Dietrich von Jagow

Jagow was born into a distinguished aristocratic family in Frankfurt an der Oder. Jagow ascribed to the typical Junker values of militarism, nationalism and a deep devotion to serving the state.[1] After attending the Mürwik naval school, he joined the Imperial German Navy as an officer on 1 April 1912. During the First World War, he served on a submarine and then commanded a minesweeper after the Armistice of 11 November 1918. Jagow began the war in 1914 as a lieutenant and had risen to the rank of senior lieutenant by 1918.[2]

In September 1919, Jagow joined the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt of the Freikorps and took part in the Kapp Putsch of March 1920.[3] Refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Weimar Republic, he left the Navy later in March 1920. Settling in Bavaria, he joined the right-wing terrorist group Organization Consul that assassinated pro-Weimar politicians. His first job was as a sales agent for the Bavarian Wood Processing Company, which was a front for the Organization Consul. In the fall of 1920, he joined the NSDAP and in early 1921 he joined the SA. In the spring of 1921, he fought against the Poles in Silesia.

Jagow (second on the left) and the Hungarian prime minister Count László Bárdossy (the man on the right) in 1941.

In January 1922, Adolf Hitler sent Jagow to set up the first NSDAP group in Tübingen, and Jagow subsequently became one of the most important Nazi leaders in Württemberg. Jagow worked as guest lecturer at Eberhard Karls University.[4] In April 1922 Hitler appointed Jagow SA inspector and chief of staff for Württemberg.[4] After the failure of the Munich Beer Putsch in November 1923, Jagow left the NSDAP, but remained active in a number of völkisch groups in Württemberg. From 1923 to 1927, he was a member of the Bund Wiking (Viking League).[5] In 1927, he joined the Stahlhelm. In 1929, he rejoined the NSDAP. From 1929 to 1930 he was the local NSDAP group leader in Esslingen am Neckar and the managing director of the NSDAP Gau in Württemberg. In 1931 Jagow was appointed full-time SA group leader "Southwest", making him in charge of all SA units in southwestern Germany. Jagow was well known as a militant anti-Semite and a devotee of the Führer principle. Jagow was elected to the Reichstag in 1932 and remained a member until 1945.

In March 1933, Jagow briefly served as the commissioner of the Württemberg state police. He had a concentration camp built at Heuberg and organised the boycott of Jewish businesses in Württemberg as part of the national boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933. The Württemberg NSDAP was torn by a feud between Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr and his rival Christian Mergenthaler, leading Jagow who backed the losing side to be transferred to Frankfurt am Main as leader of the SA group V. In June 1933, he was promoted to the rank of SA Obergruppenführer. After the Night of the Long Knives, Jagow was transferred to Berlin, which he headed the local SA branch from July 1934 to January 1942. Jagow had resumed his naval career in 1933 as a reserve officer and served during the Spanish Civil War in 1936-1937 as an intelligence officer. In 1936, when the völkisch magazine Das innere Reich was banned following an article which implicitly criticized the idolisation of Frederick the Great under the Third Reich, the editors of the Das innere Reich appealed to Jagow among other people for help.[6] On 23 October 1936, the ban of Das innere Reich was lifted following the intervention of Rudolf Hess.[7]

In September 1939, he resumed his naval officer as an active officer, initially commanding the minesweeper Tannenberg in the Baltic Sea. Jagow was always proud to be a Junker and combined traditional Junker values with Nazism.[1] In a letter to his son written in September 1939, Jagow encouraged him to remember the Jagow family values of "the tradition of honour, loyalty, knightliness and bravery".[8] In the same letter, Jagow told his son not to be a Duckmäuser ("moral coward") and to stay faithful to the "National Socialist idea unto death".[8] From October 1940 to April 1941, he commanded the 18th flotilla of patrol boats, torpedo boats, and minesweepers in the English channel, leading his forces into nightly clashes with the Royal Navy for control of the channel.

Jagow with Hans Heinrich Lammers, May 1939

In January 1941, long-standing rivalries between the Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office) and the SS exploded with the attempted coup d'etat in Bucharest that saw SS back the coup by the Iron Guard under its leader Horia Sima against the Prime Minister, General Ion Antonescu while the Auswärtiges Amt together with the Wehrmacht backed Antonescu. In the aftermath of the coup, the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop made an effort to club the power of the SS to conduct a foreign policy independent of the Auswärtiges Amt. Taking an advantage of the long-standing rivalries between the SS and the SA, in 1941, Ribbentrop appointed an assemblage of SA men to head the German embassies in Eastern Europe, with Manfred von Killinger going to Romania, Siegfried Kasche to Croatia, Adolf-Heinz Beckerle to Bulgaria, Dietrich von Jagow to Hungary, and Hanns Ludin to Slovakia in order to ensure that there would be minimal co-operation with the SS.[9] The role of the SA ambassadors was that of "quasi-Reich governors" as they aggressively supervised the internal affairs of the nations they were stationed in, making them very much unlike traditional ambassadors.[10] The German historian Daniel Siemans wrote that it was significant that four of the five SA ambassadors had served as policemen in their careers, suggesting it was their ability to impose their will on others as police chiefs that led them for them being appointed as ambassadors.[11] Those who knew him reported that Jagow was "deeply unhappy" about serving as a diplomat as he much preferred to be fighting in the war.[12]

