extradite the Jews in their areas. He was thus largely responsible for the organization of the persecution and murder of European Jews during the Second World War . Even before the Wannsee Conference he wrote in a lecture note on December 4, 1941: " The opportunity of the war must be used to finally eliminate the Jewish question in Europe ". On January 20, 1942, he took part in the Wannsee Conference as a representative of Ernst von Weizsäcker and brought a memorandum with him: wishes and ideas of the Foreign Office on the proposed overall solution to the Jewish question in Europe , in which he approved the intended (and made) mass murder signaled.

Ribbentrop had got the impression that Luther had exceeded his powers and, in the case of Romania, had not adequately protected the position of the Foreign Office against the SS. Luther justified himself on August 21, 1942 in a detailed letter to Reich Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. He did not mention that he had acted unauthorized on "Jewish issues" in Serbia, alleged untruthfully that Weizsäcker had been informed in detail about the Wannsee Conference and defended his cooperation with the SS:

Wannsee Conference

“At the meeting on January 20th, 1942, I demanded that all questions relating to foreign countries must be coordinated with the Foreign Office beforehand, which Group Leader Heydrich promised and kept loyal to, as did the Reich Security Main Office responsible for Jewish matters from the start Has carried out measures in smooth cooperation with the Federal Foreign Office ”.

Luther appeared as the “driving force” in the persecution of the Jews. In a letter to Werner von Bargen dated December 4, 1942, in which he “did not use a single foreign policy argument”, he called on him to “take energetic action” against Belgian Jews, because “a thorough cleansing of Jews from Belgium sooner or later be done in any case ".

In 1942, Luther rose to the position of SA Brigade Leader within the SA . In the Foreign Office he achieved "a powerful position [...] whose influence gradually undermined and ultimately surpassed the traditional powers of the State Secretary." Trusting in the support of the head of the SS foreign intelligence service, Walter Schellenberg , who, like Luther himself, considered Ribbentrop's foreign policy to be inadequate due to insufficient efforts to “get Germany out of the impasse of the two-front war”, Luther tried to force Ribbentrop to resign as Foreign Minister. His letter to Himmler , in which various allegations were bundled in such a way that Ribbentrop “had to appear as insane and incapable of office”, was “personally delivered to the Reich Foreign Minister” by his adjutant Karl Wolff . Luther was arrested on February 10, 1943 and interrogated by the head of the Gestapo, SS group leader Heinrich Müller . Subsequently imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp , “he received preferential treatment as a prominent prisoner”. From a letter from Himmler to the chief of the security police and the SD Ernst Kaltenbrunner on June 5, 1944, it emerges that Hitler personally decided after a letter from Luther's wife, who asked for relief from prison, and according to Himmler's commitment, that “Martin Luther in the course of the Year he lived in a house on the edge of the concentration camp and his wife [was] allowed to move there too ”. Shortly after the end of World War II, he is said to have died “of the consequences of a heart attack” in Berlin.

According to the assessment of the Independent Historical Commission - Foreign Office 2010, the "putsch" to disempower Ribbentrop already took place in a phase of "increasing loss of importance [s]" of Luther, was also motivated by personal "alienation" from his minister and failed to recognize his chances of a "coalition with." the SS ”against Ribbentrop. For the historian Hans-Jürgen Döscher , who specializes in the history of the Foreign Office under National Socialism , Schellenberg was the “originator” of the plot against Ribbentrop, with the aim of, after its success, even Ribbentrop “succeeding him as Reich Foreign Minister”. To achieve this goal he had "used Luther's" and dropped him when the plot failed, without being "decoupled" himself.

Only Luther's copy of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference escaped the destruction of the files, as his files had been relocated in preparation for his trial in Berlin-Lichterfelde. Due to his untimely death, Luther escaped later “criminal prosecution in the Wilhelmstrasse Trial ” for his joint responsibility for the murders of the Jews.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: Martin Luther - Rise and Fall of an Under Secretary of State , in: Roland Smelser (Ed.): Die brown Elite II , Darmstadt 1993, p. 179.
  2. ↑ Gerald Reitlinger : The SS: alibi of a nation, 1922-1945 p. 115. ISBN 0-85368-187-2 .
  3. ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 384.
  4. ^ Quote from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, p. 384.
  5. ↑ Christopher Browning : The "Final Solution" and the Foreign Office. Section D III of the Germany Department 1940-1943. Darmstadt 2010, ISBN 978-3-534-22870-6 , pp. 153-155.
  6. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, p. 385.
  7. ↑ a b 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, p. 243.
  8. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: Martin Luther - Rise and Fall of an Under Secretary of State , p. 179.
  9. ↑ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: Martin Luther - Rise and Fall of an Under Secretary of State , p. 187.
  10. ↑ a b c d Hans-Jürgen Döscher: Martin Luther - Rise and Fall of an Under Secretary of State , p. 188.
  11. ↑ a b 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, p. 144 f.
  12. ^ A b Hans-Jürgen Döscher: Martin Luther - Rise and Fall of an Undersecretary of State, p. 190.
personal data
SURNAME Luther, Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Luther, Martin Franz Julius (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Undersecretary in the Foreign Office
DATE OF BIRTH December 16, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 13, 1945
Place of death Berlin