Wilhelm Freiherr von Ketteler

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the German theologian and baron of the same name, see Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler (1811–1877).

Wilhelm von Ketteler (early 1934)

Wilhelm-Emanuel Wilderich Maria Hubertus Vitus Aloysius Freiherr von Ketteler (born June 15, 1906 in Eringerfeld Palace , † March 1938 in Vienna ) was a German diplomat . As a close collaborator of Hitler's Vice Chancellor and Ambassador in Vienna, Franz von Papen and young conservative opponent of National Socialism in the " Edgar-Jung-Kreis ", he planned the shooting of Hitler as early as 1938 when he marched into Vienna. He was then murdered.

Life

Youth and Studies (1906 to 1932)

Ketteler was a scion of the Westphalian noble family Ketteler . He was the third of nine children of Clemens Goswin Freiherr von Ketteler (born September 17, 1870 in Schwarzenraben ; † January 7, 1945 in Störmede) and his wife Maria Elisabeth Freiin von Fürstenberg (born September 7, 1875 in Körtlinghausen Castle ; † 21 May 1963 in Störmede) was born at Schloss Eringerfeld . His other relatives included the diplomat Klemens von Ketteler , who was murdered in Beijing in June 1900 , the Bishops Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler and Clemens August Graf von Galen, and the officer Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager .

Ketteler attended the Marianum Warburg high school . During his studies in Munich he became an active member of the Catholic student association Rheno-Bavaria in the KV .

In the Weimar Republic , Ketteler belonged to the "group" of the so-called "young conservatives". This somewhat imprecise term subsumes a diffuse number of right-wing, often unrelated, younger intellectuals who were striving for a more or less comprehensive restoration of the “old” German Reich. What the young conservatives had in common was the rejection of democracy, liberalism and parliamentarism in the Weimar form and a more “elitist” self-image. In the latter respect in particular, they sharply distinguished themselves from the “plebeian” perceived populist mass cult of the National Socialists.

Ketteler, who , according to his friend Fritz Günther von Tschirschky , had an “unusually strong interest in politics” and was a “devout Catholic without confessional narrow-mindedness”, was already on friendly terms with the Westphalian landowner von Papen family in the 1920s . During the chancellorship of Franz von Papen , the head of the family, from June to December 1932, Ketteler first came into closer contact with the political control centers in Berlin.

Worked in the Reichsvizekanzlei (1933 to 1934)

After the formation of the government of the "National Concentration" in January 1933, in which almost all right-wing political forces in Germany came together to form a coalition government with Adolf Hitler at the top as Chancellor, Ketteler was appointed to work in the von Papens office served in the new government as Deputy Chancellor of Hitler.

Together with other young conservative Papen employees such as Herbert von Bose , Edgar Jung , Friedrich-Carl von Savigny , Kurt Josten , Walter Hummelsheim and Fritz Günther von Tschirschky , Ketteler worked from this point on a reorganization of the Weimar state in line with the young conservative ideas. Ketteler survived the political cleansing action of the National Socialists at the end of June and beginning of July 1934, in the course of which Jung and Bose were murdered, which became known as the " Röhm Putsch ". Together with Josten he managed to get the premises of the Vice Chancellery after it was occupied by the To leave the SS because the SS people mistakenly thought they were visitors.

A few hours after his successful escape from the vice chancellery, Ketteler traveled to Gut Neudeck in East Prussia, the country seat of the Reich President. His intention to inform Hindenburg about the situation in Berlin and to induce him in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the Reichswehr to intervene against the murder going on in the capital, however, was dashed because he was not allowed to go near the head of state. Even the attempt to come to him with the help of Hindenburg's neighbor Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau did not lead to the hoped-for result. According to Rainer Orth, he nevertheless managed, via detours, to get the Reich President to order the shootings to be stopped, which Hitler obeyed.

Attaché to the German legation in Vienna (1934 to 1938)

Wilhelm Freiherr von Ketteler (left) on February 21, 1938, three weeks before his murder. The picture shows him together with Franz von Papen (center) and Hans Graf von Kageneck (right) at Vienna's Westbahnhof, on the way to a meeting with Hitler in Berchtesgaden.

In August 1934, Ketteler went to Vienna with von Papen, who - meanwhile resigned from the office of Vice Chancellor - had been appointed German Ambassador to Austria. From the early fall of 1934 until his murder in the spring of 1938, Ketteler worked there as one of Papen's closest employees. There is some confusion - at least terminologically - about the official rank he held there: some sources call him an "extraordinary attaché ", others the "personal secretary" or "personal assistant" of Papen. In February, Ketteler and his colleague Hans von Kageneck, on Papen's behalf, took the diplomatic files documenting his activities in Vienna to a safe place in Switzerland.

