Otto Kriegk

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Otto Hermann Kriegk (born May 17, 1892 in Rinteln ; † since 1945, officially declared dead on December 31, 1945 by decision of the Lichterfelde District Court in 1952) was a German journalist and writer . He was best known as a newspaper journalist in the 1920s to 1940s and as an employee of the National Socialist Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels .

Life

Early years (1892-1919)

Kriegk was born as the son of the postal secretary a. D. Hermann Kriegk and his wife. In his childhood he attended a private preschool in Hildesheim and the middle school in Osnabrück , before he entered the Sexta of the Ratsgymnasium in Osnabrück at Easter 1901, which he left in Easter 1910 with the school leaving certificate.

From 1910 to 1914, Kriegk studied German , history , geography , French , Latin , economics and geology at the Georg-August University in Göttingen . In December 1913, he passed the state examination there (examination as a candidate for the higher teaching post). With examination of 24 June 1914, he was at Göttingen University with one of Max Lehmann managed national economic-historical dissertation on the topic The beer money in the Electorate of Brandenburg to Dr. rer. pole. PhD. In May 1914, Kriegk joined the editorial staff of the Weser newspaper in Bremen as a full-time journalist . In August 1914 he got a job as a senior political editor there. From participating in World War I , Kriegk was postponed due to complete blindness in his right eye. Instead he was assigned to the Weser-Zeitung for the entire duration of the war due to a special order from the General Command in Altona .

At the end of the war in 1918, Kriegk founded an organization against Marxism in Bremen . He also prepared the “resistance” of the Bremen population against the “Bolshevik tyranny” in the city. During the November Revolution, Kriegk first achieved public awareness with his proposal to oppose the revolutionary workers' and soldiers' councils so-called (counter-revolutionary) "citizens' councils". In 1920 he was appointed to such a Reich Citizens' Council.

Weimar Republic (1919–1933)

In 1919, Kriegk reported on the Weimar National Assembly as a representative of his newspaper . In 1920 he went to Berlin as a correspondent for the Weser newspaper , where he soon developed into one of the most famous journalists in the capital's press.

Since 1922, Kriegk had been in the service of Scherl Verlag , a company owned by media mogul and DNVP politician Alfred Hugenberg , whose closest journalistic associate was Kriegk for the next ten years. Since 1926 he has written for all of the magazines and newspapers of the Scherl Verlag, but especially for the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger , for the Berlin illustrated night edition and for Die Woche . He also directed articles for Count Rohan's European Review . He also continued to work for the Weser newspaper until it was closed in 1934.

Politically, Kriegk was against liberalism - the liberal journalist Werner Stephan called him his "antipode" - against the Weimar form of government , which he branded as "self-deception" and against social democracy . The left world stage therefore characterized him as a man with whom one finds “not always pleasant company”. In addition to political and social issues, Kriegk also wrote numerous film reviews and feature sections relating to the medium of cinema. His taste was rather conservative, aesthetically and / or content unconventional films, mostly met with his rejection. Fritz Lang's Metropolis was a “Bolshevik” concoction for Kriegk.

Through his personal influence on Hugenberg, on which he worked as a consultant apart from his journalistic activities for the Hugenberg press and through close personal contact, Kriegk was also able to influence the politics of the DNVP after Hugenberg had taken over the leadership of the party in 1928. In 1932, Kriegk expressed his admiration for Hugenberg, whom he considered the “coming man” for a number of years, in a biography.

Kriegk determined the suitability of Hugenberg, who was already older at the time, to be the political leader of Germany in the demographic structure of the country . The great losses of younger men in the First World War made it necessary to skip the warring generation. It is too decimated for great political talents to be expected in it. Instead one should fall back on men from the "pre-war period" to fill the leading political positions until the post-war generation is old enough to move up:

“For the next five years Germany has to reckon with the serious fact that it lacks a broad stratum of politically mature, physically quite healthy men with strong nerves from whom statesmen could emerge. Then maybe the younger ones have become ripe. Until then, Germany will have no choice but to take its responsible political leaders out of the 'pre-war period' following the example of other states. "

