Paul Schmidt (interpreter)

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Paul-Otto Schmidt (center) interprets between Édouard Daladier and Adolf Hitler (1938)
Paul-Otto Schmidt (center) interprets between Neville Chamberlain and Hitler. Bad Godesberg, September 24, 1938

Paul-Otto Schmidt (born June 23, 1899 in Berlin ; † April 21, 1970 in Gmund in Upper Bavaria) was a German interpreter, chief interpreter in the Foreign Office from 1924 to 1945 , office manager of the minister, and from 1935 official interpreter for Adolf Hitler and from 1940 SS standard leader .

Life

Schmidt was the son of the railway secretary Gustav Schmidt. He attended the Siemens-secondary school in Charlottenburg and made 1917 the " War High School ". In 1917/1918 Schmidt took part in the First World War as a soldier and was wounded on the Western Front . He then studied modern languages ​​in Berlin and at the same time worked for a US newspaper agency. From 1921 he took part in courses at the Foreign Office to train conference interpreters, where he already distinguished himself through his outstanding memory skills. In July 1923 Paul Schmidt received his first assignment from the Foreign Office's language service for the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague , while he was still preparing for his exams .

After studying language in Berlin, Schmidt briefly worked in the Foreign Language Office of the Reich government . From 1924 he worked as an interpreter in the Foreign Office. Under Gustav Stresemann , Schmidt rose to the position of chief interpreter, a position he held until 1945 after the National Socialists came to power . In this role he was involved in the Locarno Treaties and also took part in many other important international conferences.

Other important stages in his career were:

On January 1, 1942, Schmidt joined the NSDAP (membership number 8.981.252).

When the Swiss envoy Peter Anton Feldscher asked the Foreign Office on May 12, 1943, on behalf of the British government, whether there was a willingness to allow 5,000 Jewish children from German territory to travel to Palestine, the Inland II department responsible for "Jewish affairs" worked out under Horst Wagner and Eberhard von Thadden a propagandistic rejection of this rescue attempt, referred to in official jargon as Feldscher-Aktion , which was also presented to Schmidt as Ribbentrop's office manager and which he provided with the handwritten note on June 29, 1943: “I consider the proposed procedure to be excellent. "

According to historian Hans-Jürgen Döscher , Schmidt's “last official act” in April 1945 as “Head of the Minister’s Office in the Foreign Office” was the destruction of secret documents so that the Allies found “only empty safes” at 74 Wilhelmstrasse .

In May 1945, Schmidt was arrested and interned by the Americans. He was one of the diplomats who, during their interrogation by the Allies in October 1945 , assessed the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 “not as an escalation of the German war of aggression, but as a necessary strategic step in self-defense”. Schmidt had already been released from prison in 1948. In 1950 he was classified as “exonerated” in front of the Miesbach Chamber of Justice , whereupon he continued his work as a translator .

From 1952 Schmidt headed an interpreting and language institute in Munich . In the Bundestag election in 1953 he ran for the right-wing conservative German party , but missed entry into parliament. In the winter semester of 1952/53 he took on the role of Rector of the Language and Interpreting Institute in Munich . In 1957 he decided not to run again for reasons of age.

1965 was u. a. Also against Paul-Otto Schmidt because of his positive opinion in June 1943 to prevent the departure of 5,000 Jewish children to Palestine, a public prosecutor's investigation "for murder" was initiated, which ended in April 1970 after Schmidt's death.

Memoirs Extra on the diplomatic stage

As an extra on the diplomatic stage , Schmidt names the memoirs from 1949, which have been cleared of his involvement in the Nazi extermination policy and tend to be apologetic , which he presents at close range as personal memories of an important ear witness of 21 years of European foreign policy.

The presentation begins with his experiences at the front during the First World War during the German spring offensive in 1918 and his assignment as a temporary conference interpreter at the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague, which he completed at the age of 24 before his university exams.

Schmidt then describes the path from the London Conference (1924) to the Dawes Plan and Ruhrkampf to the Locarno Treaty and the role that Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann played in it, such as the Geneva disarmament negotiations within the League of Nations , in which Heinrich Brüning took part , as well as Ribbentrop's conclusion of the Hitler-Stalin pact up to the grotesque establishment of a French puppet government in October 1944 at close range, always striving to live up to his claim to deliver “a lively assessment of the events” .

Particularly noteworthy are the images that Schmidt conveys of Arthur Neville Chamberlain (energetically, urging Hitler to withdraw) and of Franco and Pétain , who resisted Hitler's alliance offers after his victory over France.

Since, in his opinion, specialist knowledge is more important for interpreting than mastery of the language and because of the translation technique (in which, as a matter of principle, closed speeches are reproduced in context) he has detailed records of all these negotiations, an atmospherically dense, but also quite detailed picture emerges.

Fonts

  • Extra on the diplomatic stage 1923–1945. Experiences of the chief interpreter in the Foreign Office with the statesmen of Europe. From Stresemann and Briand to Hitler, Chamberlain and Molotov. Athenaeum, Bonn 1949. New edition: EVA, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-434-50591-1 .
  • The extra at the gallery 1945–50. Experiences, comments, comparisons. Athenaeum, Bonn 1951.
  • Learn languages ​​- why? and how? Athenaeum, Bonn 1954.

literature

Web links

Commons : Paul Schmidt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945? . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 546; Hans-Jürgen Döscher: The Foreign Office in the Third Reich. Diplomacy in the shadow of the final solution. Siedler Verlag Berlin 1987 ISBN 3-88680-256-6 , p. 284.
  2. ↑ Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 4: S. Editors: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2012, p. 116.
  3. ↑ Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 4: S. Editors: Bernd Isphording, Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2012, p. 116.
  4. ^ Wigbert Benz: Paul Carell. Ribbentrop's press officer Paul Karl Schmidt before and after 1945 . Berlin 2005. ISBN 3-86573068-X , 35 f.
  5. ^ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: rope teams. The Foreign Office's suppressed past . Propylaea, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-549-07267-8 , p. 53 f.
  6. ↑ 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, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 , p. 365 f. Schmidt then wrote in his memoirs in 1949 : "I recognized from this that between November 1940 and March 1941 Hitler's fateful decision was made to attack Russia, which sealed the end of Germany." (P. 517)
  7. ^ Wigbert Benz: Paul Carell. Ribbentrop's press chief Paul Karl Schmidt before and after 1945. Berlin 2005, p. 88 f.
  8. ↑ Which, according to the French conception, should not be officially spoken about ( cf.state on diplomatic stage , p. 45)
  9. ↑ Since France was already largely occupied, it should have its seat in Sigmaringen. ( Extra on the diplomatic stage , p. 584)
  10. ↑ "Only personal experience allows a lively assessment of the events" - Paul Schmidt in the foreword by Statist auf diplomatischer Bühne , p. 8)
  11. ↑ p. 397, for the wording cf. http://fontanefan3.blogspot.com/2007/10/hitler-zuckte-zurck.html
  12. ↑ pp. 501-505, cf. http://fontanefan3.blogspot.com/2007/10/hitlers-groe-enttuschung.html
  13. ↑ "Over the years, based on my experience, I have come to believe that a good diplomatic interpreter must have three qualities: first and foremost, as paradoxical as it may sound, he must be able to remain silent; to a certain extent be an expert in the questions that are involved in his translations, and only in third place strangely comes mastery of the language. ”( Extra on diplomatic stage , p. 19/20)
personal data
SURNAME Schmidt, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schmidt, Paul-Otto (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German interpreter, chief interpreter in the Foreign Office
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1970
Place of death Gmund in Upper Bavaria