Willy Rudolf Foerster

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Willy Rudolf Foerster (born July 15, 1905 in Reichenbach im Vogtland , † February 19, 1966 in Heppenheim an der Bergstrasse ) was a German engineer and industrialist in Japan who saved the lives of Jews during the Nazi era . He founded the F. & K. Engineering Company and the German-Japanese machine tool factory Nichidoku Kikai Seisakujo in Tokyo . At times it employed 1,200 workers and 180 office workers. He was considered one of Japan's leading industrialists and one of the country's richest foreigners.

Life

Willy Rudolf Foerster was born on July 15, 1905 as the son of a textile engineer and a farmer's daughter in Reichenbach in Vogtland . He attended high school and was confirmed in the St. Peter-Paul Church in Reichenbach. He studied mechanical engineering in Zwickau and Berlin and worked at Krupp in the Wipla department and at BMW . In 1929 he married in Reichenbach. Through his work at BMW, he came to the Soviet Frunze, where he worked as an aircraft engine designer. After a short time, however, there were conflicts with the local party commissioner who “argued with hungry people with theoretical concepts.” In the context of the disputes, Foerster rose to be the spokesman for a workers' protest and had to leave Russia as a result. With the help of Japanese students whom he had met in his home town of Reichenbach, he managed to travel to Japan. In Tokyo, he first opened a workshop for motorcycles, cars and diesel engines, produced spare parts and then designed special machines that were not available locally. Industrial production began in 1934. Four years later - in 1938 - he founded the German-Japanese machine tool factory.

Foerster was an enthusiastic motorcycle racer and pilot. He remained closely connected to his flight instructor, Antonius Raab . After his escape from the National Socialists, he took over the representation of the newly founded AEKKEA-RAAB in Athens, until Wolfgang von Gronau , and Dr Wolfgang von Gronau , at the instigation of the air attaché at the German embassy in Tokyo. Hardly had to give up from the Reich Association of the German Aircraft Industry.

Foerster worked closely with the “Jewish Refugee Committee” in Tokyo and employed a considerable number of Jewish refugees from Germany and the occupied territories during the Nazi era. Hans Alexander Straus (representative of Columbia Records) and Karl Rosenberg (head of the mechanical engineering department at Liebermann-Waelchi & Co.) placed Foerster in Tokyo with employees who B. lost their position in Germany because of their Jewish origin. Foerster then arranged for the emigration to Japan and used his influence to enforce the entry of the families against massive opposition from the authorities. While pogroms were taking place in Germany, the refugees in Foerster's factory were given high-profile executive positions, e.g. B. as operations manager or HR manager. Foerster's chief accountant lived with an Asian woman and in this way violated the National Socialist racial ideology. At the end of 1940, Foerster rescued the children of one of his employees who had stayed behind in Vienna from deportation to a concentration camp. Shortly after their arrival in Japan, however, they were expatriated by the consulate in Yokohama because of their Jewish origins. However, Foerster was able to prevent the entire family from being deported to Shanghai.

From the beginning he was against National Socialism , especially anti-Semitism . Despite massive pressure from the German party and foreign representation in Tokyo, he refused to fire his Jewish employees. He publicly distanced himself from Nazi politics and described himself as "stateless".

Since Foerster also stayed away from the events of the "German Community" in Tokyo , he was publicly defamed in various ways. At the consulate general in Yokohama and the German embassy in Tokyo , especially with the police attaché Josef Meisinger , the "butcher of Warsaw", Foerster was "persona non grata". His love for a Japanese woman contributed to the rejection. In addition to Japanese and Jewish refugees, Foerster also employed Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Persians and Russians. His company was regarded by the German authorities as a “gathering point for foreigners hostile to the axis”.