The Annual Reports for German History rated Kriegk's Hugenberg biography in 1932 as a “one-sided” work that suffered from “an immeasurable overestimation of this politician” and also showed “how little the author understood the signs of his time”. The majority of American newspaper correspondents in Germany saw Kriegk as a “chatty, rumbling block” ( “loud-mouthed, boisterous, bulky newsman” ) that could not be taken seriously.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the National Socialist " seizure of power ", Kriegk continued to work as editor, editor-in-chief and editor at Scherl Verlag, which however now passed from Hugenberg's property to Max Amann 's control and was taken over by Franz-Eher-Verlag . The journalistic synchronization of Kriegk went without problems, so that he soon became a "valued helper of the propagandists of the Reich government". In 1950, Jürgen Thorwald judged in retrospect about the war of the late 1930s that it had "fallen for years" according to Goebbels' propaganda line. Thorwald attributed this to Kriegk's ability "to move into different worlds of imagination and make them his own."

In addition to his work as chief reporter for the former Hugenberg newspapers of the Scherl publishing house, Kriegk, who had been a member of the NSDAP since November 15, 1937, now occasionally wrote for National Socialist newspapers such as The Attack .

In addition, Kriegk went public with several books. While he published with moderate publishers such as Stalling or Oldenbourg until the early Nazi era , his later writings were mostly published by National Socialist publishing houses such as Junker and Dünnhaupt or the Nibelungen Verlag . Some of these books had a clear propaganda function. Various "revelation books" published by Kriegk during the immediate prewar period and in the war years attempted to "enlighten" the German public and German-occupied countries in the spirit of the Propaganda Ministry about the "real" authors of the Second World War and their motives. The volume Who is driving England to war? of the spring of 1939, for example, identified the British statesmen Winston Churchill , Alfred Duff Cooper and Anthony Eden as the heads of an alleged clique of British "plutocrats and saloon Bolsheviks" who had conspired to "impose war" on Germany. In Behind Geneva, Moscow tried again to “expose” the League of Nations as a “Jewish-Masonic foundation”.

During the Second World War, Kriegk von Goebbels was used as a journalist and propaganda writer for various political maneuvers. After Kriegk's visit to the front in 1942, Goebbels temporarily sent him to neutral Portugal as a correspondent in order - apparently by mistake - to “divulge” details about the German strategic plans in the east. The underlying idea behind this assignment was the plan to mislead the Allies by giving their spies the impression through an accident through Kriegk's deliberate indiscretion that they had learned of the secret German operational plans in the East. In particular, they wanted to suggest to the Allied middlemen in Lisbon that the Wehrmacht intended to attack the Red Army in the middle section of the Eastern Front in the near future . Thereupon, so the German hope, the spies would pass on the information "leaked" in this way to their superiors, who would then act in the German sense. The Red Army, according to the calculation, would soon withdraw strong defense formations to the “center” section on the instructions of its leadership in order to be able to better intercept the expected German attack. In the meantime, the German troops would only be confronted with weakened units at their actual attack site in the south. For this task, Kriegk, according to Goebbels, was particularly suitable because he was naturally "talkative enough" to master this feat with a "certain degree of virtuosity".

In June 1944, Kriegk incurred the ire of Goebbels when he exuberantly celebrated a German V2 rocket attack on London in an article for the Berlin night edition as the day "80 million Germans were waiting for", the day that the turn of the war would bring. Goebbels, who feared that the population's expectations would be so wrongly raised and that their failure to meet them would lead to a considerable weakening of morale at times, threatened to have Kriegk shot as punishment for his mistakes. As it soon turned out, and Goebbels temperament calmed down somewhat, Kriegk had only acted on the instructions of State Secretary Otto Dietrich , who had disregarded the language regulation published by Goebbels, how the V2 attacks should be reported.

post war period

In May 1945, Kriegk belonged to the group of five parliamentarians who brought the Soviet armed forces to the Soviet armed forces that the commanders of Berlin were ready to hand over the city. After the city surrendered, Kriegk was arrested by the Red Army in Berlin on May 2, 1945, together with other important Goebbels employees such as Hans Fritzsche and Wolff Heinrichsdorff . He was then held successively in Berlin-Tempelhof, Hennickendorf and at the headquarters of the Soviet secret police in Friedrichshain, where he was repeatedly questioned. On August 10, 1945 he was sentenced to death by a Soviet military tribunal for war crimes; the execution of the sentence is not certain. On December 5, 2001, Kriegk was rehabilitated by the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation.

