User:Eli185/Eberhard Czichon

The grave of Eberhard Czichon and his wife Ruth at the Baumschulenweg cemetery in Berlin

Eberhard Czichon (* August 8, 1930 in Luckenwalde; † September 8, 2020 in Berlin) was a Marxist German historian whose books about the role of businessmen and bankers in the rise of the Nazis resulted in lawsuits and bans.

Youth and professional life

Czichon first did an apprenticeship as a wholesale merchant, then took his Abitur at a workers' and farmers' college and went on to study history. He then worked first as a lecturer, then in the Institute for Local History Museums at the Ministry of Culture. In 1948 he joined the SED, and for a short time he also worked as an unofficial employee of the Ministry for State Security. His solitary nature repeatedly brought him into conflict with state and party authorities. A doctoral project on the role of big industry in the rise of the NSDAP failed.. At the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, he was first employed in the Office for Academy History and, from 1970, in the Scientific Information Center.

The book Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht?

In 1966, he met Paul Neuhöffer in Cologne, the head of the West German Pahl-Rugenstein publishing house, who convinced him to summarize the preliminary work on his dissertation and publish it with him. The result was the 105-page book Who Helped Hitler to Power? in 1967. The historian Brünger calls the book a brochure. In it, Czichon tried to explain the rise of the NSDAP with manipulations of big industry. Adolf Hitler had been only the "laboriously played up and expensively paid political candidate" of a "Nazi group" of industrialists, bankers and large landowners. Since the publications of the American historian Henry Ashby Turner, this agent theory has been disproved.. This work was widely received in student and trade union circles in the Federal Republic of Germany. It was published in six editions until 1989.

Diffamation lawsuit for writings on Hermann Josef Abs

Publications

At Neuhöffer's suggestion, Czichon began researching the behavior of Deutsche Bank and its new Supervisory Board Chairman Hermann Josef Abs during the National Socialist era. In the archives of the German Institute for Economic Research, he found extensive files, which he began to work through after hours. Overwhelmed with the technical language of the financial world, he also wrote to Abs himself asking for help in understanding, but Abs did not reply. The result was a longer essay for the Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, published by Pahl-Rugenstein. For reasons of length, the text was divided into three parts, the first two of which were published in 1967. Upon Abs's intervention with the co-editor Viktor Renner, the third did not appear. Renner left the editorial board in a dispute over Czichon's essay. As a result, the text appeared in two different book versions. A shorter one was published in 1969 by Union Verlag in East Berlin under the title Hermann Josef Abs. Porträt eines Kreuzritters des Kapitals. The western version, published the following year by Pahl-Rugenstein, was more detailed and endeavored to provide a theoretical underpinning for the material presented. It was entitled Der Bankier und die Macht. Hermann Josef Abs in German Politics, with a foreword by the American historian George W. F. Hallgarten. More than a third of the text in both volumes dealt with Abs' postwar career. Hereby, Czichon tried to make plausible the unbroken continuity of the pernicious influence of business on politics up to the time of the Federal Republic of Germany.

When a student from Marburg cancelled her account with Deutsche Bank in March 1970, referring to Czichon's book, the branch manager responsible replied that the allegations made in it were "untrue and insulting in all essential points". This letter was printed in a student magazine, whereupon Czichon threatened the Marburg branch with a libel suit in which he wanted to obtain DM 5,000 from the bank "in favor of the freedom struggle of the Vietnamese people..

Trials

Abs, who originally wanted to minimize publicity of the controversy, then sued Czichon and his publisher Manfred Pahl-Rugenstein for libel and defamation. On August 12, Abs and Deutsche Bank filed an action for an injunction against twenty, and later forty, of Czichon's allegations with the Regional Court in Stuttgart. They also demanded damages and a judicial declaration that his publications were "political tendentious writings." Among other things, the suit concerned Czichon's allegations that Abs had personally enriched himself in the "Aryanization" of Jewish companies, that he had been a "convinced supporter of the Hitler regime," that he had been responsible for the forced labor of concentration camp prisoners and even children, and that Abs and Deutsche Bank had plundered property from countries occupied by Germany.. The aim of the plaintiffs was to prevent a second edition of the book. In this, Abs and Deutsche Bank were represented by Martin Löffler; he was supported by Josef Augstein, among others, while on the side of the defendants, Friedrich Karl Kaul acted as lawyer, supported by the West German lawyer Heinrich Mackenrodt. In September 1970, the Regional Court issued an injunction against the book, which Kaul appealed. He also filed a complaint against Abs for perjury, because Abs had made various affidavits about his behavior during the Nazi era. With the trial on the merits, the legal dispute thus developed on three different levels. The trial met with keen public interest.

