Between April and the summer of 1943, Beckerle and Dannecker repeatedly discussed the best timing for further deportations.110 In July, however, Beckerle realized that ‘to insist on the deportation [of Jews from the Bulgarian heartland] at the present time makes no sense whatsoever’. He nevertheless expected the deportations to resume when Germany’s military success became ‘apparent’, a possibility he still thought realistic in early 1944.111 When interrogated by the Soviets after being captured in September of the same year, Beckerle took pride in the success he had achieved in deporting Jews from Macedonia and Thrace.112 His extreme antisemitism is best illustrated by a brief report from Beckerle on his time in Litzmannstadt, the former Łódź. In it he compared the German reconstruction efforts after the occupation of Poland most favourably against the traditional life in the Jewish quarters of that city, for him ‘the most dirty places of the most disgusting East European Jewry’. All antisemitic clichés were present. He was repelled by orthodox men with long beards, ‘draped in dirty caftans’, as well as by the ‘insolent’ Jewish women, and obsessed with the idea of Jewish dirt.113
Beckerle’s diaries, today held in the German Foreign Office’s Political Archive, also shed light on his self-image and his interpretation of his diplomatic mission. Although he still felt closely attached to his men in SA-Gruppe Hesse (and struggled with giving up its command in 1942), Beckerle the diplomat saw himself as someone who had to ‘represent National Socialism in its entirety’.114 He was not very popular in Bulgaria, even among the ethnic Germans. In his diaries he repeatedly expressed feelings of loneliness and, at times, revealed signs of a mid-life crisis.115 He became sentimental and homesick when thinking of the SA in Germany but consoled himself with the fact that he was nevertheless better off than the German soldiers and civilians at home, who were increasingly suffering from the Allied bombings of German cities.116 In Sofia, however, rumours spread that Beckerle’s wife had greeted the first Allied bombings of the Bulgarian capital with the words: ‘Thank God! Finally, there is some work for us, too’ (Gott sei Dank, nun kriegen wir auch mal Arbeit).117
Last but not least, we now turn to the role of Dietrich von Jagow as German envoy in Hungary. Only four years the junior of von Killinger, von Jagow had also enjoyed a similar career as his colleague prior to joining the German Foreign Office in late June 1941. He fought in the First World War as a lieutenant and later senior lieutenant in the navy, and in 1919 joined the Marine Brigade Ehrhardt and took part in the Kapp Putsch of 1920. At about the same time he became a member of the NSDAP and between 1921 and 1923 served as inspector of the nascent Württemberg SA. After the party re-emerged later in the decade, von Jagow rejoined and began a stellar career in the SA, leading the SA-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg between 1934 and 1939. With the onset of the Second World War he returned to the military, fighting for two years in the Wehrmacht, before being appointed a diplomat.118
However, like von Killinger, von Jagow struggled to meet the requirements of his new position. Prior to his appointment, Hungary and Hungarian politics were terra incognita to him, and his deep-rooted contempt for civilian life did not help him warm to his new job.119 Von Jagow’s main tasks as envoy were to recruit ethnic Germans from Hungary for the Waffen-SS, to monitor the military situation in the Balkans, particularly in light of a possible Allied invasion, and to deal with the ‘Jewish question’.120 However, Miklós Horthy, the regent of Hungary who had introduced antisemitic legislation as early as 1938, insisted that the latter task was a purely Hungarian affair. In contrast to the other states discussed previously, Hungary initially faced only relatively mild pressure on the ‘Jewish question’ from von Jagow and the Foreign Office. This was, however, a tactical decision, framed as giving the Hungarian side more time to ‘prepare’ the ground for the pending ‘final solution’.121 As early as August 1942 the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin noted that the Germans had made it very clear to him that the ‘Jewish question’ needed to be solved immediately. In the spring of 1943, German pressure further intensified with the first official visit to Hungary of SS Brigade General Edmund Veesenmayer, who later became plenipotentiary there.122 In the meantime Hungarian Jews were compelled into forced labour but were not (yet) deported.123 Consequently, in March 1944, 762,000 Jews still lived in Hungary, 150,000 of them in Budapest alone.124
Von Jagow’s role in enforcing the German ‘Jew policy’ in Hungary is difficult to assess from the remaining documents. Compared to Ludin and Kasche, who are best characterized as diplomat-politicians with personal agendas, von Jagow remained in the background, more an observer than a man of diplomatic initiative. He conveyed the German demands for a ‘radical solution’ of the ‘Jew question’ to the Hungarian premier Miklós Kállay via Foreign Minister Jenő Ghyczy on 17 October 1942.125 Therefore, it is certain that he knew the regime’s ultimate goals, but it is unclear whether he had a strong personal commitment to the cause, as his official reports abstain from personal commentary. In any case, von Jagow reported to the Foreign Office in late October and again in mid-November that he did not expect the Hungarians to give in to the German demands.126 Over the course of the following year the Foreign Office as well as the RSHA slowly but surely lost faith in von Jagow’s ability to impose the German will on the Hungarians, whom they regarded as increasingly problematic after the German defeat at Stalingrad and the subsequent advance of the Red Army.
