Vicco von Bülow-Schwante

Vicco Karl Alexander von Bülow-Schwante (born May 10, 1891 in Berlin , † March 14, 1970 in Düsseldorf ) was a German diplomat .

Life

He came from the Mecklenburg primeval noble family von Bülow and was a son of the Prussian field marshal Karl von Bülow . His uncle was Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow , State Secretary in the Foreign Office from 1930 to 1936.

After graduating from high school, Bülow joined the 2nd Guards Regiment on foot in the Prussian Army on September 16, 1910 as a flag junior . There he was promoted to lieutenant on January 27, 1912 with a patent from January 30, 1910 . During the First World War he was assigned to the high command of the Army Group " von Below ". After the war, Bülow was retired as Rittmeister .

He was a Stahlhelmgau leader from Havelland . In 1924 Bülow bought Schwante Castle from the financier Ledwin , who had previously bought it from Richard Sommer's heirs in 1919 and was therefore called by Bülow-Schwante.

Bülow-Schwante had been a member of the right-wing conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) since 1928 , later the NSDAP and during the Nazi era he was a lecturer to the Foreign Minister. Within the Sturmabteilung Bülow-Schwante was a standard leader z. V. at the Supreme SA Leadership (OSAF).

He was also a brigade leader in the NSKK .

Special section Germany

With the protection of the chairman of the steel helmet and the new labor minister Franz Seldte and against the protest of his uncle, the state secretary Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow, who feared a "politicization of the foreign service", he was taken over to the higher service of the foreign office without any prior training. In 1933, the Foreign Office under the direction of Bülow-Schwante the Special Unit Germany founded. From March 20, 1933, the tasks of this department included, among others, the Jewish-political affairs previously dealt with by Department III , which were designated as the Jewish question in the Foreign Office after the transfer of power to the National Socialists . First of all, he implemented the directive of State Secretary von Bülow of March 13, 1933, to collect material on the allegedly disproportionate "advance of Jews in public life in Germany". Under Bülow-Schwante's aegis, a circular drafted by Emil Schumburg on the development of the Jewish question in Germany and its repercussions abroad was given to the diplomatic and professional consular representations.

In addition to the APA , the NSDAP / AO and the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda , the special section Germany promoted the spread of the ideology of the NSDAP abroad.

The Special Section Germany invited the leaders of the Spanish Falangists to the German Reich in 1934.

When trying to drive Jews out of the German Reich, at the end of February 1934, Bülow-Schwante saw similarities with the Zionists , who called for people to emigrate to Palestine .

In 1935 he was head of the protocol under Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath . That year he also had to limit the damage after Hitler's definition of Aryans and Semites and the Nuremberg Race Laws became known in Arab countries. A boy with an Egyptian father was therefore even thrown out of the Hitler Youth. Bülow wrote around that the laws do not apply to Egyptians, Iraqis, Iranians, Turks, etc., but especially the governments of Egypt and Iran (which claimed to be the home of the "Aryans") were hard to convince. The laws apply “only against Jews”. He had to admit that further discussions are necessary among the Germans. The Egyptians threatened to boycott the 1936 Olympics. One then helped oneself with the invention of the "related blood" of these people. On July 1, 1936, 20 high-ranking AA officials gathered around Bülow and Wilhelm Stuckart for a conference on this subject. In 1937 Bülow-S. Wrote that world Jewry wants to conquer Palestine, but the Arabs have recognized the danger. Mussolini is also against Jewish immigration. That is why the Germans will now have to change their minds, be against immigration and divide the Jews. The Jewish question is also not resolved if there are no more German Jews; Bülow thus refers to an alleged world power of "international Jewry"; as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion claim. Under no circumstances should the Jews receive a power base in the east that corresponds to that of the Vatican for the Catholics.

State Secretary Bernhard Wilhelm von Bülow died in June 1936. In the business distribution plan of the Foreign Office from 1936 and March 10, 1938, Bülow-Schwante was head of the protocol departments (diplomatic corps in Berlin, the foreign consuls in the German Reich, introduction to the Führer and Reich Chancellor, ceremonial, religious matters) and internal German affairs

In 1937, for reasons of foreign policy, Bülow-Schwante argued in favor of barracking the descendants of occupation soldiers of the Ruhr instead of sterilizing them.