During the Nuremberg trials of the main war criminals, Kriegk was named by the defense as one of two witnesses in the trial against Fritzsche (the other was Goebbels press officer Moritz von Schirmeister ) who should testify in favor of the accused. Although Kriegk had already been "made available" by the Allies to take part in the trial, the defense finally decided against Kriegk's appearance in the courtroom. After that his track is lost.

Kriegk was pronounced dead in 1952 and his death was recorded in the Declaration of Death book under No. Tw-26672/1952.

Works

  • The history of beer money in the Kurmark Brandenburg , (= research on Brandenburg and Prussian history, vol. 28), Göttingen 1915.
  • Bremen in the German Revolution from November 1918 to March 1919 , Bremen 1919. (with Wilhelm Breves, Paul Müller, Gerhard Heile, Johann Gerdes, Gustav Peter, Franz Vierweg, Sophie Dorothea Gallwitz , Otto L. Strack)
  • Locarno. A success? A critical study of the Locarno Treaties and their prehistory , Berlin 1925. (with Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell)
  • Tenancy law and housing shortage legislation in the Reich, in Prussia and in Berlin , Berlin 1925.
  • Was the understanding policy correct? Versailles-Locarno-Thoiry , Berlin 1929.
  • Hugenberg , Leipzig 1932.
  • The end of Versailles. The foreign policy of the Third Reich , Oldenburg 1934.
  • We are witnessing the liberation of the Saar. Six reports by German editors , Berlin 1935 (with Alfred Ingemar Berndt)
  • Behind Geneva stands Moscow , Berlin and Leipzig in 1936.
  • War or Peace. World politics between National Socialism and Bolshevism , Berlin 1939.
  • Who is driving England to war? The warmongers Duff Cooper, Eden, Churchill and their influence on English politics , Leipzig 1939. (Also published as The English Warmongers )
  • Who wins? Matter or human? , Berlin 1940.
  • German film in the mirror of Ufa. 25 years of struggle and completion , Berlin 1943.
  • The birth of Europe , Berlin 1943.
  • The war in 1914. Compiled from news and articles in the Weser newspaper , Bremen undated

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Federal Archives Lichterfelde: R 55/23496, file 22.
  2. Ibid. (Self-written résumé dated March 28, 1938).
  3. Werner Stephan: Eight decades of Germany experienced. A liberal in four eras . 1983.
  4. Werner Stephan: Journalist in four epochs . P. 138.
  5. The world stage . 1928, p. 314.
  6. See, [1] .
  7. ^ Otto Kriegk: Hugenberg . P. 10.
  8. ^ Annual reports for German history . Volume 35, 1932, p. 281.
  9. Louis Paul Lochner: The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943 , 1970, p. 163.
  10. ^ Fritz Singer: Politics of Deceptions. Abuse of the press in the Third Reich , 1975, p. 32.
  11. Jürgen Thorwald: The end on the Elbe . 1950, p. 134.
  12. Ibid.
  13. Theodor Veiter: Constitutional law and legal reality of the ethnic groups and ... m 1980, p. 131.
  14. ^ Walter Hagemann: Journalism in the Third Reich. A contribution to the methodology of mass leadership . 1948, p. 295.
  15. ^ The Goebbels Diaries, 1942–1943 . P. 163.
  16. ^ Ernest Kohn Bramsted: Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda, 1925–1945 , 1965, p. 322.
  17. ^ Karl Maron: From Charkow to Berlin. Front reports from the Second World War . 1960, p. 579.
  18. Andreas Weigelt, Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner (eds.): Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944-1947). A historical-biographical study. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-36968-5 , p. 367
  19. Max Bonacker: Goebbels' husband on the radio. The Nazi propagandist Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953) , 2007, p. 221.