Wolfgang Diewerge (12 January 1906 in Stettin - 4 December 1977 in Essen) was a Nazi propagandist in Joseph Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. His special field was anti-Semitic public relations, especially in connection with trials abroad, which could be exploited for propaganda purposes. He also played an essential role in the preparation of a show trial against Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination attempt on a German embassy employee in Paris had been used by the Nazis as a trigger for the November pogroms in 1938. In 1941, his pamphlets on the so-called Kaufman Plan and the Soviet Union were published in print runs of millions. After the war, Diewerge managed to re-enter politics via the FDP North Rhine-Westphalia. However, the intervention of the British occupation authorities and a commission of the FDP's Federal Executive Committee put an abrupt end to this intermezzo. In 1966 Diewerge was convicted of perjury for his statements made under oath about the Grynszpan trial planned by the National Socialists. After all, he was involved in the Flick donations affair as managing director of two associations.
Origin and early years Diewerge's father was Wilhelm Diewerge, a Stettin secondary school teacher and later school principal in Stargard in Pomerania. His mother's name was Hedwig, née Grell. Wolfgang Diewerge had a three years younger brother, Heinz Diewerge, who during the Nazi regime made a career as a folklorist, teacher trainer and member of the party's official examination commission for the protection of Nazi literature. Heinz Diewerge died in 1939 from a war injury he sustained during the Polish campaign.Otto Hofmann, Hinrich Siuts (ed.): Das Gröningsche Gymnasium zu Stargard in Pommern. Eine Schulgeschichte. Essen 1981, S. 131.
Wolfgang Diewerge attended the traditional Gröning grammar school in Stargard and passed his school-leaving examination there in 1924 Afterwards he studied law in Jena and Berlin. He passed the first state examination in law in 1929, followed by a legal clerkship at the Kammergericht in Berlin, with a stay abroad of several months as a court clerk at the German consular court in Cairo and with the German lawyer Felix Dahm, who was admitted to the Mixed Court there. In spring 1933 Diewerge applied for an abbreviation of the state examination in law, and in November of the same year he finally passed his assessor examination.Information on legal training according to Fuhrer 2012, p. 82 f., which uses files from documents on Diewerge in the Berlin Document Center.
Politically orientated, Diewergs early on aligned themselves with nationalist (Völkisch movement) and Nazi groups. According to his own statements, he became a member of the Schlageter-Gedächtnisbund (Schlageter Memorial Association) in October 1923, i.e. while still a schoolboy, and joined the Black Reichswehr in August 1924 in Leipzig. Since 1927, he occasionally wrote for Nazi newspapers and magazines, such as the Angriff, the Völkischer Beobachter, the Westdeutsche Beobachter, the National Socialist Monatshefte and the anti-Semitic satirical magazine Die Brennessel. August 1930 he joined the NSDAP (membership number 278.234). He is said to have been a member of the NSDAP earlier under the alias Diege. Even before 1933 Diewerge held various party offices in Berlin, from district propaganda officer to training officer to deputy local group leader. In addition, he made his legal knowledge available to various Nazi organizations, such as the Gaurechtsstelle Berlin of the NSDAP and the prisoner care of the SA, and appeared as a Gauredner.Fuhrer 2012, p. 82 f., with reference to information provided by Diewerge in his application to shorten the state examination.
Nazi propagandist In 1933 Diewerge became the Reich's managing director of the German Gymnastics Association and celebrated the Stuttgart Gymnastics Festival, which took place at the end of July, as a "folk festival in the National Socialist sense" in which "true national and destiny community" manifested itself In this year he also became head of the legal department of the "National Socialist Fighting League for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses – Gau Groß-Berlin". Diewerge was also a department head in the NSDAP foreign organization. In early 1934 he made his first public appearance. The occasion was a highly politicized trial in Cairo; the Egyptian capital was already familiar to him from his traineeship.Horkenbach 1935, p. 931 The biographical information there goes back to Diewerge's own communications, as can be seen from Horkenbach's preface; cf. ibid., p. 4.
