Company Seven

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Company Seven , also Operation U-7 , was the cover name of a rescue operation for those threatened by the Holocaust from the Foreign Office / Defense in the High Command of the Wehrmacht . The action became known to a broader public only after Winfried Meyer's analysis in 1993.

In the autumn of 1941, the deportation of Jewish citizens began throughout Germany . The lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi and the officer Hans Oster , one of the most active resistance fighters, then organized the action with the code name "Company Seven". They received backing from the head of the office, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris . Disguised as Abwehr agents, seven Jews were initially supposed to leave Berlin for Switzerland. Von Dohnanyi suggested that those smuggled out must transfer their assets to the office, since it would have fallen to the office anyway and would get the corresponding amount back as foreign currency in Switzerland . Canaris then ordered this. During a secret visit to Switzerland, Dohnanyi made the arrangements for taking in the refugees.

In 1942, 14 people were able to flee to Switzerland as disguised agents of the Foreign Office / Defense as part of "Company Seven". The Protestant social worker Charlotte Friedenthal (1892–1973), an employee of the Confessing Church , fled as the “vanguard” on September 4, 1942 and was in contact with Dietrich Bonhoeffer . 12 other people fled Berlin on September 29, 1942 and crossed the Swiss border on September 30, 1942:

  • Julius Fliess , Jewish lawyer, his Jewish wife Hildegard and his daughter Dorothee
  • Fritz Werner Arnold (1894–1980), baptized Jewish lawyer and the person who kept von Dohnanyi and the other “agents” of the company in contact during the preparation, his Aryan wife Ursula and his children Christof-Dieter and Friederike Christiane
  • Ilse Rennefeld , a Jewish doctor, and her blind, Aryan husband, Otto Rennefeld
  • Annemarie Conzen, widowed, Jewish neighbor of Admiral Canaris, and her half-Jewish daughters Gabriele and Irmgard

A straggler was Irmingard Arnold, a daughter of Fritz Werner Arnold, who only fled to Switzerland on December 15, 1942. The company succeeded thanks to the good preparation of all those involved and the reinsurance obtained.

Hans von Dohnanyi was arrested on flimsy grounds in 1943 and then held in Sachsenhausen concentration camp without charge . In the course of the investigation into the Hitler assassination attempt in July 1944 , von Dohnanyi, Oster and Canaris were heavily incriminated. During the investigations by the Secret State Police , the diary kept by Wilhelm Canaris was found, further records were found and thus the contact with the resistance against National Socialism became known. All three were later executed.

Web links

literature

  • Ursula Adam: Lexicon of Resistance, 1933-1945 . Peter Steinbach & Johannes Tuchel, January 1, 1998, p. 208 ( google.de ).
  • Winfried Meyer: Company Seven: a rescue operation for those threatened by the Holocaust from the Foreign Office / Defense in the High Command of the Wehrmacht. Frankfurt am Main: Hain, 1993.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ #Meyer 1993 .