Wilhelm Melchers

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Wilhelm Melchers (born January 20, 1900 in Bremen , † November 18, 1971 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German diplomat .

Life

The son of a Bremen grain wholesaler attended the humanistic old grammar school . After graduating from high school, he studied law at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg . In 1919 he became a member of the Corps Suevia Freiburg . With his doctoral thesis on pledging ships under construction , he was awarded a Dr. iur. PhD . In 1925 he joined the consular service of the Foreign Office as an attaché and passed the consular examination in 1927 with the result “sufficient”. At his request of May 6, 1939, on the day the attack on Poland began , September 1, 1939, he became a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party .

time of the nationalsocialism

During the time of National Socialism , Melcher made a career as a leading expert for the Foreign Office for the Middle East . It began in 1937 when he was posted to the German consulate in Haifa and continued shortly after the outbreak of war with the assumption of the Orient department in the Political Department of the Foreign Office. In 1943 he was promoted to lecturing councilor . According to the research results of the Independent Commission of Historians around Eckart Conze , as head of the Orient Department, he was "one of the main people responsible for anti-Jewish propaganda in the Arab world". In 1952 he therefore had to briefly investigate his very close relationship with Mohammed Amin al-Husseini , the Mufti, so that the Bonn-Cairo line, which was directed against Israel, could be kept under better control by the federal government for overriding reasons. Werner Otto von Hentig , based in Djakarta , took on this task in Arabia. In particular, he fought against the Luxembourg Agreement on “reparation” together with the Mufti , even after the signing by passing on internal information to the anti-Semites in Egypt. He met the mufti repeatedly. Melchers, as the superior of Hentigs, weighed possible disciplinary measures against him.

In contrast to the representation of the Independent Commission of Historians , the American historian Christopher R. Browning sees Melcher's resistance to the German Foreign Office's Jewish policy. In February 1943, Melchers managed to save over 2,400 Turkish Jews who were on the territory of the German Reich from deportation . He argued that their deportation would "be cannibalized by the enemy's propaganda and spark a storm of indignation in the Turkish press". Finally, in September 1943, against efforts by the Reich Security Main Office and the Jewish Officer in the Foreign Office, Eberhard von Thadden, he was able to have the Jews repatriated to Turkey after the government there, which had shown its disinterest for six months, was finally ready to return to allow all Turkish Jews. Melchers had previously "saved Palestinian Jews who were in German hands by painting on the wall the specter of retaliation against German settlers in Palestine".

Myth formation on July 20, 1944 and denazification

After the Americans removed him from the public service after 1945, Melchers came to work for the Evangelical Relief Organization in his hometown of Bremen in September 1946 . As early as February 28, 1946, he had made a lengthy record of the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt for his denazification process . In it he claimed that two days before the assassination there had been a lengthy conversation with the resistance fighter Adam von Trott zu Solz , during which it had become clear that the circle around State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker was a nucleus of the resistance of July 20, 1944. Melchers writes from the perspective of the initiated co-conspirator he was not.

According to Historical Commission "that drafted in the style of a legacy paper can be used as key early document constitutes the official internal myths." The Bremen denazification process completed Melchers as "relieved".

Head of the HR department and ambassador after 1950

When the Bremen State Councilor and later head of personnel in the Foreign Office, Wilhelm Haas , was appointed by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to head the organizational office for the consular and economic missions abroad on November 19, 1949 , he brought Melchers to Bonn in December 1949 and entrusted him with the management of Section I Pers. A ( personal details of the higher service ). Due to his work in the headquarters of the Foreign Office during the Second World War, Melchers had insider knowledge, "which Haas, who had left the office two years earlier and then worked as an economic advisor to IG Farben in China, was unable to". Melchers used the influential position entrusted to him to prevent the return of emigrants or applicants who were previously critical of the regime to the Foreign Office. For him, any previous "collaboration with the Allied Prosecution was a valid reason to rule out a suitability for the foreign service in principle." In 1950, Melchers rejected Fritz Kolbe , who was Ambassador Karl Ritter's personal advisor in the early 1940s , but refused to join the NSDAP, instead passed on messages to the United States from 1943 and supported them in preparing for the Nuremberg Trial in 1945 . Kolbe should "not be hired under any circumstances" and should "remain without notice".

In June 1953 Melchers took over the management of the German embassy in Baghdad and the Amman branch . In March 1957 he was appointed ambassador to New Delhi ; In mid-1961 he was appointed ambassador to Athens until he retired in 1965. Melchers was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit with a Star in 1954 . He died at the age of 71.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1996, 157 , 814
  2. ↑ a b c Hans-Jürgen Döscher: rope teams. The Foreign Office's suppressed past . Berlin 2005, p. 110.
  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. 402 f.
  4. ↑ Conze u. a., The Office and the Past, pp. 575-580.
  5. ↑ Christopher R. Browning: Historian study "The Office". The end of all cover-ups . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 10, 2010. Accessed January 3, 2011.
  6. ↑ Christopher R. Browning: The "Final Solution" and the Foreign Office. Section D III of the Germany Department 1940-1943. Darmstadt 2010, p. 199.
  7. ↑ Christopher R. Browning: The "Final Solution" and the Foreign Office. Referat D III of the Germany Department 1940-1943 , p. 200.
  8. ↑ Christopher R. Browning: The "Final Solution" and the Foreign Office. Referat D III of the Germany Department 1940-1943 , p. 199.
  9. ↑ 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. 402.
  10. ↑ 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. 450 u. P. 455; Hans-Jürgen Döscher: rope teams. The Foreign Office's suppressed past . Berlin 2005, p. 102 u. P. 110.
  11. ↑ 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. 455.
  12. ↑ 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. 548.
  13. ↑ 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. 555.
personal data
SURNAME Melchers, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH January 20, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH 18th November 1971
Place of death Freiburg in Breisgau