Paul August Schmitz
Paul August Schmitz (born December 12, 1903 in Frankfurt am Main , † May 15, 1948 in Vorkuta , ( Soviet Union ); known under the name Paul Schmitz-Cairo ) was a German journalist and Middle East expert .
Life
Paul Schmitz was the son of the school principal August Schmitz and his wife Johanna, née Pastoors. He studied philosophy at the universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg and then pursued the career of a writer and journalist. From 1929, living in Munich , he was first head of the radio division of the Catholic correspondence and then chief editor of the Austrian Catholic magazine Weltguck ( publishing house Tyrolia ) and editor of the correspondence Funk and Schall . In his first marriage Paul Schmitz was married to Rosa Wilhelmine, nee Fries. From this marriage there were two daughters. In his second marriage, Paul Schmitz was married to Charlotte Marie Pasewark from 1940. The daughter Gertrud Schmitz, born in 1944, comes from this marriage.
In March 1933, Paul Schmitz had increasing difficulties with the Nazis who had come to power , and so, following an invitation from a friend, he emigrated to Egypt in May 1933 . In Cairo, Paul Schmitz initially worked for the newspaper La Bourse Égyptienne and the American newspaper agency Associated Press . In 1935 he then succeeded in writing articles for the German newspapers Hamburger Fremdblatt and Münchner Neue Nachrichten and became their reporter in the Middle East. He also worked for the Graf Reischach newspaper service. During his stay in Egypt, Paul Schmitz undertook several major trips through Africa, Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan and India on behalf of the newspapers and wrote a number of political books about them under the name "Paul Schmitz-Kairo", most of which were published in Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag published. Some of his books have also been translated into Polish, Italian, Romanian and Japanese.
In Cairo, he was a correspondent among others, the Volkischer Beobachter and other rich German newspapers, as well as for the press agency of the Reich Ministry of Propaganda " Transocean ". On May 7, 1939, he was expelled by the Egyptian Ministry of Justice - one month after Joseph Goebbels' visit to Cairo - without giving any reason. In the literature, “National Socialist propaganda” and anti-British articles in the Völkischer Beobachter are assumed to be the reason . He took his stay in the Turkish capital Ankara . In the " Third Reich " he was now considered one of the best experts on the Arab world. In Ankara he was the representative of the Transocean and in March 1944 he also took over the management of the Istanbul office of Transocean , as he was particularly popular because of his close relationships with Turkish newspapers, journalists and parliamentarians, as well as the press chief of the Turkish government, Selim Sarper held suitable. In the summer of 1944 - after diplomatic relations with Turkey were broken off - Paul Schmitz returned to Germany. In Berlin he worked in the headquarters of " Transocean " as a specialist for Turkish and Arabic questions until April 14, 1945. On that day he left his office and retired to his property in Neukamp on the island of Rügen .
After the occupation of Ruegen by the Red Army Paul Schmitz was arrested on 10 July 1945 and on Putbus and Berlin to Moscow in the dreaded KGB - prison Lubyanka brought. He was accused of being a courier for the German embassy in Ankara . After a year in prison in Moscow, Paul Schmitz was sentenced on November 30, 1946 for espionage to 20 years in a labor and reformatory camp and taken to the notorious Vorkuta labor camp . He died there on May 15, 1948.
After the end of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives in Moscow, Paul Schmitz's daughter Gertrud tried to rehabilitate her father. In a letter from the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation dated June 21, 2004, Paul Schmitz was posthumously rehabilitated.
Fonts
His books All-Islam - World Power of Tomorrow and The Arab Revolution , for example, were mentioned in 2007 as introductory literature for the lecture “The Instrumentalization of Islam in the National Socialist German Reich” at the Free University of Berlin .
Between 1929 and 1945 his articles were published in numerous German and Austrian newspapers and agencies. He wrote, among others, for the Munich Latest News , Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung , Hannoverscher Kurier , Danziger Latest News , Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt , Preußische Zeitung , Fränkischer Kurier , Nürnberger Zeitung , Mitteldeutsche Zeitung Erfurt, Frankfurter Zeitung , Kölnische Zeitung and for the Wiener Neue Freie Presse and Neues Wiener Tagblatt . Schmitz wrote under the abbreviation Sch. also for the national observer . For the GDR historian Heinz Tillmann , the publications by Giselher Wirsing and Paul Schmitz, among others, were "[...] an important part of the German-fascist Middle East propaganda on the eve and in the course of the Second World War [...]". Your contributions did not serve to illuminate but to conceal the aggressive German Middle East policy.
Works
- All-Islam! World power of tomorrow? Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig, 1937 and 1942.
- Egypt's way to freedom. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig, 1937, 1941 and 1942
- New building in the Arab world. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig, 1937 and 1940.
- France in North Africa. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig, 1938.
- Moscow and the Islamic world. Franz Eher Nachf., Munich, 1938.
- Politicians and prophets on the Red Sea. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig, 1939.
- British weakness. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig, 1940.
- England's policy of violence on the Nile. German Information Center, Berlin, 1940.
- The Arab Revolution. Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, Leipzig, 1942.
Web links
- Literature by and about Paul August Schmitz in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gerhard Höpp (Ed.): Foreign experiences: Asians and Africans in Germany, Austria and Switzerland until 1945 . Center for the Modern Orient, Humanities Centers Berlin. Verlag Das Arabische Buch, Berlin, 1996, ISBN 978-3-86093-111-0 , p. 368
- ^ Albrecht Fuess: The German Congregation in Egypt from 1919-1939 . Hamburg's Islamic and Turkish Studies and Texts, Volume 8. ISBN 978-3-8258-2734-2 , p. 131
- ^ Rehabilitation by Russian authorities (2004). Original scan
- ↑ Heinz Tillmann: Germany's Arab policy in the Second World War . Series of publications by the Institute for General History at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Volume 2. Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1965, p. 6
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Schmitz, Paul August |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Schmitz-Kairo, Paul; Schmitz, Paul |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German journalist and Middle East expert |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 12, 1903 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Frankfurt am Main |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 15, 1948 |
| Place of death | Vorkuta , Soviet Union |