In order to publicly discredit Willy Rudolf Foerster, the German authorities in Japan forged an alleged criminal record. This was initially used as whisper propaganda against Foerster by leading members of the German embassy in Tokyo and the consulate general in Yokohama. The aim was to sabotage his business. As before in the case of Colonel General Werner von Fritsch , Meisinger used a namesake for this purpose. In the Fritsch trial , this was a retired captain of the same name. In Foerster's case, a serious criminal. This was the worker "Willy Rudolf Förster", who was born in Reichenbrand near Chemnitz in 1890 and not in 1905 in Reichenbach in the Vogtland. This was convicted of theft and stolen goods as well as moral crimes and was imprisoned several times, most recently on July 23, 1937-23. June 1938 in the Hoheneck prison. At this point, however, Foerster had been living in Tokyo, Japan for many years. The alleged criminal record was handed over to the Japanese authorities in order to incriminate Foerster and later made available to Allied investigators in order to portray Foerster as a notorious and unbelievable criminal. The previous convictions can also be found in the official SCAP files on Foerster. Meisinger's use of an apparently falsified criminal record list is also known from the case of the journalist Karl Raimund Hofmeier .

Because of his resistance, Foerster was arrested together with his Japanese wife and several employees on May 24, 1943, at the instigation of German authorities, under the pretext of espionage in favor of the Soviet Union. He spent over a year in Japanese detention, during which he was tortured by Meisinger , among others . During this time he was forced to "sell" his company, which actually amounted to an expropriation. On June 13, 1944, Foerster was released from prison for proven innocence in the matter of "espionage". I.a. for criticizing the war and angry appeals to the public he was sentenced to probation. A few days later he was placed under house arrest.

On May 17, 1945, Foerster was arrested again at Meisinger's instigation , this time as an "anti-Nazi", and interned in Tokyo Koishikawa along with Jews of German descent and Allied citizens (including Catholic nuns). He was elected prison spokesman and saved the lives of the inmates when the Allies bombed the camp by overpowering the Japanese guard. In addition, with the help of a German who was married to an Indian and who had “no racial prejudice”, he managed to obtain additional food rations for the internees. The prisoners included the conductor and composer Klaus Pringsheim , Thomas Mann's brother-in-law , and his son, the journalist Hans Erik Pringsheim. Foerster had a lifelong friendship with both of them. The Americans liberated the camp on August 15, 1945.

After the war, Foerster lived with his family at Lake Nojiri, where he owned a house. Under General Douglas MacArthur , the Allies conducted intensive investigations in Japan. For this purpose , German embassy and consulate members working in Tokyo and Yokohama during the war were interviewed. The files obtained show that interested parties succeeded in massively discrediting Foerster at the SCAP . Although he had been expatriated from the German Reich in 1936 and internal investigations by the CIC fully confirmed Foerster's commitment to Jewish refugees and his resistance to the Nazis, he and his family were forcibly repatriated in 1947 as an alleged "Nazi". His remaining property, valued at several million dollars, was confiscated for German reparations . Jewish friends who campaigned intensively for Foerster got to hear that they were “just stateless foreigners”, Mr. Foerster “lies whenever he opens his mouth” and he would never have been arrested for “political reasons”. It was not until almost twenty years after the end of the war that German courts confirmed Foerster's Nazi opposition. In a process characterized by personal humiliation and unofficial and oath false statements by former Nazi diplomats, he was able to prove what the Allied authorities had actually known internally before his repatriation in 1947. Foerster died a few months after the verdict.

On August 28, 2018, the Foerster case was presented to the public in a lecture entitled “Willy Rudolf Foerster - Rise and Fall of the Savior of the Jews in Tokyo” in the House of History in Bonn . The author Clemens Jochem presented, among other things, findings on individual biographies of Foerster's Jewish employees and important new documents on the Foerster trial.

