Rudolf Rahn

Rudolf Rahn (photo by the Federal Foreign Office, no year)

Rudolf Rahn (born 16th March 1900 in Ulm , died 7. January 1975 in Dusseldorf ) was a German diplomat in the Nazi era .

Life

The son of a notary studied political science and sociology in Tübingen , Berlin and Heidelberg , where he qualified as a sociologist in 1923. phil. received his doctorate . He joined the Foreign Office in Berlin in 1928 . From 1931 he worked at the German Embassy in Ankara as an embassy secretary. He made a great career under National Socialism after becoming a member of the NSDAP on June 1, 1933 . Rahn became legation secretary in 1934 and went to Lisbon in 1938 as a delegation counselor . In 1940 he became a lecturer in the Legation Council in Paris and in 1941 was on special assignments in Syria and Iraq. From 1942 to 1943 he was a representative of the AA at the command of the German troops . On June 22, 1943, after his return from Tunis , Hitler awarded him the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross and the Iron Cross First Class . From August 1943 he was envoy in Rome. On September 24, 1943, he had a serious car accident on Lake Garda. and from November 1943 until the end of the war Ambassador to the Republic of Salò ( Repubblica Sociale Italiana ).

From 1945 to 1947 he was imprisoned in Hohenasperg and Nuremberg . From 1950 he was managing director of the Coca-Cola branch in Düsseldorf and a member of the executive committee of the Indo- German Society, the German-Tunisian Society and the Rhine-Ruhr Club.

From 1959 to 1974 he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation .

Paris

see also Vichy regime

From August 17, 1940, Rahn was initially head of propaganda, press and radio work in the office of the representative of the AA at the French military commander and then moved to the German embassy in Paris in the same position until November 12, 1940. The ambassador was Otto Abetz . His colleagues included Ernst Achenbach (head of the political department), SS-Brigadführer Werner Gerlach (head of the cultural department), Karl Epting (cultural affairs), the lawyer Friedrich Grimm and counselor Friedrich Sieburg (former correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung ), who already had Experience in pre-war France.

" Judenreferent " was Carltheo Zeitschel , SS-Sturmbannführer and Legation Councilor, one of the engines of the " Final Solution in France", that is, the removal and murder of the Jews. Rahn was also concerned with "Jewish issues" in the German embassy, ​​for example with the demand that 50,000 French Jews should be transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp . Rahn himself presented the request to Prime Minister Laval in June 1942 . This incident was cited in the Nuremberg trial against Ribbentrop and later led to the conviction of Ernst von Weizsäcker , first state secretary of the Foreign Office, as a war criminal.

Ambassador Abetz was also convicted and imprisoned in France for nine years. Grimm was imprisoned for sixteen months in the witness prison at the Nuremberg trials. Rahn was also imprisoned there. Gerlach was interned for three years. The others remained unpunished. Epting even became headmaster in Baden-Württemberg.

“ Augusta (that's Elisabeth Plessen ) meets a retired German teacher at Strasbourg Cathedral : 'I was a courier driver, he said, to Legation Councilor Rahn, who then became ambassador to Italy. An enormous head. And on time ... There were also good times in Paris, but you can't say a good word about that today. ' ... Augusta knew the name Rahn. Some time ago she had read two long tome about Hitler's policy on France and Italy. Rahn had always worked for the regime, even at his own risk. "

- Elisabeth Plessen, 1976.

Syria and Tunis

Rahn had a special order in Syria from May 6, 1941 to September 21, 1941 . and in Iraq . The intention of harnessing the Iraqi national leadership around Prime Minister Raschid Ali al-Gailani, which came to power in April through a military coup, for the German war aims was granted only a very brief success.

In Syria, Rahn attempted to act on the basis of the “Paris Protocols” and, via Ribbentrop, promised further consideration for the military involvement of the French troops stationed in Syria and Lebanon. He got into the role of a military organizer, had the General Henri Dentz , the commander of the Vichy forces in Syria, within three days, two trains with 50 wagons with weapons for Iraqi troops loaded and accompanied the weapons transport on the Baghdad Railway by neutral Turkey to Mosul. He had the injured Fausi al-Kawukdschi taken to a hospital in Germany and equipped his leaderless gang with weapons for the fight against the English. In between he flew to Ankara and met a visibly disinterested ambassador Franz von Papen , who played tennis and who was supposed to accelerate the transit of jet fuel from Romania through Turkey.

