Erich Vermehren

Erich Barward Julius Increase after 1945 Erich Vermeeren de Saventhem or Eric Maria de Save Them, ( born December 23, 1919 in Lübeck, † April 28, 2005 in Bonn) was 1943/44, an Abwehr agent in Istanbul, whose desertion to the English 1944 the occasion and pretext to break up the defense offered. Later he worked as an insurance broker and was the founding president of Una Voce.

Biography

Background and education

Increase grew up in a family of lawyers in Lübeck. His grandfather was the Senator Julius propagating his father 's lawyer Kurt propagating. His mother, the journalist Petra Increase, was the daughter of Possehl business partner John Schwab Roch. Erich was the youngest of three children. His older siblings were the stand-up comedian, actress and nun Isa propagating and journalist Michael propagating. In 1933 the mother with him and his sister to Berlin, where she was hired on the recommendation of the Berlin lawyer and friend of Paul Leverkuehn family as the first woman in the foreign policy editorial in April 1934 at the Berliner Tageblatt. From Berlin, Erich propagating came to the boarding of the Joachimsthalerstrasse school in Templin, where he graduated. Then he started in Hamburg as a bank clerk and a law degree, but applied simultaneously to a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University can. In 1938 he was awarded the scholarship, upon the intervention of the Nazi student body, he was not worthy to represent the youth of the Third Reich abroad, but was confiscated his passport, which prevented the adoption of the scholarship.

His sister Isa had meanwhile Elisabeth Countess Plettenberg ( born November 23, 1911 in Bremen) is met. Intense conversations with her led in 1938 to the conversion Isas to the Roman Catholic Church. Erich also growing, said was very impressed by Countess Plettenberg, converted in 1939 and married her in October 1941 on the ancestral castle of the Plett Mountain in Hovestadt.

Defence agent

At the beginning of World War II Erich Increase was due to a long-ago shooting accident which had led to a permanent severe disability, classified as garrison usable home. This enabled him to continue his studies first and in Freiburg with the First State Exam and 1941 with the degree of Dr. jur. 1940 complete. He got a job in the defense and was transferred after a short time in Berlin by Please Leverkuehns Paul, who had become head of the Abwehr unit in Istanbul, according to Istanbul. In addition, the ambassador in Ankara, Franz von Papen was a distant relative of his wife.

He managed to leave behind for his wife, whom he had considered politically unreliable in Germany, in mid December 1943 to gain a special order for church-political explorations in Turkey. Although her entry was on the Bulgarian- Turkish border refused, as they both wanted to go to Turkey again, and Erich Increase had to go on alone, succeeded Elizabeth Increase to come over Sofia with a courier plane of the Foreign Office still to Istanbul.

Desertion

After her boyfriend Otto Carl Kiep was arrested in January 1944, Vermehrens were ordered back to Berlin to be heard in the context of this case. Erich Increase intensified its then existing contacts with the British Secret Service and initiated his desertion. To protect the families from guilt by association, an abduction was staged by the British on 27 January 1944. The couple was first brought to the land via Izmir and Aleppo to Cairo, thence to Gibraltar and finally in March 1944 to London.

Although the Vermehrens little intelligence- brought valorizable, the impression that they betray a secret German code was created. This and the fact that the British press on February 10 reported on the case with the headline Cousin of Papen deserts, led to the fall of the Berlin attracted wide circles and was included in Goebbels ' diary dated 4 March 1944 " the case Increase in Ankara has made the leader a lot of trouble. He has now passed the whole defense service to Himmler and the SD. " This incident had caused Hitler already on February 18, 1944 to overthrow the defense under Admiral Canaris and to provide oversight of the RSHA.

Several family members of both families were arrested. The Increase family was lured under false pretenses to Potsdam, where she first found in a hotel under house arrest and then in the Ravensbrück concentration camp ( Isa Increase ) and Sachsenhausen ( Kurt, Petra and Michael Increase ) was admitted.

In England

Erich and Elisabeth Increase lived in South Kensington, first in the home of the mother of Kim Philby as guests of the Foreign Office.

However, since they could not identify with the British policy towards Germany, they asked for approval, which was granted. Elisabeth propagating found a job at a Catholic school in Worth Priory, and Erich Increase in 1945 with an export company for rationed goods initially quite successful. In 1952 he found a job as an insurance broker. In 1954 he changed his surname to Vermeeren de Saventhem, Zaventem, Flemish origin of the proliferating family. The couple then generally used the name Eric Mary and Elizabeth de Save Them.

Later years

On behalf of the insurance company Lloyd 's of London Erich Increase built from autumn 1952 in Zurich with increasing success a subsidiary, Interbroke Ltd.. , On. In 1964, he was General Plenipotentiary for the entire European business and lived for two years in Paris. In 1966, the couple returned to Switzerland and was naturalized here.

In response to the Second Vatican Council, the conservative convert in the Catholic traditionalist movement was active. He was one of the founders of Una Voce and became the first president of this movement for the preservation of the Tridentine Mass.

As worsened Elisabeth Vermehrens health, the couple decided to return to Germany, and moved to Bonn in the vicinity of his sister Isa Increase monastery. Elizabeth died here on April 7, 2000. Erich growing, said still was able to travel to Rome for a meeting of the Una - Voce Board with the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 2003, died 2005.

Elisabeth and Erich Increase are buried in the cemetery in Bonn Poppelsdorf.

Writings

• Carl- Ludwig von Haller as a legal thinker. Freiburg (Breisgau ), Univ., Diss, 1988