Talk:Eduard Schulte

Newspaper article

The following article, a 1983 NY Times article published when Schulte's story first became widely known, had been inserted by an Anon Editor, and was moved here by -- Matthead ^discuß!     O       17:40, 17 March 2007 (UTC).

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AN UNSUNG 'GOOD GERMAN': FAME COMES AT LAST

By JAMES M. MARKHAM, NY Times, Nov. 9, 1983

In the aftermath of World War II, many Germans came forward to proclaim that they had been secretly against the Nazis, or had carried out inner resistance to Hitler's dictatorship. But Eduard Schulte kept his secret.

Mr. Schulte, a tall, prosperous businessman who until 1943 had directed a mammoth German zinc mining company in Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland), lived out most of the postwar years in Zurich. In 1956, a year after the death of his first wife, the 65-year- old Mr. Schulte married Dora Jette Kurz, a Jewish woman of Polish parentage who was born in Zürich and ran a boutique there. He died in the Swiss banking capital in 1966, according to Swiss archives.

In recent weeks, American historians have disclosed that Eduard Schulte was the mysterious German industrialist who was long known to have passed to the Allies vital information about Hitler's war plans, including the decision to invade the Soviet Union. In 1942, Mr. Schulte provided intelligence from Hitler's headquarters that the German dictator was considering the mass killing of European Jews using prussic acid.

The story of how the United States and its Allies ignored or disbelieved this intelligence has been told many times: a filter of skepticism, disbelief and in some cases anti-Jewish prejudice inclined Washington and other capitals to inaction as late as 1944, when full details were known of the Auschwitz death camp.

Motive Remains an Enigma

But, even after his name was disclosed for the first time, an aura of mystery surrounded Eduard Schulte. What compelled this scion of the German establishment to risk his life as an unpaid Allied agent?

Gerhart Riegner, the Swiss representative of the World Jewish Congress, still refuses to acknowledge that it was Mr. Schulte who in 1942 supplied him with the information about the final solution.

I have not identified the man for 40 years, said Mr. Riegner in a telephone interview, and I see no reason not to keep the one request he ever made of me.

A series of interviews have turned up many new details about Mr. Schulte, including the revelation that his highly classified information came from Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, the military intelligence branch of the high command of the German armed forces.

According to an extremely close relative who requested anonymity, Mr. Schulte was a member of a network of anti-Nazi plotters that also included Hans Bernd Gisevius, the German vice consul in Zürich, and Carl Goerdeler, the one-time Mayor of Leipzig who was the civilian leader of the German resistance to Hitler. Canaris and Goerdeler were both executed for their involvement in the 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler.

Met in Zurich in '38

Mrs. Schulte, who is 74 and lives comfortably in Zurich, was initially too frightened to talk after the newspaper reporting uncovered the industrialist's second marriage and her whereabouts. But Monday night she relented, and, in two telephone conversations, spoke of her husband, whom she first met in Zurich in 1938. We have our own little love story, but this is not the time to talk about that, she said.

Mrs. Schulte praised her husband - an upstanding, good man, one of the most modest men in the world- and said his hatred for Hitler was sharpened by the plight of his many Jewish friends in Europe.

In 1940, she said, Mr. Schulte warned her that she should flee neutral Switzerland, fearing that it would be invaded. But she stayed. After the war, she said, Mr. Schulte was profoundly disillusioned about his own espionage exploits - that he had done something that put his life in danger and there was no reaction.

Eduard Reinhold Karl Schulte was born on Jan. 4, 1891, in Düsseldorf, and, after earning his law degree, went into banking and industry. In 1926, he became managing director of Georg von Giesche's Erben, the biggest zinc producer in Germany, which had important holdings in Poland. The American Anaconda Copper Mining Company controlled 51 per cent of the German company's interests in Polish Silesia.

With his first wife, Clara Luise, Mr. Schulte had two sons, Eduard Wolfgang Oskar and Ruprecht Franz Hubertus, who were both born in Berlin and fought in the war. The first son died in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Stalingrad in 1943, and Ruprecht Schulte today lives in San Diego, Calif., where he works for a defense company.

Had Been a Social Democrat

Reached by telephone today, Ruprecht Schulte said that under the Weimar Republic his father was a member of the Social Democratic Party and had a number of friends who were later unceremoniously pushed out of office and killed after Hitler's takeover in 1933.

Albrecht Jung, who was Giesche's legal adviser, said that before the war Mr. Schulte had known Allen W. Dulles, then a lawyer with the firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, through Anaconda's dealings in Silesia. During the war, Mr. Dulles became the Bern chief of the Office of Strategic Services, and a key Schulte contact.

Dr. Schulte told us the way Hitler was doing things we could never go forward, said Mr. Jung, who is now retired. He spoke out openly, but of course in trust. He said we were up against the world, that Hitler had created a dirty mess.

The former legal adviser recalled that, before Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, Mr. Schulte got in touch with Giesche's representative in Prague, Rudolf Boyka, a Jew, and told him to flee; he gave similar warnings to Jewish employees in Hungary and Rumania, and some of them managed to escape to Spain and Portugal, according to Jürgen Gruber, the company's current manager.

A Struggle With Göring

After the invasion of Poland in 1939, Mr. Schulte and Mr. Jung fought off an attempt by Hermann Göring, the second most powerful figure in the Third Reich, to incorporate the Giesche complex into the air force commander's sprawling industrial empire. To sever its incriminating American tie, Giesche bought out Anaconda's Polish interests with the help of Swiss banks.

This deal gave Mr. Schulte the pretext to shuttle to Switzerland, where he pursued his clandestine contacts with Mr. Dulles, with Mr. Gisevius, the dissident German consul, and Polish and French intelligence contacts, according to various sources. In 1943, Mr. Schulte dictated a secret letter to Mr. Dulles in Bern, but an SS agent acquired the carbon, and notified the Gestapo.

The industrialist returned to Germany, but, according to Ruprecht Schulte, he was warned by Admiral Canaris, the Abwehr chief, that an order was out for his arrest. He fled back to Switzerland, and his wife followed him out of Germany.

Ruprecht Schulte was sent to the Eastern front, where he was wounded five times. He learned only after the war that among the secrets his father had passed to the allies were operational plans of the German armies in the Soviet Union. In the family, that subject was treated as one of sad necessity that we don't all want to talk about, he said. These things are not easy. He was a man between worlds, and probably a pretty lonely guy.

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Giesche's Erben

I changed and developed the section of Giesche's Erben, as I found some misinformation there (PR, 14th April 2007)