Wilhelm von Braun (lawyer)

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Wilhelm von Braun (born November 13, 1883 in Frankfurt (Oder) ; † August 29, 1941 in Buchenwald concentration camp ) was a German lawyer and diplomat.

Life

Wilhelm von Braun was born in 1883 as the second son of Colonel a. D. Konstantin von Braun and Bertha von Braun, daughter of the industrial family Hoffmann, were born and grew up in a Brandenburg evangelical officer family. His father was regiment commander and a descendant of Berlin city commander Christoph Heinrich Gottlob von Braun , knight of the Black Eagle Order (1714–1798).

Wilhelm von Braun also chose a military career and joined the 2nd Guard Field Artillery Regiment of the Prussian Army in Potsdam as a Junker . He received his training at the Engers War School . After his promotion to lieutenant in the artillery, he left active duty as a reserve officer in 1904 and studied law in Grenoble , Munich , Greifswald and Jena . At the beginning of 1908 he fell ill with typhus and then left the military for good. After a recovery period in France and England , he received his doctorate in law from the University of Heidelberg in 1910 and began a legal clerkship in Kirchberg (Hunsrück).

In France he was arrested in Brest in 1908 . Initially suspected of being a spy, he was arrested for allegedly seducing minors. His arrest and conviction (in January 1909) are reported in the French press. He made a suicide attempt. In May 1909 he was acquitted by the appeals court.

Probably in 1912 he converted to the Roman Catholic Church , probably influenced by his friendship with the Catholic priest Giuseppe Pizzardo , who later became a cardinal and undersecretary of state in the Vatican (Braun got to know Pizzardo in Munich, who was an employee of the papal nunciature there from 1909) .

Deployed on the Eastern Front at the beginning of World War I , he later switched to Ottoman services, where he was taken prisoner by Russia .

In the Weimar Republic during the chancellorship of the Catholic Joseph Wirth , Wilhelm von Braun went into politics. He got access to the Vatican through Monsignor Giuseppe Pizzardo. Braun was involved in various diplomatic activities that led to the Rapallo Conference and contractual cooperation between the German Empire and Soviet Russia . Braun established contacts from major German companies such as Siemens & Halske and major banks such as B. the Deutsche Orientbank AG with Soviet Russia. In cooperation with Pizzardo and the Soviet diplomat and head of the trade mission in Rome, Wazlaw Wazlawowitsch Worowski , he brokered aid deliveries from the western states via the Vatican for the starving Russian population in 1921/22. In 1922, in addition to Cardinal State Secretary Gasparro, Pizzardo and Worowski, he was also involved in secret agreements between the Vatican and Soviet Russia; Braun is mentioned several times in the secret diplomatic correspondence of the German Foreign Office and in the Vatican documents.

From 1924 Braun spent a lot of time abroad (mostly with the order of the Benedictines ), probably also in Italy and China . There are no certain facts about his activities there, nor about further contacts with Moscow.

On May 1, 1933, he became a member of the NSDAP . In 1935 he was arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the Dachau concentration camp , later he was transferred to the Mauthausen and Buchenwald concentration camps . According to the concentration camp documents, he was a protective prisoner for homosexuality ( § 175 ) , and he was listed as a "prominent prisoner". In the files he is a theologian, captain a. D., police agent, referred to as liaison man to the Vatican and as Soviet ambassador in Rome.

On August 29, 1941, Wilhelm von Braun was murdered by lethal injection in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Like many others, his grave in the old garrison cemetery in Berlin-Mitte was cleared away when it was redesigned into a city park in the late 1970s; a memorial plaque is to be erected in place of the disappeared grave of the von Braun and von Gersdorff families.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://gallica.bnf.fr/ : for example "Le Journal, 1908/11/18" , "Le Journal, 1908/11/20 , " La Croix, 1908/11/19 " , " Le Matin, 1908/11/18 " " Le Matin, 1908/11/28 " , " Le Petit Parisien, 1909/1/30 " , " Le Petit Parisien, 1909/5/21 "
  2. ↑ The document is headed as: “Agreement between the Holy See and the Government of the Soviets on the sending of authorized representatives of the Holy See to Russia” (reprinted in: Hansjakob Stehle, secret diplomacy in the Vatican. The Popes and the Communists, Zurich 1993, p . 385 f.)
personal data
SURNAME Braun, Wilhelm von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dr. Braun, Wilhelm von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lawyer, diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH November 13, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt (Oder)
DATE OF DEATH August 29, 1941
Place of death Buchenwald concentration camp