The emissary Fritz Grobba (he landed with Rahn on May 12, 1941 in Baghdad) and the German combat units arrived too late in Iraq. After the defeat of Iraq, the British also invaded Syria and Lebanon and defeated the Vichy troops in “Operation Exporter” . Rahn escaped to Turkey.

Rahn was from November 15, 1942 to May 10, 1943 representative of the AA in the German Africa Corps . From November 24, 1942, a task force under the direction of Walter Rauff was deployed in Tunisia . On December 6th, in a meeting with General Walther Nehring and Rahn , Rauff agreed on the use of Jewish forced laborers and set up a system of labor camps organized by Theo Saevecke . Over 2500 Tunisian Jews died in six months, and the Wehrmacht also participated in executions. However, due to the different interests of Vichy France, Italy and the leadership of the Africa Corps, which capitulated on May 13, 1943 , there were no further planned mass murders .

Rahn reported to Berlin about the forced labor of the Jews during the expansion of the main battle line. Jews with Italian citizenship should be exempt from this. Rahn reported on a compulsory levy of 50 million francs on the Jewish population for the damage caused by an Allied air attack. Rahn only recommended a “cautious anti-Jewish tendency” for propaganda in order to avoid disturbances of the internal order (e.g. conflicts between the Arab and Jewish population).

Rahn wrote in his autobiography that he had saved the Tunisian Jews.

Rome / Salò - Plenipotentiary

After the Allies landed in Sicily, Mussolini was deposed by the Grand Fascist Council on July 25, 1943 by a simple majority vote. Mussolini was arrested and interned in different places. In the meantime, Marshal Pietro Badoglio was negotiating with the Americans and concluded the Cassibile armistice with them , which was not made public until September 8, 1943. German troops then occupied Italy (“ Axis Case ”), liberated Mussolini and, under his leadership, installed the puppet regime of the radical fascist Italian Social Republic ( Repubblica Sociale Italiana ). General Plenipotenziario (Italian: Plenipotenziario) of the German Empire was Rahn.

Rahn was ordered to the Wolfsschanze headquarters on July 26, 1943 . There he was informed of his transfer to Rome. Hitler told him that the German political and military representatives there had a completely wrong view of the situation. Badoglio and the king undoubtedly tried to find a separate peace. He will prevent that, if necessary by force. In addition, he ordered that Mussolini be freed by a coup. Ambassador Mackensen was recalled on August 2, 1943 after a conversation with Hitler. On August 30, 1943, Rahn became the acting ambassador in Rome in order, according to Goebbels, to lead the falling Italians on the short reins. “Rahn is our representative in Rome”, Goebbels on September 18, 1943.

The deportation of the Jews from Rome

“The deportation of Italian and especially Roman Jews began in October 1943. That the people at the embassy knew that the Jews were to be exterminated is shown by the dispute over a telegram from the 30-year-old diplomat Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen in September 1943. He temporarily headed the remaining staff of the German embassy, ​​while the new chargé d'affaires Rahn was in Fasano on Lake Garda after an accident. He wrote directly to Ribbentrop that the German police chief Kappler had received the order to deport the Roman Jews to the East, "where they should be liquidated". The German city commander Reiner Stahel could only agree to this if he received instructions directly from the Foreign Office. He himself campaigned for the Jews to be drafted for labor in Italy. Ribbentrop was terribly upset that telegrams were openly talking about the extermination of the Jews. "

Rahn and Weizsäcker had also found out about this. Ernst von Weizsäcker and his son Richard von Weizsäcker , who acted as auxiliary defender, claimed in Nuremberg that they did not understand the veiled terminology Final Solution to the Jewish Question . Richard von Weizsäcker visited Rome in mid-May 1944.