In July 1938, Alexander Freiherr von Dörnberg was appointed as the successor to Vicco von Bülow-Schwante as head of the protocol department of the Foreign Office.

From October 14, 1938 to 1940, Bülow-Schwante was the German ambassador in Brussels. In preparation for the attack on Poland , Joachim von Ribbentrop called a conference of the ambassadors of the German Reich in Europe in Berlin. Ribbentrop asked Bülow-Schwante whether Belgium would remain neutral in a war between Germany and Poland. Bülow declared that Belgium would seek military security in France and England after the experience of the First World War, both of which would unquestionably intervene against the German Reich. Ribbentrop announced that England and France were not thinking of war at all. Bülow replied that if so, then he did not understand Ribbentrop's question, because it would be an absurd thought that Belgium should go into the field alone and alone against Germany.

In 1940 Bülow-Schwante sent the military attachés of the embassy in Brussels, Ralph Wenninger and Friedrich-Carl Rabe von Pappenheim, to the prisoner Helmut Reinberger, who on January 10, 1940 with plans for the western campaign at Maasmechelen near Mechelen in Belgium with a Messerschmitt Bf 108 had made an emergency landing.

During a hearing at a Nuremberg trial in 1946, Hans Bernd Gisevius reported that he reported to Bülow-Schwante about crimes of the Gestapo, of which he was informed via Arthur Nebe from the Gestapo department head's lunch table so that Neurath could have presented them.

In 1951 he was chairman of the supervisory board of Dr.-Hiller-AG as well as on the advisory board of the then limited partnership Henkell & Co.

In 1953 Bülow-Schwante sat on the supervisory board of the Stahlindustrie und Maschinenbau AG , Düsseldorf.

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 .
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007. ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Vicco von Bülow , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 18/1970 from April 20, 1970, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

• Newspaper article about Vicco von Bülow-Schwante in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

References and comments

1. ↑ ^{a b} Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 82.
2. ↑ General German Biography & New German Biography , Volume 2, Berlin, 1955, p. 736.
3. ↑ 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 . Munich 2010, p. 42f.
4. ^ Freiherr von Bock: list of the officers' corps of the 2nd Guards Regiment on foot June 19, 1813– May 15, 1913. Publisher R. Eisenschmidt. Berlin 1913. p. 280.
5. ↑ 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. Munich 2010, p. 42.
6. ↑ Robert E. Lester, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Office Files, 1933–1945 Part 5: The John Franklin Carter Files, on German Nazi Party Members (PDF; 279 kB)
7. ↑ 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. 43 f.
8. ↑ 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. 46.
9. ↑ Magnus Brechtken , Madagascar for the Jews: Anti-Semitic Idea and Political Practice 1885–1945 . P. 173.
10. ^ Robert H. Whealey, Hitler and Spain: The Nazi Role in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 . P. 31.
11. ^ Arnd Krüger : The Olympic Games of 1936 and the world opinion. Bartels & Wernitz, Berlin 1973, ISBN 3-87039-925-2 .
12. ↑ Jeffrey Herf : Nazi Propaganda for the Arab world . Yale UP, New Haven 2009, pp. 19f, 28f. and throughout the book, s. Reg.
13. ↑ Business allocation plan Foreign Office 1936 (PDF) 1938 (PDF)
14. ↑ Alexandra Przyrembel : Rassenschande - Purity Myth and Extermination Legitimation in National Socialism . 2003, 567 pp., P. 61 FN.154
15. ↑ Hammer, sickle and swastika . In: Die Zeit , No. 40/1949
16. ↑ Nuremberg Trial, main negotiation on zeno.org
17. ↑ The quality of the sparkling wine . In: Der Spiegel . No. 48 , 1951 ( online ). Bülow-S. here later follows in the footsteps of Ribbentrop, who also grew up as a champagne representative.
18. ↑ From the ventures . In: Die Zeit , No. 53/1953

predecessor	Office	successor
Herbert von Richthofen	German ambassador to Belgium 1938–1940	Werner von Bargen