Heinrich Otto Abetz (26 March 1903 – 5 May 1958) was the German ambassador to Vichy France during the Second World War and a convicted war criminal. In July 1949 he was sentenced to twenty years' hard labour by a Paris military tribunal, he was released in April 1954 and died in a car accident four years later.
Early years
Abetz was born in Schwetzingen on 26 March 1903. He was the son of an estate manager, who died when Otto was only 13. Abetz matriculated in Karlsruhe, where he became an art teacher at a girls' school.
He would eventually join the Hitler Youth where he became a close friend of Joachim von Ribbentrop. He was also one of the founders of the Reichsbanner, the paramilitary arm of the Social Democrats, and was associated with groups such as the Black Front, a group of dissident National Socialists associated with Otto Strasser.
Abetz cultivated a legacy of strengthening Franco-German relations. Interested in French culture at an early age, in his twenties he started a Franco-German cultural group for youths, along with Jean Luchaire, known as the Sohlberg Congress. The group brought together a hundred German and French youth of all professions, social classes, political leanings, and religious affiliation. The group held their first conference in the Black Forest, and were frequently convened around ski slopes, campfires, and in hostels. The group maintained relations with the media through Luchaire's connection to the Notre Temps, and Abetz started the Sohlberg Circle (Sohlbergkreis). In 1934 the Sohlberg Circle was reborn as the Franco-German Committee (Comité France-Allemagne), which included Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Jacques Benoist-Mechin.
An ardent Francophile, Abetz married Luchaire's French secretary, Susanne de Bruyker, in 1932. His politics were leftist, and he was known as a pacifist who bridged differences with fascists.
National Socialist period
Abetz "pledged his support" for the NSDAP in 1931 and formally joined in 1937, the year he applied for the German Foreign Service. From 1938, he was representing Germany in Paris. There, he joined masonic lodge Goethe in 1939.
Abetz attended the Munich Conference in 1938. He was expelled from France in June 1939 following allegations he had bribed two French newspaper editors to write pro-German articles; his expulsion created a scandal in France when it emerged that the wife of the French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet was a close friend of the two editors, which led to much lurid speculation in the French press that Bonnet had received bribes from Abetz, though no firm evidence has ever emerged to support the rumors.
He was present in Adolf Hitler's entourage at the fall of Warsaw, and served as a translator for the German Führer. He returned to France in June 1940 following the German occupation and was assigned by Joachim von Ribbentrop to the embassy in Paris.
Following Hitler's June 30 directive, Abetz was assigned by Ribbentrop the project of "safeguarding" all objects of art, public, private, and especially Jewish-owned. Abetz embarked on the job with enthusiasm and announced to the Wehrmacht that the embassy had been "charged with the seizure of French works of art... and with the listing and seizure of works owned by Jews." On 17 September 1940 Hitler allowed Einsatzstab Rosenberg into the game too and soon pushed Abetz out of the confiscation business. The Pétain government protested Abetz's undertakings in late October, but nothing could stop the German agencies. By the end of October so much material had accumulated at the Louvre that it was decided more space was needed.
Ambassador to Vichy France
In November 1940 Abetz was appointed to the German Embassy in Paris, in occupied France, at the age of 37 – a post he held until July 1944. He was also head of the French fifth columnists through Ribbentrop's special unit within the Foreign Service.
He advised the German military administration in Paris and was responsible for dealings with the French Government now based at Vichy. In May 1941, he negotiated the Paris Protocols to expand German access to French military facilities.