Othmar Gamillscheg

Othmar Gamillscheg (* 1889 on Gut Veselíčko near Staré Hobzí , Moravia ; † 1947 near Rio de Janeiro , Brazil ) was an Austrian officer and captain of the Austro-Hungarian Army . After the First World War , he advocated targeted German-Austrian emigration to Brazil and founded the “Neue Heimat” association for emigration to São Paulo . After the failure of this project he became a sales representative for German companies in South America and from 1941 worked as an informant for the German defense . In April 1942 he was exposed as a spy by the US secret service and arrested. In 1947 he died in a Brazilian prison.

Life

Othmar Gamillscheg was interested in emigrating to South America even before the First World War and in 1912 published the text " Lecture by Rittmeister Gamillscheg on his project of an organized emigration ". The Austrian writer Alfons Petzold , who dedicated the volume of poems " The steel cry " to him in 1916 his brother-in-law. During the First World War he served as a cavalry officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army . Deeply disappointed by the outcome of the war and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy , he came to the conclusion that the time had come to found an Austrian settlement colony. Above all, he saw the large number of officers discharged from the army and now in need in the rest of the revolution- laden Austria as a reservoir for his project.

"Action Gamillscheg"

At the end of 1918 he founded the “Nova Patria / Neue Heimat” association . He took up the trade policy goals of the German nationalist Austrian colonial society, which had tried from 1902 to channel the emigration of German-speaking Austrians to certain areas in order to create new sales markets for the mother country. The trauma of the lost war fed the emigration fever and within a few months Gamillscheg was able to gather 1000 people who wanted to emigrate, around 400 of them former members of the army. In May 1919 he went on a reconnaissance trip to Brazil, where he immediately started negotiations with government agencies and settlement companies. His aim was to found a German-speaking colony with Austrian war veterans in the still relatively sparsely populated southern Brazil, also in order to forestall the simultaneous Italian mass immigration - Austria-Hungary's former enemy. In order to finance the crossing of the mostly destitute emigrants, two donation campaigns were carried out in the Netherlands, Great Britain, Sweden and Switzerland with the help of the soldiers' organization “ Silver Cross ”. However, since the Brazilian government wanted farmers and craftsmen families as immigrants, advertisements were placed in Austrian newspapers to look for women for the mostly single officers. The main propaganda organ was the magazine "Der Emigrant" , which was published by several Austrian emigration associations. Even before Gamillscheg could show the results of the negotiations, the first group of people willing to emigrate, encouraged by his euphoric letters, left Vienna and embarked in Trieste for Brazil in October 1919 . He hastily concluded a contract with the government of the State of São Paulo on the provision of a coffee plantation on the Rio Corumbataí.

However, the construction of this colony was delayed and the arriving Austrians first settled in the Braz district of São Paulo . Many had only learned on the crossing that Portuguese is spoken in Brazil and were accordingly helpless. Many still wore semi-military clothing and reworked Austro-Hungarian uniforms with military boots, which caused a sensation in the city. The allocation of land plots could only begin after six months. However, working on the derelict Boa Vista Fazenda , which was in the middle of the bush, discouraged many of the immigrants who promptly left the colony and streamed back to the coastal towns. At the same time, new colonists from Austria arrived at the beginning of 1920, a total of 850 people. The rushed project remained a failure and a closed Austrian settlement in southern Brazil did not materialize.

commercial agent

Othmar Gamillscheg gave up his project, but stayed in São Paulo. He took a job at a company that imported machinery and steel from Germany. In 1925 he went to Germany for Junkers & Co. and later returned to Brazil as director of the South American business for Junkers Flugzeugwerke . There he married a German-Brazilian from Minas Gerais , with whom he had a daughter. In 1935 he accepted a job at Röchling's iron and steel works in Saarland and went back to Europe with his family. After the Saar was annexed to the German Reich, he initially had difficulties adapting to the new conditions. However, when the Second World War broke out in 1939 , he volunteered for the Wehrmacht . In December 1940 he was released because of his age.

spy

Thereupon he offered himself to the Abwehr, the German military foreign secret service, to go back to Brazil as a scout. The latter gladly accepted the opportunity and in July 1941 sent him disguised as a civilian with the Italian airline LATI ( Linee Aeree Transcontinentali Italiane ) from Rome to Brazil. There he was supposed to scout out US ship movements and air traffic and report back to the German Reich . His code name was "Grillo". He made direct contact with AEG representatives Albrecht Gustav Engels and Herbert von Heyer (code name “Humberto”), both of whom were Abwehr spies sent by Wilhelm Canaris . His assistant and right hand man was Adalberto Wamszer from Romania, who had lived in Brazil since 1924. In Rio de Janeiro he made the acquaintance of a French man named Pierre Leclerq, who showed sympathy for Hitler's Germany and recommended Gamillscheg as an employee of the Abwehr via radio message. However, she was suspicious and refused.

At that time, Brazil was still neutral and the government under President Vargas was even pro-German. Gamillscheg regularly sent reports to Germany, made secret contacts with informants in Panama and Mozambique and even developed his own encryption system . However, after the attack on Pearl Harbor , the Brazilian authorities became increasingly hostile to the axis . Heyer and a few other informants were arrested, making radio contact with Germany temporarily impossible. However, he managed to send secret cards of the newly established USAAF bases in Belém , Fortaleza and Recife to his wife in Kitzbühel via encrypted letters . In addition, he made contact with the secret service men of the Hungarian Horthy regime around Elemen Nagy, with whose help he was able to radio indirectly back to Germany. In March 1942, however, Wamszer was arrested by the US secret service and revealed Gamillscheg's name during interrogation. In April 1942 he was exposed and arrested before Brazil entered the war. This situation worsened for him in August 1942 when Brazil finally gave up its neutrality policy after German and Italian submarine attacks on its merchant fleet and pressure from the USA and entered World War II on the side of the Allies. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and remained in Brazilian custody as an enemy spy throughout the war. Weakened and aged, he died in 1947 in a prison near Rio de Janeiro.

legacy

Othmar Gamillscheg's enthusiasm for an Austrian emigration settlement in southern Brazil later influenced the Tyrolean politician Andreas Thaler , who took up this idea again in the course of the global economic crisis and founded the village of Dreizehnlinden in the state of Santa Catarina in 1933 , which still exists today.

literature

• Wolfgang Doppelbauer: In addition to the misery, the shame. The old Austrian officer corps at the beginning of the republic (= military history dissertations of Austrian universities , vol. 9). Österreichischer Bundesverlag, Vienna 1988, ISBN 3-215-07025-1 , p. 81.

Web links

• Literature by and about Othmar Gamillscheg in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Othmar Gamillscheg: Lecture by Rittmeister Gamillscheg on his project of an organized emigration , 1912
2. ↑ Alfons Petzold : The steely cry in the Gutenberg-DE project " To my brother-in-law Othmar Gamillscheg and the friends Dr. Franz Grüner and Heinrich Lersch, who always remembered me with love and loyalty in the struggle for my homeland . "
3. ↑ atein Amerika-studien.at: The "Aktion Gamillscheg"
4. ^ Stanley E. Hilton: Hitler's secret war in South America, 1939-1945: German military espionage and Allied counterespionage in Brazil , LSU Press, 1999, ISBN 9780807124369
5. ↑ Traude Horvath, Gerda Neyer: Emigration from Austria .: mid-19th century until today , Böhlau, 1996, ISBN 9783205985655