Rome as an open city and the planned kidnapping of the Pope

On June 4, 1944, Rome was occupied by the Allies. Before that, there was a plan to kidnap the Pope. Field Marshal Kesselring , SS Police Leader Karl Wolff , Ernst von Weizsäcker, who had been ambassador to the Vatican since June 24, 1943, and Rahn, too, tended to thwart the project.

The cities of Florence and Genoa

In 1944, consul Gerhard Wolf, together with Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich , the head of the Art History Institute, thwarted the planned removal of numerous Florentine art treasures to Germany and "saved human lives with the help of Rahn".

In February 1945 Hasso von Etzdorf was appointed Consul General of Genoa and was able to help protect the city's port facilities and industrial plants from the destruction ordered by Hitler. Rahn supported him here.

Reprisals against the Italian population

Rahn tried to set up the office of the Reich Plenipotentiary at the Social Fascist Government as the highest political authority in northern Italy. When mass strikes broke out in December 1943, Rahn obtained a license from Ribbentrop on December 16, 1943 to suppress the strikes: “I agree that you may place the striking workers under martial law, possibly arrest a few thousand here and there as an example and as Get military internees to Germany. The Führer continues to authorize you to arrest outspoken ringleaders and to have them shot unceremoniously as communists. ”SS General Paul Zimmermann , who later became a member of the Naumann group, was also involved in fighting the strike .

End of the war and imprisonment in Nuremberg

Rahn was imprisoned from 1945 to 1947, wrote his memoirs there and prepared the publication of a selection of documents on Talleyrand that were first translated into German , supplemented by an essay that he had given as a lecture in Berlin in 1929. In preparation for the Wilhelmstrasse trial , he was one of the German diplomats who were to be charged. A report was made on October 31, 1945 and he was interrogated eight times between May 27 and December 4, 1947. On June 7, 1949, he was denazified by the court in Essen as “exonerated” (Group V) , especially since he was able to assert that “through diplomatic measures, about 1,800 supporters of De Gaulle who were captured by the Gestapo in North Africa were in front of the threatened ones Execution has saved ”.

Rahn in the FDP in the second row

At the beginning of 1956, the CDU and FDP held "their" old Nazis in front of each other during internal political differences of opinion. Dönhoff reported on it in March 1956 in the ZEIT and mentioned a. a. Rahn.

In Rahn's endeavors to regain a foothold in politics or the diplomatic service, his colleague from the Paris embassy, ​​Ernst Achenbach, who despite his past almost managed to become EEC commissioner in 1970 , could not help him thoroughly. In addition to his Parisian embassy colleague Friedrich Grimm , Achenbach was also a defender in the trial against the Naumann Circle , a group of Nazi greats who wanted to infiltrate the FDP in 1953. Rahn's name does not appear in this circle. Achenbach's blockades in the German prosecution of war crimes in France could no longer slow everything down, and in 1979 three actors in the persecution of Jews in France, namely Kurt Lischka , Ernst Heinrichsohn and Herbert M. Hagen , were brought to justice. The desk criminals and the bureaucrats, the Paris embassy staff and the Berlin AA bureaucracy were largely spared or lived in an aura of secret resistance that had sought to “prevent the worst”. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 1960s, the Cologne public prosecutor's office had investigated him without a charge being brought.

"Talleyrand"

Rahn's complicity in the war in France, Iraq, Tunisia and Italy and his knowledge of the Holocaust are only poorly understood. In 1943 he claimed in the Nazi propaganda in Tunis: The Jews were sent to forced labor. Their property is being distributed to poor Muslims who have been harmed by the bombing. In the study The Office and the Past of the Independent Commission of Historians - Foreign Office from 2010, Rahn's role in Italy was mentioned, but his role in the Middle East and Tunisia was not mentioned, nor was that of Grobba. Schröder's study from 1975 does not appear in the bibliography in 2010.

A Talleyrand who served many regimes as a diplomat during the French Revolution , the Napoleonic Wars and at the Congress of Vienna and finally under Louis Philippe as French ambassador to Great Britain , Rahn may have envisaged this career at the age of 50 in 1949 - but the Foreign Minister and Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer did not want him and his personnel officers Herbert Blankenhorn and Hans Globke had a rich selection of other Nazi diplomats and bureaucrats. And on the right edge of the FDP, the positions around Achenbach , Best and Grimm were already densely occupied.