Assassination plan against Hitler

After his return to Vienna, Ketteler began preparations for an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. How far the preparations for this had progressed at the time of his death remains unclear. Apparently, however, Ketteler planned to shoot Hitler on his solemn entry into Vienna from a window of the German embassy while the dictator was driving (who on such occasions used to stand in the car, like a Roman general on a triumphal procession).

assassination

One day after the annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938, Ketteler disappeared without a trace and was initially considered missing. During the Nuremberg trials, Papen stated that he immediately notified the Vienna police and asked Reinhard Heydrich to clarify “whether Herr von Ketteler was accidentally arrested”. A note dated April 5, 1938, shows that Papen briefly briefed Hitler on the matter. He also informed Heinrich Himmler , Hermann Göring and the State Secretary for Security in Austria, Ernst Kaltenbrunner . On March 25th, Himmler issued a decree in which it said: “With immediate effect, I instruct the Chief of the Ordnungspolizei and the Chief of the Security Police to conduct a particularly careful and comprehensive manhunt for Wilhelm Emmanuel, who has been missing since Sunday, March 13th To initiate Freiherr von Ketteler. I request that the subordinate services be made particularly emphatic about the present search request ... "

On April 25, 1938, the master of the river, Karl Franz, found an unknown male corpse in the Danube near Hainburg, fifty kilometers downstream from Vienna. The corpse could be identified on the basis of a gold signet ring with the family coat of arms and “a gold ring with Caluschon-like cut blue sapphire with two brilliant-cut diamonds, engraved on the inside: 30. VI. 1934 “can be identified as the missing Ketteler within a short time. Drowning was found to be the cause of death. Since chloroform was found in the corpse of the dead man, which was so strong that it would have made an "independent" walk into the Danube impossible due to its rapid action, suicide was ruled out as the cause of death, so that one had to recognize "murder". The most likely variant is that Ketteler was first stunned and then drowned in his bathtub. The body is said to have been "dumped" in the Danube in order to disguise the murder as a suicide. Contemporary witnesses and foreign journalists immediately attributed the perpetration to unknown members of the Gestapo (or the SS or SD ). Historical research also endorsed this judgment (see below).

Papen, according to his own statement, filed a complaint against unknown persons after the discovery of Ketteler's body. He also protested against Ketteler's murder in a letter to Hitler - which went unanswered, as did the request for help in finding the murderers - and offered a reward of 20,000 Reichsmarks for catching the perpetrators. Papen saw “revenge of the Gestapo against me, my politics and my friends” as the motive for the act. A request for help to Goering, which Papen claims to have made, was answered by the latter with the promise to use Hitler to punish those responsible. However, Göring had previously informed him that the Gestapo had found evidence that Ketteler had prepared an attack on Hitler's life.

Immediately after the first autopsy on April 27, 1938, Ketteler's body was buried in the municipal cemetery of Hainburg in grave site D 17, No. 14, without notifying his relatives. A few weeks later, at the suggestion of the Gestapo, which apparently feared that the premature burial would reinforce the rumors about the death of Kettelers, the Viennese public prosecutor's office ordered the exhumation of the deceased “in order to enable an unequivocal agnosis of the body and the determination of the cause of death ". The exhumation finally took place on May 25, 1938 in the presence of Ketteler's brother Goswin Freiherr von Ketteler and the Viennese dentist Rudolf Friese. After the corpse was examined again by the coroner Werkgartner, the corpse was transferred to the family property of the von Ketteler family in Geseke , where he was buried for the second time on May 31, 1938.

It should be noted that the local newspaper "Niederösterreichischer Grenzbote" made the following statement on p. 3 in its issue of May 22, 1938:

" Finding: After extensive investigations, the Viennese police have now established that the corpse that was recently washed ashore in Hainburg from the Danube was that of Wilhelm Emanuel Freiherr von Ketteler from Vienna, who was reported missing."

The Ketteler murder case

Memorial for Wilhelm Freiherr von Kettler and Josef Wirmer at the grammar school Marianum in Warburg

There is disagreement in research about the time and the exact circumstances of Ketteler's death. The only agreement in the relevant literature is that the perpetrators are to be looked for in the ranks of the SD.

The “Handbook of the Austrian” from 1949 stated that Ketteler was apprehended while attempting to flee to Hungary by car and then murdered. Most of the other books dealing with the “Ketteler case” are content with the brief statement that Ketteler initially disappeared “without a trace” after the German invasion of Austria and that his body appeared a few weeks later. There are various types of information about the date and place of discovery, e.g. T. contradicting information.

