Caesar von Hofacker

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Caesar von Hofacker , also Caesar von Hofacker (born March 11, 1896 in Ludwigsburg , † December 20, 1944 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German reserve officer in the Air Force involved in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler .

family

Caesar was the son of the later Württemberg Lieutenant General Eberhard von Hofacker and his wife Albertine, née Countess von Üxküll -Gyllenband. His great aunt was Hildegard von Spitzemberg . Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was his cousin.

Hofacker was married to Ilse-Lotte Pastor; The children Eberhard, Anna-Luise, Christa, Alfred and Liselotte are from the marriage. Anna-Luise later married the major general of the Bundeswehr Richard von Rosen .

Life

Hofacker joined the Uhlan Regiment "King Wilhelm I." (2nd Württembergisches) No. 20, previously commanded by his father, as a volunteer on August 8, 1914, after the beginning of the First World War . Eskadron in action. On May 7, 1915 he was made a non-commissioned officer and on December 4, 1915, he was made a vice sergeant . R. and promoted to Lieutenant in the Reserve on March 30, 1916 . On June 7, 1916, he was transferred to the replacement squadron, and on December 25, 1916 to training as a pilot in the Aviation Replacement Division 5 . After passing the exam, Hofacker was employed in the field pilot's department 69, where he was awarded the Golden Military Merit Medal on February 20, 1917 .

On April 3, 1917, at the request of King Wilhelm II of Württemberg, he was reassigned to the regiment's replacement squadron. He was transferred to the 26th Division on May 10, 1917 and assigned to the German military mission in Turkey . As a first lieutenant he was taken prisoner of war by the French on October 20, 1918 . He was released from captivity on March 14, 1920 and from military service on March 17, 1920.

After completing his studies, he was promoted to Dr. jur. doctorate and worked since 1927, since 1936 authorized signatory of the United Steelworks in Berlin . In 1931 he joined the Stahlhelm-Bund der Frontsoldaten . In 1939 he was drafted into the Air Force as a reserve officer , and after the occupation of France in 1940 - most recently as a lieutenant colonel in the reserve - he was appointed head of the "Iron and Steel" department of the German military commander in Paris .

Informed by his friend Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg about the military conspiracy against Hitler since 1942, he was transferred to the personal staff of General of the Infantry Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel in 1943 and established the connection between the military opposition in Paris and Berlin for his cousin Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. He had contacts with the Resistance and the Committee Free Germany for the West in France. Hofacker tried in early July 1944 to win General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel for the conspiracy, led the attempted coup in Paris on July 20, 1944 and was arrested after it failed.

The National Socialists saw von Hofacker as the "head of the coup" in France. He was sentenced to death by the People's Court on August 30, 1944 , and hanged in Plötzensee on December 20 of the same year . At the show trial chaired by the notorious chairman of the People's Court, Roland Freisler , he fell to him with the words “You are silent now, Mr. Freisler! Because today it's about my head. In a year's time it will be about your head! ”And showed a spirit of resistance even in this situation.

Use Lotte von Hofacker and all five children in kin custody

On July 30, 1944, his wife Ilse Lotte was arrested by the SS as family prisoners at her place of residence in Krottenmühl, a suburb of Söchtenau am Simssee , together with their two older children, Eberhard and Anna-Luise, and moved to the police school prison in Munich Ettstrasse 2 brought. The three younger children, Christa, Alfred and Liselotte, initially stayed at home under the care of an NSV sister and came to an NSV children's home in Bad Sachsa on the southern edge of the Harz Mountains on August 26th . There they were housed together with at times 43 other children from resistance families.

His wife Ilse Lotte and the two older children were transferred to a prison in Weilheim in Upper Bavaria on October 11, 1944 . From there, an odyssey began on October 31st, heading north via a hotel in Bad Reinerz in Silesia, the Stutthof and Lauenburg concentration camps near Gdansk , then heading south again to the Buchenwald concentration camp and via Regensburg and Schönberg to the Dachau concentration camp . They learned that their husband and father had been executed on January 6, 1945 in the Stutthof concentration camp. On April 30, 1945, shortly before the end of the war in South Tyrol, the Wehrmacht liberated them from the hands of the SS. In the custody of US troops , they continued on May 8, 1945 via Capri , Paris to Frankfurt am Main , where they were released home via Munich on June 26, 1945 .

