European Values
PARIS/HAMBURG (Own report) - With the support of German state institutions, the notorious "Alfred Toepfer Stiftung, F.V.S." is once again planning to make an appearance in France, after numerous attempts. The Hamburg based foundation is organizing a vernissage at the Maison Heinrich Heine in the Cité internationale universitaire in Paris on November 7. By appearing as patron of the arts, the foundation is seeking to cover up its eponym, Alfred Toepfer's, shady past and is encountering heavy French resistance. The critics are pointing to the Nazi activities of the Hamburg merchant and founding father of the foundation, Alfred Toepfer, who had had close ties to the SS and high ranking Nazi officials. During World War II, Toepfer had worked also for the German administration in charge of occupied Paris ("Sabotage and Subversion in Enemy States"). His activities were inimical to France. He had promoted an ethnically oriented "new order" for Europe under German hegemony. The critics in the French capital are outraged, because the vernissage will have as its motto, Toepfer's battle cry "Europe".
Alfred Toepfer's Nazi activities, which are the focus of the protests, have been sufficiently known for some time (german-foreign-policy.com has reported extensively).[1] Toepfer had close contacts with known Nazis and had the status of "SS promoter". During World War II, he became "Counterespionage officer", in occupied Paris in charge of "sabotage and subversion" and later for "the clandestine procurement of goods" for the German Reich - in other words the arbitrary plunder of the occupied territory. His business enterprises maintained their profit-making throughout World War II. One of Toepfer's companies supplied slaked lime to the Ghetto administration in Łódź to cover the cadavers. After the war, Toepfer employed several Nazi criminals in his companies, among them Edmund Veesenmeyer and Hans-Joachim Riecke. Edmund Veesenmeyer worked with Adolf Eichmann in the mass deportation of approximately 400.000 Hungarian Jews to the German extermination camps. Hans-Joachim Riecke was implicated in the wholesale slaughter of several hundred thousand Soviet prisoners of war. Up to the beginning of the 1970s, Toepfer financed a leading German neo-Nazi, who later produced the pamphlet "The Auschwitz-Lie".
Carte Blanche
At the beginning of this year, the "Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S." [2], considered Germany's largest private foundation, was able to celebrate its 75th anniversary. Since the mid 1990s, this foundation has come under sharp criticism, particularly from France, because of the Nazi role of its founder. Two years ago, the French theater directrice Ariane Mnouchkine refused the German foundation's highly remunerated "Hanseatic Goethe-Award". For years, the foundation has been trying to neutralize its critics, which is why in the late 1990s, it convened a commission of historians to examine Toepfer's biography. In spite of the Hamburg merchant's obvious and uncontested Nazi activities, these experts, financed by the Toepfer Foundation, concluded, that "in any case it would be wrong to directly or indirectly implicate him in the Nazi regime's crimes."[3] The commission "issued the foundation a very unconvincing carte blanche," commented the historian Michael Fahlbusch.[4]
"Europe"
The foundation's argumentation was focused on Toepfer's "Europe" orientation. According to the former head of the historian commission, Hans Mommsen, Toepfer had before 1945, already "argued for a European solution" thereby clearly distancing himself "from the main Nazi line."[5] But in reality, one of the main lines of the Nazi's propaganda on the continent was to mask German hegemony as "European". "Europe" is still the focus of the foundation's activities. According to its statutes, the foundation is committed "to promoting European unification and ensuring cultural diversity".[6]
Ethnic Groups
"Europe" structured in accordance with its "ethnic political diversity," is an important element in Toepfer's ideology. "Our cradle is and remains Europe. It is the cradle of the white race," the Hamburg merchant declared at the Foundations 1938 "Mozart Prize" Awards.[7] Two years later, in May 1940, he published his thoughts on the structure of Europe, entitled "Westschau".[8] According to Toepfer, a "European economic realm" should permit the economic permeation of the continent. Simultaneously he was developing plans to secure the German Reich's absolute hegemony. Throughout Europe "ethnic groups" should be allowed to "freely develop," which, for example, would decompose France into numerous "ethnic" regions. He was particularly concerned that "German ethnic groups" be liberated from eastern Belgium and France (Alsace, Lorraine).
Bases
Following the invasion of Belgium and France, Toepfer participated in the practical implementation of his "Europe" concept - applying his liberation of "ethnic groups" ideas. "In Alsace-Lorraine Toepfer organized networks of spies for the Wehrmacht's counterespionage", recounts the historian Karl-Heinz Roth. "In Belgium and the Western French provinces he participated, until the summer of 1942, in the recruitment and organizing of autonomy movements (...) to politically assure the Wehrmacht's strategic bases at the Channel coast, 'along ethnic lines,' with the aid of Flemish, Brittany, 'Celtic' and Basque collaborators."[9] The plan was "to consolidate the achievements of the Blitzkrieg offensive against Western Europe, to 'ethnically' encircle France, the 'archenemy,' from all sides and to abandon, in accordance with Werner Best, head of the military administration, what was left - the center of France - to its fate, within the framework of a 'designated collaborator administration'." A newly "ordered" Europe - under German leadership.
Burned
Not only the fact that the vernissage on November 7 is to be held under the banner "European values", has particularly angered the critics of the Toepfer Foundation, but also by the choice of location for the event, the Maison Heinrich Heine in Paris. Heinrich Heine had left Germany in 1831 for exile in the French capital. While Alfred Toepfer was promoting the "new European order" on behalf of the German occupiers in Paris and while his foundation was busy awarding "Mozart-" and "Eichendorff prizes [10], the works of Heinrich Heine had been outlawed in Germany; Heine monuments had been destroyed and his books had been burned in May 1933.
Please read also a French dossier about Toepfer Foundation.
[1] see also Widerstand gegen deutsche "Mäzenaten", "Goethe" in Colmar, Gau Oberrhein, Human Rights, Ethnically Pure, Wille und Vorstellung, Gesamteuropäische Perspektive, Nicht verstrickt, Kriegstreiber, Blut und Boden and Persilschein
[2] Was "F.V.S.", ein von Alfred Toepfer gewähltes Kürzel, bedeuten soll, hat der Stiftungsgründer nie geklärt; es steht entweder für "Friedrich von Schiller" oder für "Freiherr vom Stein".
[3] "Es drängte Toepfer nie zur NSDAP"; Die Welt 19.04.2005
[4] see also Persilschein
[5] Interview mit Prof. Hans Mommsen; www.toepfer-fvs.de. See also Wille und Vorstellung
[6] Profil; www.toepfer-fvs.de
[7], [8] Qu'y a-t-il derrière le masque "européen" de "La figure du grand négociant et grand mécène Alfred Toepfer"? Communiqué, Paris, 04.11.2007
[9] Die vollständige Studie von Karl-Heinz Roth finden Sie hier.
[10] see also Blut und Boden