An English-language Papen biography from 1941 (Tibor Koeves) says that Ketteler's “horribly mutilated corpse ” was washed ashore from the Danube at the end of April (sic!). This book also wants to know that Ketteler was " murdered after horrible tortures ". A precise location is not mentioned here. Another Papen biography from 1940 (Oswald Dutch) dates the discovery of Ketteler's body to May 16 and names the area near Hainburg as the place where it was recovered ( recovered from the Danube near Hainburg ). This work also notes that Ketteler was "chloroformated" (that is, was still alive) when he was thrown into the Danube.

Papen himself testified on June 18, 1946 in Nuremberg that an autopsy carried out on his behalf had provided no evidence of a violent death and thus contradicts (indirectly) the quoted statement by Koeves that Ketteler's body was "terribly mutilated". Fabian von Schlabrendorff confirms Papen's testimony in a memory book from 1951 when he writes that the corpse had "no external injuries". Like Dutch, he also names Hainburg as the location of the corpse. Confusingly, like Koeves, and unlike Dutch, he dates the time of his discovery to "end of April".

Dorothy Thompson names - as the only author - the Vienna Woods as the place where Ketteler's remains were found.

The exact time of Ketteler's murder is also controversial: Arthur Schweitzer claims that it took place on March 13th. However, it seems as if he negligently equated the day of Ketteler's disappearance after the German invasion with the day of his murder, without considering that Ketteler's murder was also significantly later, at practically any point in time between his disappearance and the discovery of his corpse.

Ketteler's cousin Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager declared in a lecture on July 14, 2004 in the Bavarian state parliament that Ketteler had been drowned by the Gestapo in his bathtub and then thrown into the Danube to simulate suicide. He referred to the fact that these circumstances soon became generally “noticeable”, as an SD man in “a drunk state had boasted to another person”: “If you are not good, you will drown in the bathtub like your friend Ketteler. ”Ketteler's friend and colleague in Tschirschky's vice chancellery confirmed in his 1972 memoirs the Gestapo's variant of“ drowning ”and claims to have learned this information after 1945 from their former colleagues Josten and Kageneck in the judicial proceedings against von Papen . Tschirschky also names a journalist and employee of the Vice Chancellery named Walter Bochow - whom he suspects of having been a Gestapo employee - as responsible for the murder of Ketteler: About Bochow, who spied on him, Ketteler and their colleagues while he was in the office That Ketteler has “on his conscience”, there is “no doubt” for him, Tschirschky.

In 1970, at the request of Wolfgang Freiherr von Fürstenberg from Detmold, a classmate and cousin of Wilhelm von Ketteler, the Ketteler case was accepted for investigation by the central office of the State Justice Administration of the federal states in Ludwigsburg and delegated to the public prosecutor in Braunschweig to conduct the investigation. In the course of this investigation, former colleagues and friends of Ketteler's as well as SD employees were interrogated and evidence was collected. After a temporary suspension in the 1980s, the proceedings were finally brought to a successful conclusion by the Braunschweig public prosecutor's office in 1994 at the suggestion of the historian Lutz Hachmeister : Based on newly discovered SD documents, the Braunschweig investigators came to the conclusion that Ketteler had arrived It is almost certain that the SD was intercepted and abducted on March 12 on the way from his secretary's apartment to the embassy and that, after brief interrogations in which he refused to make an arrangement with the SD, he was still on the 12 or 13 March 1938 was drowned in his bathtub by SD man Horst Böhme (and unidentified accomplices) and then thrown into the Danube. Böhme had received the order to murder Ketteler from SD chief Heydrich, after Bochow, who at the time was a journalist for the Daily Mail in Vienna - was working as a freelance newsman for Ketteler, had informed Heydrich about Ketteler's recent anti-regime activities. Hachmeister supplements the forensic findings with the conclusion that Ketteler probably came into the attention of the SD after his Hindenburg action in 1934. After he was already basically a persona non grata , his trip to Switzerland in February gave a fresh occasion for his murder, for which the situation of the Anschluss offered the opportunity: The SD had to fear that among those in Switzerland of Ketteler deposited Papen documents could also find a will of the late Reich President Hindenburg presumed in Papen's possession, which could have recommended a person other than Hitler as his successor for the office of Reich President. Böhme (as the executor) and Heydrich (as the client) are named as those primarily responsible for the murder.

Memberships

Ketteler was a knight of honor of the Order of Malta .

Honors

The Catholic Church accepted Wilhelm Emanuel Freiherr von Ketteler as a witness of faith in the German martyrology of the 20th century .

literature

Monographs:

• Rainer Orth : "The official seat of the opposition"? Politics and state restructuring plans in the office of the Deputy Chancellor in the years 1933–1934. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2016. ISBN 978-3-412-50555-4 (with biographical data on Ketteler on pp. 180–191 and 584–599).