Fonts

• The Reich in the constitutional idea of ​​1848 and 1919 . Dissertation Heidelberg 1924.
• Restless Life: Records and Memories . Diederichs Verlag , Düsseldorf 1949.
• Talleyrand. Portrait and documents . H. Laupp'sche Buchhandlung, Tübingen 1949.
• Ambasciatore di Hitler a Vichy ea Saló. [Hitler's ambassador in Vichy and Salo]. Garzanti, Milano 1950.
• Anchor in the Bosporus and later poems . Düsseldorf 1973.

literature

• Eckart Conze , Norbert Frei , Peter Hayes , Moshe Zimmermann : The Office and the Past . German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic. Karl Blessing, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2 .
• Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 3: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: L – R. Schöningh, Paderborn u. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-71842-6 , pp. 557-559.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945? S. Fischer, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
• Lutz Klinkhammer : Between Alliance and Occupation: National Socialist Germany and the Republic of Salò 1943–1945 . Niemeyer, Tübingen 1993.
• Jobst etiquette: Hitler's image of Italy: origins and confrontation with reality . Kovač, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8300-6170-0 .
• Frank Raberg : Biographical Lexicon for Ulm and Neu-Ulm 1802-2009 . Süddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft im Jan Thorbecke Verlag, Ostfildern 2010, ISBN 978-3-7995-8040-3 , p. 324 f .
• Francis R. Nicosia : Nazi Germany and the Arab world . Cambridge University Press, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-107-06712-7 , pp. 173-179; Pp. 230-240.
• Wolfgang Proske : Dr. Rudolf Rahn: “The written as a tactical vibration of a political will.” In: Wolfgang Proske (Ed.): Täter Helfer Free Rider. Nazi-polluted from Baden-Württemberg , Volume 9: Nazi-polluted from the south of today's Baden-Württemberg . Kugelberg Verlag, Gerstetten 2018, pp. 319–337, ISBN 978-3-945893-10-4 .
• Bernd Philipp Schröder: Germany and the Middle East in the Second World War. Series: Studies and documents on the history of WWII. # 16. Ed. Working Group for Defense Research . Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1975, ISBN 3-7881-1416-9 .
• Martin Seckendorf: The occupation policy of German fascism in Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Italy and Hungary: (1941-1945) . Hüthig, Berlin / Heidelberg 1992, ISBN 3-8226-1892-6 (Federal Archives, Europe under the swastika ; Vol. 6).

Web links

• Literature by and about Rudolf Rahn in the catalog of the German National Library
• Photo in the Italian Wikipedia: Rahn with Ferdinando Mezzasomma and Alfredo Cucco (1944) (not public domain)