The situation of relative calm changed dramatically on 19 March 1944, when German troops occupied Hungary. As an official ambassador was no longer needed, von Jagow was relieved of his duties, and Veesenmayer took over as the plenipotentiary of the Greater German Reich in Hungary.127 In the following months the new Szálasi regime, supported by the Arrow Cross militia and instructed by Eichmann and Veesenmayer, efficiently ghettoized, deported, and expropriated the holdings of the majority of Hungary’s remaining Jews.128 Between 16 May and 8 July alone 437,000 Jews were deported to Auschwitz, the vast majority of whom were killed immediately upon arrival there. Only 255,500 of the previously 762,000 Hungarian Jews survived the fall of Fascist Hungary.129
On 8 May 1944 von Jagow was officially recalled to Berlin, where he reported for duty on 1 June but was not given a new role in the Foreign Office. In September he returned to his proper realm, the world of the military, where he was placed in command of a Volkssturm battalion in Upper Silesia. His family moved to a mansion in Groß-Münche in the Warthegau, today’s Polish Mnichy near Kwilcz.130 In January 1945 von Jagow and his men shot down four Russian tanks by panzerfaust, a military achievement that earned him an honorary mention in the Wehrmacht report of 21 January 1945.131 However, during the action, von Jagow was struck in the head by flying parts of the exploding tanks and lost one eye. After several weeks in hospitals in Dresden and Leipzig, he was reunited with his family for the last time in Constance in March 1945. Shortly afterward the Foreign Office sent him as a messenger to the Italian village of Fasano at Lake Garda, which was serving as the administrative centre for the German occupation of Italy in the last stage of the Second World War.132 The instructions he was given for this trip are unknown. On his way von Jagow took up quarters in Merano in the house of the German plenipotentiary to the Italian Social Republic, Rudolf Rahn, where he shot himself shortly after his arrival on 26 April 1945.133
The Impact of the SA Diplomats
Overall, the trajectories of the different SA diplomats’ activities in southeastern Europe between 1941 and 1944–5 reveal striking parallels. The commencement of these individuals’ duties coincided with a radicalization of the ‘handling’ of the ‘Jewish question’ in their respective states, culminating in the decision in the summer of 1941 to move toward the ‘final solution’.134 The SA diplomats were not the driving forces behind this policy, but they often acted confidently and independently to carry it out. Apart from the Holocaust, their political influence was limited, particularly from 1943 onward. Certainly, they were newcomers to the diplomatic realm, did not speak the local lan
guages, and were not well informed about the peculiarities of the regions to which they were sent. Scepticism about their suitability for their complicated missions was widespread, even among the German leadership. After the war Rudolf Rahn commented that he had always believed that it had not been a good idea to ‘put politically naïve SA leaders in diplomat uniforms, in the belief that foreign policy could be done by party methods’.135 And the Austrian general Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, when first informed about Kasche’s appointment to Zagreb, commented bitterly that ‘he should at least be able to find Croatia on a map’.136 But even von Horstenau, a sworn enemy of the German envoy, acknowledged later that Kasche had been ‘far better’ than he had initially feared.137
A comparative analysis of the roles of the five SA diplomats in southeastern Europe indeed suggests that a balanced assessment is needed.138 Personal shortcomings notwithstanding, their ultimate failures were as much grounded in their individual character traits as they were a consequence of their unusual positions. They were neither Reichskommissare with extensive authority nor conventional diplomats accustomed to dealing with autonomous governments. Given the fluidity of the political situation between 1941 and 1944 in southeastern Europe, one may be surprised to learn that at least Beckerle and Kasche extensively researched the peculiarities of their respective regions. As long-term stormtroopers, all five of these SA diplomats sympathized with the paramilitary organizations of the Fascist right in their host countries.139 In the autumn of 1939, SA Chief of Staff Lutze paid the first official NSDAP visit to Tiso’s Slovakia, where he met with Karmasin to lay a wreath at the grave of Andrej Hlinka, the namesake of the Slovak Fascist militia.140 Both the Hlinka Guard and the SA shared strong antisemitic convictions, and later Ludin in his negotiations with his Slovakian counterparts would stress the natural bonds of the new Slovak state with the Brownshirts’ Third Reich. Because of such sympathies, however, he failed to notice the growing scepticism and anti-German sentiment among the Ludaks, a failure for which he was