Biographical sketches:

• Wolfgang Freiherr von Fürstenberg: Wilhelm Emanuel Freiherr v. Ketteler to memory . In: Deutsches Adelsblatt , 12th vol. (1973), Issue 8, pp. 172-175, Issue 9, pp. 195-199.
• ders .: Wilhelm Emanuel Freiherrn von Ketteler in memory . In: Gymnasium Marianum: Festschrift for the jubilee of the Gymnasium Marianum in Warburg. Warburg 1949, pp. 37-39.
• Gerhard Schilling : Wilhelm von Ketteler . In: ibid .: They followed the dictates of conscience. Memorandum about members of the association Rheno-Bavaria in Munich, which belongs to the Cartel Association of Catholic German Student Associations (KV), who became martyrs against the unjust National Socialist state. Düsseldorf 1989, pp. 17-35.
• Wilhelm Schmidt : Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler. In: ders .: Present and Future of the Occident (= Races and Peoples in Prehistory and History of the Occident, Vol. 3). Lucerne 1949, p. 128 f.

Biographical entries in reference works:

• Michael F. Feldkamp : Ketteler, Friedrich-Emanuel Frhr. v. In: Siegfried Koß, Wolfgang Löhr (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon des KV. 3rd part (= Revocatio historiae. Volume 4). SH-Verlag, Schernfeld 1994, ISBN 3-89498-014-1 , p. 64 f.
• Peter Möhring : Art .: Wilhelm Emanuel Freiherr von Ketteler. in: Helmut Moll (ed. on behalf of the German Bishops' Conference): Witnesses for Christ. The German martyrology of the 20th century. Paderborn et al. 1999, 7th revised and updated edition 2019, ISBN 978-3-506-78012-6 , 593-596.

Sketches especially for the murder of Ketteler:

• Lutz Hachmeister : The dead man in the Danube. In: ders .: The enemy researcher. The career of SS leader Franz Alfred Six. Munich 1998, pp. 10-19.
• Douglas Reed : End of a Baron. In: ders .: Disgrace Abounding. London 1939, pp. 71-78.

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm von Ketteler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ When Franz von Papen was questioned on June 19, 1946 in Nuremberg by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the latter confirmed that Ketteler belonged to the family of the envoy to China (MF: "That is the family the gentleman belonged to, is it not?" ; P: "Yes"), mistakenly said - or out of inattention, Klemens von Ketteler was Wilhelm's father, [1] .
2. ^ Fritz Günther von Tschirschky: Memories of a High Traitor , p. 247.
3. ^ Rainer Orth: "The official seat of the opposition"? Politics and state restructuring plans in the office of the Deputy Chancellor in the years 1933–1934. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2016; Lecture by Daniel Koerfer: Vice Chancellery Group against Hitler. In: FAZ , April 10, 2017, accessed on April 14, 2017.
4. ↑ State Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Forests: Bavarian Agricultural Yearbook, 1955, p. 69.
5. ↑ Peter Hoffmann : The History of the German Resistance 1933–1945 , 1996, p. 29.
6. ↑ Detlef Schwerin: Then it's the best minds you think , 1991, p. 145.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Ernst Joseph Görlich: Handbuch des Österreichers , 1949, p. 329.
8. ↑ Meeting of June 18, 1946.
9. ^ The opponent researcher , 1998, p. 10f.
10. ↑ ^{a b c} Statement in Nuremberg on June 18, 1946.
11. ^ Eugene Davidson: The Trial of the Germans, 1997, p. 214.
12. ^ Austrian National Library: ANNO, Niederösterreichischer Grenzbote, 1938-05-22, page 3 .
13. ↑ Tibor Koeves : Satan in Top Hat. The Biography of Franz Von Papen , 1941, p. 288.
14. ^ Oswald Dutch : The Errant Diplomat , 1940, p. 251.Dutch also mentions the same place and date of discovery in his book Thus Died Austria , 1938, p. 157.
15. ^ Fabian von Schlabrendorff: Officers against Hitler , 1951, p. 45.
16. ^ Dorothy Thompson : Let the Record Speak , 1939, p. 174.
17. ^ Arthur Schweizer: Big Business in the Third Reich , 1964, p. 615.
18. ↑ http://www.bayern.landtag.de/8145_8175.html
19. ^ Fritz Günther von Tschirschky: Memories of a high treason , 1972, p. 241.
20. ↑ Lutz Hachmeister: The enemy researcher. The career of SS leader Franz Alfred Six , Munich 1998, pp. 10–20.
21. ↑ Errant Diplomat, p. 251.