Profiling in antisemitic public relations: The Cairo Process Wilhelm van Meeteren, the head of the Siemens Cairo branch and president of the German Association in Cairo, had published an antisemitic brochure there in mid-1933 entitled "The Jewish Question in Germany". Thereupon, the Jewish businessman Umberto Jabès, with the support of the Ligue Internationale Contre l'Antisémitisme (LICA, i.e. the International League against Anti-Semitism), had sued van Meeteren for damages for insult. The trial was to take place before a so-called Mixed Court, an Egyptian body for the settlement of legal disputes involving foreigners. On August 30, 1933, a discussion of the upcoming trial took place at the Foreign Office in Berlin's Wilhelmstraße, to which representatives of the Ministry of Propaganda were also invited. The young lawyer Diewerge was commissioned by this ministry to "prepare the ground" for the legal dispute.Cf. Albrecht Fuess: "Between Internment and Propaganda. The German Community in Egypt 1919-1939," in: Journal of the German Oriental Society, Supplement XI. XXVI German Orientalist Day, 25–29 September in Leipzig. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart, 1998, pp. 334–343, here: S. 341
Disturbed by the news that Jabès had won the internationally renowned Parisian lawyer Henry Torrès as his legal representative, the German Foreign Ministry initially pursued a cautious strategy and tried to keep the subject out of public debate in particular. Diewerge, on the other hand, sent a ten-page report to the Foreign Office on 29 September 1933 entitled "Press Support for the Cairo Trial", which, on the contrary, aimed to exploit the trial as publicly as possible. Diewerge drafted a detailed public relations strategy for this. He named media, target groups and costs and proposed a uniform label under which the trial would appear in the Nazi press: "Cairo Jewish Trial". According to him, the entire plan was coordinated in detail with the national group leader of the NSDAP in Egypt, Alfred Hess (Rudolf Hess' brother). The aim of the projected press work was clear from an enclosed sample text entitled "International Jewish Conspiracy against Germany in Egypt Revealed". Diewerge also immediately made public use of this sample text: for a lecture on October 5, 1933, on the radio and an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, which was largely identical to the text and appeared on October 6.Kassim 2000, pp. 364–367 The article in the Völkischer Beobachter was entitled: "A New Edition of the London Jewish Theatre in Cairo, Again an Anti-German Hate Trial of International Jewry"; cf. Kassim 2000, pp. 367. Furthermore, he sent the text via the lawyer of confidence of the German legation in Cairo to selected Arabic and French-language newspapers in Cairo in order to generate the desired press response in Egypt as well. Among other things, he arranged for the newspaper La Liberté, which is close to the Egyptian King Fu'ad I, to publish an interview with Goebbels on the day of the trial.Fuess 1996, p. 104.
Diewerge succeeded in asserting himself with his ideas. At the beginning of 1934 he was appointed commissioner for the preparation and conduct of the trial. He travelled to Cairo as Special Rapporteur of the Völkischer Beobachter. He wrote newspaper reports, gave an interview to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram and, after Jabès' complaint had been dismissed, on 31 January 1934 he gave a radio speech from Cairo on all German stations celebrating the "German victory over world Jewry". In 1935, after Jabès had also failed in the appeals court, Diewerge wrote a propagandistically designed report with the subtitle "Court-certified material on the Jewish question" in the party publishing house of the NSDAP.
In this court case, a division of labour had been established for the first time, which was continued in further proceedings: The internationally renowned international law expert Friedrich Grimm took over the legal side of the proceedings and appeared in the main hearing, while Diewerge took care of the journalistic and political planning in the sense of the Ministry of Propaganda.
In March 1934 Diewerge was employed as a government assessor in Goebbels' Reich Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda.Fuhrer 2012, p. 81. In mid-1935, he was listed in various constellations for Cuno Horkenbach's yearbooks as "Referent" in Department VII of this ministry, which is titled "Defense" or "Defense against lies.Horkenbach 1935, who notes in the preface that the status of the information on the organizations is that of the middle of 1935; see also Cuno Horkenbach: Handbuch der Reichs- und Staatsbehörden, Körperschaften und Organisationen, 1935/1936, Wirtschaftsverlag Berlin. For Diewerge this marked the beginning of a continuous rise. In 1936 he became Regierungsrat, in 1939 Oberregierungsrat (Senior Councillor). In 1941 he reached the career level of a Ministerialrat (assistant head of a government department). In 1936 he married, by 1941 the couple already had three children. An undated assessment of the ministry about Diewerge was very positive, in particular his attitude to the Nazi world view was acknowledged as "unconditional".Fuhrer 2012, p. 84. His duties included propaganda lectures abroad, among other things in connection with a three-month trip to Africa in 1937.Cf. Elke Fröhlich (Ed.): Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. K. G. Saur, Munich. Part I: Records 1923–1941. 1997–2005. volume 3, II, p. 382. Time and again his activities revolved around incidents, trials and publications abroad that gave rise to antisemitic campaigns against so-called world Jewry.
The Gustloff case: antisemitic politicization of a murder trial In 1936, Diewerge's responsibilities in Department VII of the Propaganda Ministry, now called "Foreign Countries", extended to France, the French possessions in North Africa (Algeria, Tunisia), Morocco, Egypt, Monaco, and Switzerland.Hans-Adolf Jacobsen: National Socialist Foreign Policy 1933–1938; Frankfurt/Berlin: Alfred Metzner, 1968, p. 714. When David Frankfurter shot the NS regional group leader Wilhelm Gustloff in Davos on February 4, 1936, Diewerge was given a new opportunity to demonstrate his abilities in antisemitic propaganda. As early as February 18, he asked the Foreign Office for material on the assassination and the situation of the Nazi regional group in Switzerland in order to produce a brochure on the subject. In April, he had completed this brochure, again in cooperation with the foreign organization of the NSDAP. It was published under the title Der Fall Gustloff: Vorgeschichte und Hintergründe der Bluttat von Davos by the NSDAP's in-house publishing house, Franz-Eher-Verlag. As in the Cairo affair, tensions arose between the Ministry of Propaganda and the Foreign Office, which in this case was supported by the Reich Ministry of Economics. However, this did not concern the content of the brochure, but only the official date of publication. With reference to important economic negotiations with Switzerland and the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the foreign and economic policy-makers demanded that the distribution of the booklet be waited until the summer. They were thus able to assert themselves.