sharply criticized by the German SD in 1943. For the Sicherheitsdienst, it was by then obvious that Tiso and his followers were playing a double game.141 In Hungary von Jagow also advocated closer cooperation with the Fascist Arrow Cross movement but was restrained by the German Foreign Office. In consequence, he lacked recognition even among those who shared his ideological convictions.142 In the Balkans, Kasche in late 1943 expressed more faith in the ideological power of National Socialism than in violent oppression. Drastic measures might be justified for the time being, he argued, but a lasting alliance with the Ustaša and other nationalists in the region could only be achieved through a cooperative policy that respected national traditions and the people’s welfare.143 Finally, the Bulgarian Prime Minister Bogdan Filov criticized Beckerle for being ‘too friendly with right-wing extremists’ in his country, as well as for being an ‘extremely limited person’.144
The longer the SA diplomats remained in office, the more they came to the conclusion that the German policy in southeastern Europe was counterproductive; at least insofar as it alienated even those nationalist circles and groups that had initially supported the German advance. The diplomats advocated instead a policy that would grant at least partial autonomy to these groups, in the hope that such a division of power would ultimately strengthen the bonds between the Germans and the nationalist governments in the region. As the war progressed, this became an ever more naive position, as German foreign policy from 1943 onward was increasingly driven by the economic and human exploitation of its southeastern allies and ultimately concerned with its own survival.145 After Martin Luther’s arrest on 10 February 1943 for involvement in a failed putsch that aimed to remove von Ribbentrop from office,146 the SA diplomats lost further support from Berlin. By 1944 they were fighting a losing battle, neglecting or simply ignoring the fundamental political changes that were unfolding in the region. A letter of complaint on Ludin’s failures as a diplomat, written by an Austrian civil servant in Bratislava to the German Foreign Office on 27 October 1944, cut right to the heart of the matter, asking, with deadly irony: ‘After the events in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary – do you have more of such “experts” out there?’147
The Struggle for Reputation
By the autumn of 1944, German diplomacy was effectively over, and the SA envoys’ vision of a German-led southeastern Europe had evaporated. Von Killinger and his embassy staff on 23 August 1944 became de facto Romanian prisoners in the German Embassy in Bucharest. One week later, on 31 August 1944, the Red Army reached the Romanian capital. On 2 September the German diplomats were transferred to the building of a school named after the Romanian national hero Mihai Viteazu. That same day von Killinger first shot his female secretary Helga Petersen, with whom he had had an affair, and then killed himself.148 Von Jagow, as previously mentioned, committed suicide in Merano on 26 April 1945, only days before the end of the Second World War. Three weeks later the Americans took Ludin into custody and, after interning him in the Natternberg camp in Bavaria, handed him over to the Czechoslovakian authorities on 5 October 1946. Ludin faced trial in Bratislava, was sentenced to death, and was executed on 3 December 1947.149 Nearly six months earlier, on 17 June 1947, Kasche had been sentenced to death by the Croatian State Court and was hanged the following day.150 Only Beckerle, who had been caught at the Bulgarian-Turkish border and brought to Moscow by soldiers of the Red Army in late September 1944, survived the immediate post-war years.151 He returned from Soviet detention to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955, where the Frankfurt mayor greeted him with handshakes on the steps of the city’s town hall. Beckerle is even said to have received compensatory damages of 6,000 deutschmark. However, the joy of his return was overshadowed by the news of the suicide of his wife in 1951 that coincided with the successful restitution of the previously ‘Aryanized’ villa she lived in. An attempt to hold the former police president accountable for his involvement in the persecution of members of the German opposition during the 1930s came to nothing, and the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office closed the case in 1957. The general attorney Fritz Bauer then attempted to bring Beckerle to court on charges related to the murder of Bulgarian Jews. In September 1959, Beckerle was arrested, yet the main trial did not begin until November 1967.152 The proceedings against him were closed in the summer of 1968 because of his ‘ill health’. Beckerle died a free man on 3 April 1976.153