Footnotes

1. ↑ Herrmann Weiß (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich. Revised new edition. Fischer TB, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-596-13086-7 , p. 364.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Frankfurter Zeitung , June 23, 1943.
3. ^ Klaus Kühlwein (2013): Pius XII. and the raid on Jews in Rome , pp. 63 ff. ( online ).
4. ^ Rudolf Vierhaus: German Biographical Encyclopedia (dbe). Munich, vol. 8, p. 124 f.
5. ↑ Handelsblatt , March 16, 1970, ZBW  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  
6. ^ Protocol of the Eichmann trial .
7. ^ Robert MW Kempner : The Third Reich in cross-examination. From the unpublished interrogation protocols of Prosecutor Robert MW Kempner . Munich / Esslingen 1969. DNB , p. 234.
8. ^ Elisabeth Plessen: Communication to the nobility . Novel. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag , Munich 1979, p. 83.
9. ↑ Syria was a French League of Nations mandate , the mandate administration was initially loyal to the Vichy regime. June 8, 1941: British troops and free French invade .
10. ↑ of May 28, 1941: After 7 days of negotiations, the German Walter Warlimont and the Vichy-French Minister of War Charles Léon Clément Huntziger signed a protocol that promised concrete French support for the German war.
11. ^ Rudolf Rahn: Restless Life, Notes and Memories . Düsseldorf 1949, p. 245 ff .; the meeting with Papen on p. 250.
12. ↑ Rolf Steininger (2015): Germany and the Middle East: From Kaiser Wilhelms Orientreise 1898 to the present ( ISBN 978-3-7065-4273-9 ), p. 77 ff. ( Online ).
13. ↑ Klaus-Michael Mallmann , Martin Cüppers : Half moon and swastika. The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine . Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 978-3-534-19729-3 .
14. ↑ Hans-Martin Stimpel: The German parachute troops 1942-1945, deployments in theaters of war in the south . Mittler, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-8132-0851-6 . The publisher has a corresponding tendency.
15. ↑ Plenipotenziario in the Italian language Wikipedia
16. ↑ Jobst Knigge : The Dilemma of a Diplomat, Otto II. Von Bismarck in Rome 1940–1943 . P. 57.
17. ^ Rudolf Rahn: Restless Life, Notes and Memories . Düsseldorf 1949, p. 223 f.
18. ↑ Elke Fröhlich (ed.): The diaries of Joseph Goebbels . KG Saur, Munich, Part II: Dictations 1941–1945. 15 vols. 1993-1996, ISBN 3-598-21920-2 . Volume 9, p. 445, September 8, 1943.
19. ↑ ibid., P. 529, September 18, 1943.
20. ↑ Knigge, p. 64; Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen: The broken axle . Alpha, Alfeld 1949, p. 112 f., DNB ( La Carta perdente. Memorie diplomatiche 1943–1945 . Sestante, Roma 1948). Walter Bussmann u. a. (Ed.): Files on German Foreign Policy , Series E: 1941–1945, Vol. VII.
21. ↑ see: Pius XII. # On the deportation of Roman Jews 1943 .
22. ^ All those involved except Rahn were later convicted as war criminals. SS General Karl Wolff was the highest SS and police leader in Italy from July 1943. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1964 for aiding and abetting the murder of 300,000 Jews.
23. ↑ David Tutaev: The Consul of Florence. Saving a city . Düsseldorf 1967.
24. ↑ Gerhard Wolf in the Italian-language Wikipedia: “Dal 1940 al 1944 fu console tedesco a Firenze e nei mesi dell'occupazione tedesca dall '8 September 1943 all'agosto 1944 riuscì anche grazie all'appoggio di Rudolf Rahn… a salvare svariate vite umane. "
25. ↑ Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Biographical Lexicon for the Third Reich . Frankfurt am Main 1998.
26. ↑ Source: Bundesarchiv Berlin, Film 13938, recording no. 71266. In: Martin Seckendorf: A new document on the German occupation policy in Italy , 2005. In: Communications from the Berlin Society for Research on Fascism and World War II www.2i.westhost.com/bg/
27. ^ Seckendorf, ibid.
28. ^ Rudolf Rahn: Talleyrand . Afterword p. 268.
29. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Munich 2010, p. 389.
30. ↑ Records of the United States Nuernberg War Crimes trials Interrogations, 1946-1949 , at archives.gov. Date Published: 1977 (PDF; 186 kB)
31. ^ Die Welt , June 9, 1949, ZBW .
32. ↑ Marion Dönhoff : You are mine. Nazi show with magnifying glass and sunglasses . In: Die Zeit , No. 9/1956.
33. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Munich 2010, p. 666.
34. ↑ in detail Schröder, p. 98 ff.
35. ^ AA Bonn, Pol. II, guidelines, Rahn, p. 2. Quoted from Alexandre Kum'a N'Dumbe: Hitler voulait l'Afrique , Paris 1980, p. 67; German IKO, Frankfurt 1993.
36. ↑ Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, Moshe Zimmermann: The office and the past. German diplomats in the Third Reich and in the Federal Republic . Munich 2010, p. 269 ff.
37. ^ Hans-Jürgen Döscher: rope teams. The Foreign Office's suppressed past . Propylaea, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-549-07267-8 .
38. ↑ Translations by sympathetic publishers into Spanish, Italian (see both DNB) and French 1980 ISBN 236006066X .
39. ↑ Rahn passim, 30 mentions, about his actions in Syria together with Hellmuth Felmy ; additional mentions by Rahn in the document appendix p. 270ff., these are not entered in the register.