Bad Sachsa was occupied by American troops on April 12, 1945 after brief fighting. The three little Hofacker children and the children of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg were picked up there on June 7, 1945 by their great-aunt Alexandrine Countess von Üxküll-Gyllenband . She brought Christa and Alfred to Caesar from Hofacker's sister Annemarie in Reichenbach and Liselotte to relatives in Tübingen . Ilse Lotte von Hofacker only found out on June 27th in Munich where her three youngest were. A few weeks later she managed to organize their trip home. On July 28, 1945 - after almost exactly a year of separation - she was reunited with her five children in Krottenmühl.

memory

In 1957 the "Hofackerzeile", a street in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district , was dedicated to the resistance fighter in Berlin . On July 22nd, 2009 the "Cäsar-von-Hofacker-Anlage", a street in the district of Oßweil , was named after him in his native Ludwigsburg . In Tutzing , where his eldest son Eberhard von Hofacker last lived, and in the Frankfurt district of Kalbach-Riedberg, there is a "Cäsar-von-Hofacker-Straße".

In 2010 a paper about the father was published by his youngest son Alfred von Hofacker. A review says:

"Alfred von Hofacker proves with anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and arrogant quotes from his father from the twenties and thirties that the path to resistance against the" Third Reich "was often not straight, but required a lengthy process of turning away and turning back the death of the mother in 1974 in documents in the attic of her house. The find made him “at first very upset” because the “resistance father” suddenly came up against him as “Adolf Hitler's pioneer”. Soon the father came closer to him because of this, because he "experienced him in these contradictions as a person who was not a hero". Caesar von Hofacker left the National Socialist "wrong track" which - as he wrote on June 30, 1944 - had "led to a pathological, sultry excess". So he participated with great passion in the uprising against Hitler, although the chances of success were slim: "In a letter to my mother a few weeks before July 20, 1944, he himself spoke of a ratio of 2 to 98." "

- Rainer Blasius

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ War ranking list of the regiment serial number 428
  2. ↑ Otto von Moser : Die Württemberger in the world wars. 2nd expanded edition, Chr.Belser AG, Stuttgart 1928, p. 130.
  3. ^ Friedrich Zipfel : Plötzensee Memorial . State Center for Political Education Berlin, Berlin, 7th edition 1966, p. 17.
  4. ↑ Christian Bommarius : Witness to History. Vinzenz Koppert ... , in: Berliner Zeitung of January 10, 2009 (online at berliner-zeitung.de) .
  5. ^ Valerie Riedesel Baroness to Eisenbach: Ghost children. Five siblings in Himmler's kin. Ullstein Taschenbuch, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-548-37777-3 , pp. 76-77.
  6. ↑ Valerie Riedesel (2018) p. 86.
  7. ↑ Valerie Riedesel (2018) p. 163.
  8. ↑ Valerie Riedesel (2018) pp. 107-108.
  9. ↑ Valerie Riedesel (2018) p. 109.
  10. ↑ Valerie Riedesel (2018) pp. 175–176.
  11. ↑ Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol. In: Online-Edition Mythos Elser 2006.
  12. ↑ Valerie Riedesel (2018) p. 285.
  13. ↑ Valerie Riedesel (2018) p. 305.
  14. ↑ Valerie Riedesel (2018) pp. 291–294.
  15. ↑ Valerie Riedesel (2018) p. 306 and 311.
  16. ↑ Hofackerzeile. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert ).
  17. ^ Alfred von Hofacker: Caesar von Hofacker. A pioneer for and a resistance fighter against Hitler, a contradiction? Stuttgart Stauffenberg Memorial Lecture 2009, Wallstein, Göttingen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8353-0626-4 .
  18. ↑ Review on forschungsgemeinschaft-20-juli.de.
personal data
SURNAME Hofacker, Caesar von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hofacker, Caesar von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Air Force officer, conspirator of the Hitler attack of July 20, 1944
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Ludwigsburg
DATE OF DEATH December 20, 1944
Place of death Berlin-Plötzensee