From 1941 to 1944, he was the German minister (ambassador) to Hungary. The Hungarian politician Count Miklós Kállay described him: "In those days I had my first meeting with the German minister , Herr Dietrich von Jagow. He was a relative nonentity, neither a politician nor a career diplomat, but an enthusiastic member of the SA".[13] Herbert Pell, the American minister in Budapest called Jagow "in many ways a boorish little fellow".[14]

As minister in Budapest, where he frequently pressured the Hungarian government to do its part in the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" by deporting the entire Hungarian Jewish community to the death camps. He first presented this demand on 17 October 1942 at a meeting with the Hungarian foreign minister Count Jenő Ghyczy and repeated it a number of times there afterwards.[3] However, the Hungarian government increased the severity of its anti-Semitic laws and imposed the onerous labor service on Hungarian Jewish men, but refused to deport its Jews.[3] Jagow knew nothing of Hungary, and his almost mindless militarism as he had a deep-rooted contempt for civilians made it difficult for him to forge friendships in Budapest.[3] Besides for the "Jewish Question", Jagow's main duties in Budapest were to monitor the situation in Balkans, recruit Hungarian volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) into the Waffen-SS and to ensure that Hungary kept supplying Germany with food.[3] Jagow favored closer links with the Arrow Cross movement, but was generally overruled by his superiors in the Auswärtiges Amt who preferred to stay on good terms with Admiral Miklos Horthy, the Regent of Hungary.[15]

In October and again in November 1942, Jagow reported to Berlin that he did not expect the Hungarian government to agree to his requests to deport Hungarian Jews to the death camps.[16] Several times, he repeated the request in 1943, but was always rebuffed which damaged his standing in Berlin.[16] On 15 April 1943, Jagow told Admiral Horthy that he wanted to see two members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Ferenc Chrorin and Aurél Egry, expelled, saying it was distasteful for him to see two men who had "Jewish blood" discuss foreign policy questions.[17] Horthy refused under the grounds that this was a Hungarian internal matter that was of no concern to the German minister.[17]

The fact that there were about 762, 000 Jews still living in Hungary at the time of the German occupation in March 1944 was seen as a failure on Jagow's part and he was replaced as minister by Edmund Veesenmayer.[3] On 8 May 1944, he returned to Berlin.[3] In September 1944 he became leader of the Volkssturmbataillon 35 of the Volkssturm (militia) in Silesia.[16] Jagow did not enjoy being a diplomat and welcomed the return to the military life, which he craved.[16] On 21 January 1945 while fighting against the Red Army in Silesia, Jagow personally knocked out 4 Soviet tanks with his panzerfaust (anti-tank rocket launcher), for which he was mentioned in dispatches.[16] During the same action, he was badly wounded and lost an eye.[16] He stayed in a hospital in Leipzig until March 1945 when he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Italian Social Republic.[16] Along the way to Italy, he stopped in South Tyrol in the city of Meran (modern Merano, Italy), which had been annexed to the Reich in September 1943.[16] On 26 April 1945, Jagow committed suicide in the house of the German ambassador to the Italian Social Republic, Rudolf Rahn.[16] His suicide note stated that he did not want to live in a world controlled by Jews, which is what he believed would be the situation after Germany's defeat.

Despite his commitment to Nazism, Jagow was posthumously "de-Nazified" with a judge in West Germany ruling on 13 February 1950 that Jagow was a "lesser offender" as the judge ruled he was not a committed Nazi and conducted himself in "an idealistic and decent way".[18] Jagow's widow was living in dire poverty with seven children to raise, and it appears that the judge's ruling was intended to help her by allowing her to collect a widow's pension rather being based on an objective assessment of his career.[18]

• Baker, Leonard (1972). Brahmin in Revolt: A Biography of Herbert C. Pell. New York: Doubleday.
• Bloch, Michael (1992). Ribbentrop. New York: Crown Publishers. ISBN 0517593106.
• Campbell, Bruce (2004). The SA Generals and the Rise of Nazism. Lexington: University of Kentucky. ISBN 0813190983.
• Cornelius, Deborah S (2011). Hungary in World War II: Caught in the Cauldron. New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 0823233448.
• Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf (1999). "The Structure of Nazi Foreign Policy, 1933-1945". In Christian Leitz (ed.). The Third Reich The Essential Readings. Blackwell. pp. 49–94. ISBN 9 780631 207009.
• Kállay, Miklós (1970). Hungarian Premier: A Personal Account of a Nation's Struggle in the Second World War. Westport, Connecticut: c. ISBN 0837139651.
• Siemens, Daniel (2017). Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300231253.
• Tourlamain, Guy (2014). Völkisch Writers and National Socialism: A Study of Right-Wing Political Culture in Germany, 1890-1960. Pieterlen: Peter Lang AG. ISBN 978-3039119585.