Martin Luther (diplomat)
Martin Luther, (1895–1945) was a protege of Joachim von Ribbentrop, first in the volunteer "Ribbentrop Bureau" and then in the Reich Foreign Office, until Ribbetrop sent him to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp for an attempt to supplant him as Reich Foreign Minister. Luther met Ribbentrop in 1936, when Ribbentrop was becoming Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He did not meet him in a context concerned with foreign policy or even politics, but as a furniture mover and interior decorator, working on the London Embassy. Somehow, Ribbentrop discovered that he had planning and infighting skills, and took him into the foreign policy establishment.
He was designated the Foreign Office liaison to the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1940. In that year, Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Desk, sent a memorandum to Luther, asking him to define Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop's basic policy toward Jews, trying to shift the role of his desk from settling individual cases to establishing policy. [1]
Deportations of French Jews, carried out in 1940, were first reported, by an anonymous letter, to Friedrich Gaus in the Legal Division, who forwarded it to Luther. Luther sent it to the Gestapo.[2]
He and Rademacher regularly received reports from the Einsatzgruppen. His assistant, Fritz Gebhard von Hahn, summarized them. Summaries from both Hahn and Luther went to Ernst von Weizsaecker and Ernst Woermann, who circulated them to interested parties in the Foreign Office. The summaries were initialed by 16 officials. [3]
In 1942, he represented the Office at the Wannsee Conference. His copy of the minutes, taken by Adolf Eichmann was the first to be found by the Allies, in 1947. At the Conference that it might be very difficult to deport Jews from Scandinavia, and recommended that be deferred. [4] He and Wilhelm Stuckart, of the Reich Interior Ministry, urged sterilization rather than direct killing. Reinhard Heydrich overrode them, telling them the Fuehrer had decided the matter.
In 1943, he plotted, with Rademacher, to replace Ribbentrop as foreign minister. He appears to have presented himself to Walter Schellenberg of the SD as a more SS-friendly alternative. When Schellenberg told Himmler, however, he had Luther arrested.[5] Luther was sent to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, was freed before the end of the war, but died in May 1945.
References
- ↑ Christopher R. Browning (2004), The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942, University of Nebraska Press, ISBN 0-8032-1327-1, p. 82
- ↑ Browning, p. 91
- ↑ Browning, pp. 491-492
- ↑ Hannah Arendt (2006), Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, Penguin, p. 170
- ↑ Richard Breitman (2005), U.S. intelligence and the Nazis, Cambridge University Press, p. 106