literature

Books

  • Clemens Jochem: The Foerster case: The German-Japanese machine factory in Tokyo and the Jewish aid committee . Hentrich and Hentrich, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-95565-225-8 (biography of Willy Rudolf Foerster with an afterword by his daughter Erica).
  • Pamela Rotner Sakamoto: Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma . Praeger, Westport 1998, ISBN 0-275-96199-0 (English, 216 pages, description of the rescue of Hugo Stern's children on p. 93. The name Foerster is not mentioned in the book, but that of his company F. & K . Engineering.).
  • Serge P. Petroff: Life Journey: A Family Memoir . iUniverse, Bloomington 2008, ISBN 978-0-595-51115-0 (English, 288 pp., memoirs of an employee of WR Foerster. Petroff reports from his perspective on Foerster's anti-Nazi attitude, his persecution by the Gestapo and Foerster's arrest and expropriation Apart from minor inaccuracies (including the date of Foerster's arrest [see Jochem: The Foerster case ]), his presentation offers an authentic insight into the conditions at that time and the rumors circulating.

items

Interviews / oral history

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Clemens Jochem: Human courageous. The industrialist Willy Rudolf Foerster in Tokyo . In: StuDeO - INFO . December 2017, ISSN  1866-6434 , pp. 40-42.
  2. ↑ Clemens Jochem: The Foerster case: The German-Japanese machine factory in Tokyo and the Jewish auxiliary committee Hentrich and Hentrich, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-95565-225-8 , p. 151.
  3. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 16.
  4. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 187.
  5. ↑ Gerd Möckel: Almost forgotten: Reichenbacher saved the lives of Jews in Japan . In: Reichenbacher Zeitung / Freie Presse , January 23, 2018.
  6. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, pp. 14–15 and p. 209, note no. 14.
  7. ↑ Serge P. Petroff: Life Journey: A Family Memoir , iUniverse, Bloomington 2008, ISBN 978-0-595-51115-0 , p. 96 and Clemens Jochem: Menschlich brave. The industrialist Willy Rudolf Foerster in Tokyo . In: StuDeO - INFO . December 2017, ISSN 1866-6434, pp. 40-42.
  8. ↑ On the rescue of Hugo Stern's children, see also: Pamela Rotner Sakamoto: Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma . Praeger, Westport 1998, ISBN 0-275-96199-0 , p. 93.
  9. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 15 f.
  10. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 19.
  11. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 20.
  12. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 33.
  13. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 188.
  14. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 64.
  15. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, pp. 64–67.
  16. ↑ Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, inventory: 30068 (prison Hoheneck), archival number: 1800, short version available online at: http://archiv.sachsen.de/archiv/Stock.jsp?guid=1554b68f-9652-4497-a8bd-32846a74782c , accessed on September 7, 2017.
  17. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, pp. 107-108.
  18. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 65 f.
  19. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 99 f. and p. 236, note no.192.
  20. ↑ Clemens Jochem: Your murderer - I am innocent! On the fate of the journalist Karl Raimund Hofmeier in Japan . In: OAG Notes . No. 04, April 1, 2020, ISSN  1343-408X , pp. 8–36, here p. 15.
  21. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 225, note no. 127.
  22. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 72 f.
  23. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 75 f.
  24. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 79.
  25. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 82.
  26. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 82.
  27. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 91 f.
  28. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, pp. 92–95.
  29. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 96.
  30. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, pp. 97 ff.
  31. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 107 f.
  32. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 109.
  33. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 102 ff.
  34. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 181 ff.
  35. ↑ Jochem: Der Fall Foerster , Berlin 2017, p. 183.
  36. ↑ Lecture: Willy Rudolf Foerster - Rise and Fall of the Savior of the Jews of Tokyo ( Memento from September 30, 2018 in the Internet Archive ); Our week, events . In: Jüdische Allgemeine . No. 34, 23 August 2018, ISSN  1618-9698 , p. 13 .; Tips and dates . In: Bonner General-Anzeiger - Bonn . August 27, 2018, p. 25. See also the lecture in the Minden Synagogue, February 23, 2019: Commemorate, inform, enlighten: Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation presents its six- month program . In: Mindener Tageblatt . No. 22, January 26, 2019, p. 8.
personal data
SURNAME Foerster, Willy Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German engineer and industrialist in Japan
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Reichenbach in Vogtland
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 1966
Place of death Heppenheim an der Bergstrasse