Paul Leverkuehn

This article refers to the politician Paul Leverkuehn. The ornithologist of the same name, his uncle, can be found under Paul Leverkühn .

Paul Leverkuehn, 1915 in Erzurum

Paul Leverkuehn on an election poster for the 1957 federal election

Paul Leverkühn (* 31 July 1893 in Lübeck ; † 1. March 1960 in Hamburg ) was a German lawyer and politician of the CDU .

Life and work

Paul Leverkuehn was the second son of the Lübeck magistrate August Leverkuehn and his wife Ida, geb. Struckmann, the daughter of Hildesheim's Lord Mayor Gustav Struckmann . He studied after high school on the Katharineum at the Universities of Edinburgh , Freiburg , Munich , Berlin , Königsberg and Göttingen law . During the First World War , he worked in 1915/16 on behalf of the Foreign Office as a member of the secret delegation under Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter in the Turkish-Persian border area, in order to then continue his studies.

After the war he completed a legal clerkship in his hometown of Lübeck and was 1922 in Göttingen with a dissertation on trusts and cartels in the legal life of England, America and Germany to the Dr. doctorate in law. He then initially worked for a year as a consultant at the German-English arbitration tribunal and at the “Amerikastelle” of the Foreign Office. From 1923 to 1925 he was a consultant to the German-American mixed commission in Washington DC before he worked as a banker in New York City until 1928 . In 1928 he moved to the German embassy in Washington, where, as Reich Commissioner, he was responsible for clearing confiscated German assets. In 1930 he returned to Germany and established himself as a lawyer in Berlin . In 1933 he separated from his Jewish partner Simon Wolf. In 1934/35 Adam von Trott zu Solz spent part of his legal traineeship in his office, in 1938/39 Helmuth James von Moltke worked for him. From 1938 he represented Anna Anderson as a lawyer together with Kurt Vermehren for over 20 years in her ultimately unsuccessful attempts to enforce her claim to be the Tsar's daughter Anastasia in court. Before the Second World War , he joined the NSDAP .

In 1939 he was briefly drafted into the Wehrmacht , but only a year later he was appointed consul in Tabriz ( Persia ) by the Foreign Office . From 1941 to 1944 Leverkuehn, who had contacts to the resistance through the German Abwehr chief Wilhelm Canaris , was then head of the German Abwehr in Istanbul . When he was exposed at the beginning of 1942 by the opposing MI 6 for the arrest of German informants and thus practically the entire German intelligence service in Turkey was destroyed, Herbert Rittlinger became his successor without his knowledge . Leverkuehn officially remained chief of the German defense, so as not to endanger the camouflage of his successor Rittlinger. Allegedly, Leverkuehn should never have known about it. After he was recalled in 1944, he was the authorized representative of the board of the Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken AG (DWM) until the end of the war .

After the Second World War, Leverkuehn worked as a lawyer in Hamburg , but in 1946 he switched to the Reichsbank control center in Hamburg for a year . In 1948/49 he was Walter Warlimont's defense lawyer in the OKW trial , the twelfth of the Nuremberg follow - up trials . He was also involved as a defender in the Manstein trial in the British zone. From 1951 to 1953 he was a member of the German delegation to the London Debt Conference . At the beginning of May 1954 he was elected President of the Europa-Union Deutschland , despite the opposing candidacy of Franz Josef Strauss , but already resigned from office in September after suffering a serious car accident. From 1957 until his death he was President of the Institute for Asian Studies in Hamburg.

MP

Leverkuehn was a member of the German Bundestag from 1953 until his death. At the same time he was a deputy member of the Defense Committee of the German Bundestag and from 1954 to 1960 a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe . During the budget deliberations for 1956 in the Bundestag, together with the SPD member Hellmut Kalbitzer , he succeeded in increasing the budget for “promoting economically underdeveloped countries” from DM 3.5 to 50 million.

From February 27, 1958 to November 4, 1959 he was also a member of the European Parliament . In 1959 he was chairman of the rules of procedure committee.

Honorary positions

From 1949 to 1954 Leverkuehn was state chairman of the European Union in Hamburg . Also in 1949 he was chairman of the “Study Society for Private Law Foreign Interests” until his death.

Honors

• 1953: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

Publications

• Post on perpetual watch. From the adventurous life of Max von Scheubner-Richter. Essen publishing house, Essen, 1938 (editor Erik Reger ).
• History of the United States of America. Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg, 1947.
• Economic provisions in peace treaties. Legal and political science publishing house, Hamburg, 1948 (editor).
• German Military Intelligence. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London 1954. (German: The secret intelligence service of the German Wehrmacht in the war. Bernard & Graefe, Frankfurt am Main, 1957).

literature

• Burkhard Jähnicke: Lawyer, politician, secret service officer: Paul Leverkuehn in Turkey, 1915–16 and 1941–44. In: Journal of Intelligence History. No. 2, 2002.

Web links

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

• Literature by and about Paul Leverkuehn in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on the estate in the Federal Archives in the Central Estate Database
  • online finding aid for the estate

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Anastasia: The good, fat milk cow . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1956 ( online ). Leverkuehn & Vermehren had been entrusted with their representation before German courts by Anderson's American lawyer Edward Huntington Fallows (1865–1940); see Fallows Papers ( Memento of the original of July 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Harvard University Library 
2. ↑ Leverkuehn, Paul, Dr. In: Martin Schumacher (Ed.): MdB - The People's Representation 1946–1972. - [Laade to Lux] (=  KGParl online publications ). Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties e. V., Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-00-020703-7 , pp. 740–741 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2014070812574 ( kgparl.de [PDF; 308 kB ; accessed on June 19, 2017]).
3. ^ ^{A b} Herbert Rittlinger: Secret Service mbH. Stuttgart, 1973.
4. ↑ see Erich Vermehren
5. ^ Records of the United States Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. Volume 10 (= Green Series Volume 10). United States Government Printing Office, District of Columbia 1950, p. 9 ( ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: mazal.org )).
6. ^ Wilfried Loth: The Europe of the Associations: The European Union in the European Integration Process (1949-1969). In: Jürgen Mittag, Wolfgang Wessels (ed.): "The Cologne European" - Friedrich Carl von Oppenheim and European unification. Aschendorff Verlag Münster 2005.