In post-war Germany the families of these SA diplomats struggled with the involvement of their husband, brother, or father in the Holocaust.154 Malte Ludin’s acclaimed documentary film 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß illustrates with empathy and exemplary clarity the long-lasting shadow that his father’s life and death cast over his surviving family members.155 Hanns Ludin had been a complex personality: he had been popular among the SA rank and file in southwestern Germany and a loving father, but he had also been personally involved in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews whom he knew were destined to be killed. Unsurprisingly, his children struggled to balance the historical evidence with their private memories.156 Ernst von Salomon’s glorification of Hanns Ludin in the best-selling 1951 novel Der Fragebogen had a particularly deep impact on the family’s memory. Von Salomon first met Ludin in the prisoner-of-war camp run by the Americans at Natternberg in 1945 and later glorified him as ‘the best man in the camp’ and as a model of decency. At one time Salomon even referred to him as a ‘camp-Christ’ (Lager-Christus) – half in jest, but also half in earnest.157 Ludin’s widow and several of his children only too willingly adopted Salomon’s literary image as a realistic description of their husband and father’s personality. Salomon’s novel, Malte Ludin claimed, served as a ‘moral vade mecum’ and a ‘consolation book’. It allowed them to remember Hanns Ludin as a morally superior individual who – despite his conviction and execution as a war criminal – served as a role model and martyr for the nation.158 When asked today about his father’s personality, Dietrich von Jagow’s son Henning refers to private letters that
characterize his father in very similar terms as a ‘political idealist, naive and relatively stubborn with regard to political developments, but at the same time a decent man, guided by Christian-ethical principles, for whom morality and honour were important and who, in later years, surely had his doubts’ about the evils of the Nazi regime.159 In this light von Jagow’s suicide in 1945 seems less a flight from political responsibility than a courageous act that was in line with his morality and aristocratic code of honour.
Whereas the Ludin family’s controversial coming to terms with their past is well known to the German public, the parallel process within Kasche’s family has remained a private affair. Files from the German Foreign Office hint at the difficulty that surviving family members had in accepting Kasche’s criminal guilt, particularly as other former diplomats in many cases remained in office or, if sentenced to prison terms by the Allies, were quickly released and had their public honour restored.160 Beginning in 1954, members of the Kasche family requested help from the West German authorities in proving that the Yugoslav authorities had sentenced the former diplomat to death against international law. One of Kasche’s brothers, in a letter to the Ministry of Justice, claimed that the former envoy had been innocent and was only executed ‘because of the well-known Serbian desire for revenge’ for the war crimes committed by the Croatian Ustaša and tolerated or supported by the Germans during the Second World War.161 An important motive behind such a request was the fact that the family of a war criminal could not claim a widow’s or children’s pension.162 Although a Bavarian denazification court had initially ruled that Kasche belonged to the category of ‘major offenders’ – with the consequence that 50 per cent of his assets could be confiscated by the state and surviving family members could not claim state pensions – a subsequent appeal was successful, and monthly payments were made to the family from 1954 onward.163 However, the Kasches made a second attempt to gain what they perceived as ‘moral justice’ in 1968, as the new Foreign Minister Willy Brandt was preparing an official visit to Tito’s Yugoslavia. In a personal letter to Brandt one of Kasche’s brothers urged the Foreign Minister to intervene on their behalf and threatened to sue the state of Yugoslavia in The Hague to receive compensation for this alleged injustice. Furthermore, he reminded Brandt of the Foreign Office’s duty to care for its former members of staff and their families, adding pointedly that Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger from the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) had himself worked for the Foreign Office during the Third Reich and ‘should therefore know my brother’.164 Addressing Brandt directly, Kasche’s brother stated that because ‘now for the first time in a generation a member of the SPD is Foreign Minister’, justice should finally prevail.165 However, the matter was simply not important enough to risk offending Tito, a strategically important political partner at a time of ‘détente’, particularly as the former envoy Kasche belonged to that group of Nazi ambassadors from whom professional diplomats wished to distance themselves – by now not only for personal reasons but even more so for ideological ones.
Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts Page 44