Czichon and his publisher lost both the appeal against the preliminary injunction and the proceedings in the main action. Both were ordered to pay DM 20,000 in damages in June 1972 because Czichon was convicted of 32 counts of false statements of fact. In addition, the book was not allowed to be distributed further. The enforcement of this sum was not pursued by Abs, since Augstein and Kaul had agreed out of court that Czichon's books would no longer be published and further attacks on Abs and Deutsche Bank, namely a publication of the OMGUS reports, which contained incriminating material about Abs, were omitted..

In fact, Czichon had overinterpreted his sources, namely with regard to the accusation of personal enrichment. However, historian Sebastian Brünger also points out that the court largely followed the traditional legal positivist narrative of the apolitical and thus innocent functionary, as if the Aryanizations had been completely normal business transactions and Abs should not have been accused of his collaboration in the racist policies of the Nazi regime..

After the trials

Czichon submitted his Abs biography as a dissertation under the title Der Techniker der ökonomischen Aggression (The Technician of Economic Aggression), but it was dismissed as an "unscientific work of fiction" in a 1974 expert opinion by the historian Dietrich Eichholtz. Czichon's doctoral project thus failed again, and a further career in the GDR's scientific establishment was ruled out. From then on, he published nothing until the end of the GDR. This was attributed to the Stuttgart trial, which had done considerable damage to the reputation of GDR historical scholarship abroad. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czichon explained his academic failure with a plot by the new First Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, Erich Honecker, who would have sacrificed the historical truth allegedly represented by Czichon in the hope of obtaining Western credits.

In 1995, a revised new edition of his book Der Bankier und die Macht. Hermann Josef Abs in German Politics under the title Die Bank und die Macht. Hermann Josef Abs, Deutsche Bank and Politics in Cologne. In this, according to historian Lothar Gall, the "incriminated passages have been replaced by new ones and the orthodox communist 'fascism analysis' has also been partially eliminated." In his opinion, the source references "are still inaccurate, however, and in some cases simply not comprehensible, which is particularly striking when, after the end of the GDR, large holdings are now freely accessible.“

Czichon was expelled from the SED in 1981 "for insubordination".. From 1990 to 1994 he was a member of the PDS, in 1993 he joined the DKP.

Czichon lived in Berlin until his death in September 2020.

Writings

• Wer verhalf Hitler zur Macht? Zum Anteil der deutschen Industrie an der Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik. In englischer Broschur, 105 S., Pahl-Rugenstein, Köln 1967. Zweite Auflage 1971. ISBN 3-7609-0042-9.
• Der Primat der Industrie im Kartell der national-sozialistischen Macht. In: Das Argument 10 (1968), S. 168 ff.
• Hermann Josef Abs. Bankier und Politiker (I). In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik Heft 7 (1967), S. 687–703.
• Hermann Josef Abs. Bankier und Politiker (II). In: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik Heft 9 (1967), S. 908–929.
• Hermann Josef Abs. Porträt eines Kreuzritters des Kapitals. Union Verlag, Berlin (Ost) 1969.
• Der Bankier und die Macht. Hermann Josef Abs in der deutschen Politik. Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, Köln 1970.
• Die Bank und die Macht – Hermann Josef Abs, die Deutsche Bank und die Politik. Papyrossa Verlag, Köln 1995, ISBN 3-89438-082-9.
• (zusammen mit Heinz Marohn) Das Geschenk. Die DDR im Perestroika-Ausverkauf. Papyrossa Verlag, Köln 1999, ISBN 3-89438-171-X.
• Deutsche Bank / Macht – Politik. Faschismus, Krieg und Bundesrepublik. Papyrossa Verlag, Köln 2001, ISBN 978-3-89438-219-3.
• (zusammen mit Heinz Marohn) Thälmann. Ein Report, Heinen, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-939828-56-3. (2 Bände)
• Verlorene Heimat - Erinnerungen und Überlegungen eines Historikers, Autobiographie, Selbstverlag, 2017, (2 Bände).
• "Die Entnazifizierung der Deutschen Bank ist gescheitert: Zu Harold James neuem Buch über die Deutsche Bank"

• Literature by and about Eli185/Eberhard Czichon in the German National Library catalogue
• Nachlass Bundesarchiv N 2552

References

[[Category:2020 deaths]] [[Category:1930 births]] [[Category:German people]] [[Category:People from Berlin]] [[Category:Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime members]] [[Category:German Communist Party members]] [[Category:Party of Democratic Socialism (Germany) politicians]] [[Category:Historians of Nazism]] [[Category:Marxist historians]] [[Category:Contemporary historians]]