Wilhelm Widenmann

Wilhelm Karl Widenmann (born June 20, 1871 in London , † September 20, 1955 ) was a German officer and diplomat ( naval attaché ).

Live and act

Childhood and Adolescence (1871 to 1890)

Wilhelm Widenmann was born in 1871 as the second son of the businessman Carl Wilhelm Widenmann (1834–1871), who at that time was a partner in the import business Widenmann-Broicher in London, which specialized in the import of tropical products to Europe. The mother, Helene Johanna Wilhelmine Overweg (* December 16, 1850 in Haus Ruhr; † August 2, 1939 Cologne-Marienburg), was a daughter of Bismarck's confidante and Reichstag representative Carl Overweg . Widenmann spent the first years of his life up to 1874 in London, where he was baptized in the German Evangelical Church. The father died before he was born on March 12, 1871. This forced the mother to return to Germany with Wilhelm and his brother Carl in 1874, where they lived on their parents' estate, Haus Letmathe , until 1876 .

In 1876 the small family moved to Düsseldorf , where in April 1877 the mother married the then Lord Mayor of Düsseldorf Wilhelm von Becker , who thus became Widenmann's stepfather. From Easter 1877 to 1879 Widenmann received private lessons. He then attended the preschool of the royal grammar school of the city of Düsseldorf until 1880, from 1880 to 1883 the sixth to fourth of the grammar school and from Easter 1883 the municipal grammar school.

To Wide's childhood friends in Dusseldorf, among others, the sons of Prince included Karl Anton von Hohenzollern , the Prince William Ferdinand (later known as Ferdinand I. King of Bulgaria ) and Carlos, the future artist Max Hünten , Karl von Restorff , later department chief of the Naval Cabinet under Wilhelm II., Ernst Poensgen , later General Director of the United Steel Works , and Widenmann's later "arch enemy", the future British Under-Secretary of State Sir Eyre Crowe , whose father was then the British consul in Düsseldorf. Well-known personalities who went in and out of their parents' house included the artists Andreas and Oswald Achenbach .

After Becker was appointed Lord Mayor of Cologne in 1886, the family moved to Cologne, where Widenmann spent the rest of his school days at the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium and graduated from high school at Easter 1890.

Early career in the Imperial Navy (1890-1907)

After graduating from high school, Widenmann joined the Imperial Navy on April 14, 1890 . After his training at the naval school in Kiel, he was promoted to lieutenant at sea on May 22, 1893 and then served on the torpedo boat D 3 in Kiel and the small cruiser " Seeadler " in East Africa. With him, Widenmann visited Cape Town and the Delagoa Bay and witnessed the bombardment of Zanzibar by the British Cape Squadron in the British-Zanzibarian War in 1896 . On April 13, 1896, he was promoted to lieutenant at sea .

After serving in the I. Torpedo Boat Department in Kiel and attending the Naval Academy , Widenmann, promoted to lieutenant captain on March 15, 1902 , was an artillery officer in the German East Asia Squadron in Tsingtau from 1904 to 1906 .

Time as a naval attaché in London (1907 to 1912)

Widenmann (center) during the visit of the English king to Berlin in February 1909. Behind him (saluting) stands his colleague, the military attaché Roland Ostertag.

Widenmann's career received special support from the State Secretary in the Reichsmarineamt (i.e. Minister of the Navy ) Alfred von Tirpitz , with whom he had a close relationship of trust. Tirpitz arranged for Widenmann to be appointed as the successor to Carl von Coerper as naval attaché at the German embassy in London in 1907, a key position in German diplomacy at the time, which he was to hold until 1912. During this time he was promoted to Corvette Captain on August 27, 1908 .

As a London attaché, Widenmann played a central role in connection with the German-British naval conflict in the years before the First World War: while his superior, Ambassador Paul Graf Wolff Metternich zur Gracht , sought a peaceful balance between British and German interests, Widenmann was more energetic Advocate of German naval construction, which was generally perceived by British politics, the press and the population as a threat to their own security. Accordingly, he deliberately avoided all of Metternich's attempts to restrict German armaments at sea and thus to remove British fears and resentments - which contributed significantly to Britain's informal leaning towards the Franco-Russian alliance. Instead, he used his function to take a stand against Metternich in diplomatic reports and memoranda to Kaiser Wilhelm II - to which he had direct access due to the sovereign's lively interest in naval issues - his judgments and advice, which led to a measured and understanding Call for correction of the policy adopted to question and systematically undermine the position of the ambassador. He not only achieved the failure of his superior's plans for a fleet agreement, but also made a significant contribution to its overthrow in 1912. The fleet agreement sought by Metternich was intended to stipulate a ratio of the size of the German to the British fleet, which would have taken into account Great Britain's security concerns through a significantly lower fleet strength of the continental power Germany. Instead, German rearmament at sea continued unchecked, making the German-British conflict unbridgeable.

Likewise, before his own recall in 1912, Widenmann prevented the appointment of the moderate officer and diplomat Werner von Rheinbaben as his successor and instead managed to get Captain Erich von Müller , who was politically in line with him, a naval attaché in London. Widenmann's influence on the emperor, which went far beyond the scope of his official position, was based in particular on his good relationship with the crown prince and the extraordinary personal esteem of the empress.

Widenmann came to involuntary literary "fame" in 1917 in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tale The Last Bow , in which he appears as Bork's German master spy.

In the first World War

Following his work in London, Widenmann, who had previously been promoted to frigate captain (April 25, 1912) , became commander of the small cruiser Kolberg in September 1912 (until February 1915), and then of the small cruiser Regensburg until August 1915 . On September 19, 1914, he was promoted to sea captain. In November 1915 he was appointed head of the news office (N) in the Reichsmarineamt and replaced Corvette Captain Paul Fischer in this position. The tasks of the news office included the collection of information from a wide variety of sources, the publication of press releases and their targeted placement in certain newspapers, the holding of press conferences in the Reichstag and its committees, the cooperation and the targeted establishment of contacts with journalists or the publication of newspapers and magazines shared with them. In addition to its original objective of obtaining, objectively evaluating and passing on information, State Secretary Alfred von Tirpitz used the news office to propagate his one-sided naval policy. This resulted in clear disharmonies with the naval intelligence service based at the Admiralty's headquarters. This situation came to a head until the beginning of 1916 that Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg withdrew control of the Navy's press policy from Tirpitz in March 1916 and transferred it to the naval intelligence service. Thereupon both Tirpitz and Wilhelm Widenmann resigned. During his tenure, Widenmann had protested again and again that the German leadership, in his opinion, left the fleet idle in the ports and urged the fleet to be used in combat. His successor was Corvette Captain Horst Rieder.

From April 1916 to January 1917, Widenmann was department head in the general naval department of the Reichsmarinamt. In February 1917 he became managing director of the German Überseedienstes GmbH (DÜD) founded in 1914 , a private news agency controlled by German heavy industry. Their aim was to obtain and convey economic news in the interests of German companies and to carry out corresponding propaganda work abroad. For this purpose, the company maintained so-called picture and news rooms in several countries, especially in Turkey, as platforms for German propaganda. Its commercial director was Ludwig Klitzsch (1881–1954).

Activity in the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933)

When Klitzsch became general director of the Scherl publishing house in Berlin in 1920, Wilhelm Widenmann was promoted to general director of the German Overseas Service, which was incorporated into the Hugenberg Group by Alfred Hugenberg in 1923 . Like his former superior and sponsor of Tirpitz, Widenmann was politically active in the German National People's Party (DNVP), in which he played a role in the directional struggle that brought Hugenberg to the head of the DNVP in 1928.

Late years (1933 to 1954)

In the 1930s, Widenmann, encouraged by Erich Raeder among others , drew up a plan for a history of the Imperial Navy from 1871 to 1914. To this end, he put together a staff of twenty-two researchers and technical experts and began to sift through files. The realization finally failed because the German naval files from the years 1848 to 1919 after the end of the Second World War were confiscated by the British Navy and transported to London.

Instead, Widenmann wrote down his memoirs in 1950 - at the urging of the historian Walther Hubatsch - with the London attaché period being the focus. His estate is now stored under the identification number N 158 in the Federal Archives-Military Archives in Freiburg im Breisgau.

Widenmann in the judgment of historical research

Widenmann's foreign policy work in the period before the First World War is now almost unanimously assessed as fatal in historical research. Hajo Holborn judged that Widenmann was "a blind tool of Tirpitz" and a "dilettante troublemaker". Lamar Cecil similarly characterized Widenmann in his biography of Wilhelm II as a "malicious and ill-tempered devotee of his chief" and the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter sharply criticized Widenmann's London activities in the second part of his work, Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk . The weekly newspaper Die Zeit summarized this criticism - which above all also emphasized the failure of Wilhelm II with regard to the person of Widenmann - as follows: “Widenmann could not have been so ominous, the Admiral von Tirpitz would not have had his protective hand over so long be able to hold the attaché, if the attaché had not found support in the most powerful man in the empire: the emperor. "

Fonts

• Special missions of the Prussian-German Navy until the beginning of the World War 1914-1918 . In: Nauticus. Yearbook for Germany's Maritime Interests , Volume 24, 1941.
• Marine attaché at the Imperial German Embassy in London 1907-1912 (= Göttingen Contributions for Contemporary Issues, Volume 4). Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1952. (With a foreword by Walther Hubatsch )

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Widenmann in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gerhard Granier, Josef Henke, Klaus Oldenhage: Das Bundesarchiv und seine Bestände , Boldt Verlag 1977, ISBN 978-3764616885 , p. 677.
2. ↑ Data of the military career according to the rankings of the Imperial German Navy.
3. ↑ Nick Rennison: Sherlock Holmes. The Unauthorized Biography . 2006, p. 234. "Von Bork is almost certainly a disguised version of the German naval attache in London Wiedenman who ran a network of spies in and around naval bases such as Chatham, Rosyth and Scapa Flow." The claim that Widenmann ran a spy network is not true; see Thomas Boghardt: Spies of the Kaiser. German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke / New York 2004, p. 44 f.
4. ↑ Sebastian Rojek, Sunken Hopes: The German Navy in Dealing with Expectations and Disappointments 1871–1930, De Gruyter Verlag Oldenburg, 2017 p. 116ff.
5. ↑ The Age of Imperialism. 1871 to 1945, (= German history in modern times, Volume 3), Munich 1971, p. 112.
6. ↑ Cecil: Wilhelm, p. 124.
7. Jump up ↑ The gloss and misery of German militarism, Die Zeit 1960, No. 49