Joseph Veltjens

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Joseph Veltjens in lieutenant's uniform

Josef "Seppl" Veltjens (born June 2, 1894 in Geldern , † October 6, 1943 in the Apennines near Piacenza ) was a German fighter pilot in World War I and holder of the Pour le Mérite order . In the Spanish Civil War he supplied the rebels around Franco with weapons and material.

Life

Josef Veltjens, born on June 2, 1894 in Geldern am Niederrhein , attended a humanistic grammar school in Berlin and then studied mechanical engineering with a focus on explosion engines at the Technical University in Charlottenburg .

After he had volunteered as a driver for the Queen Augusta Guard Grenadier Regiment No. 4 on August 3, 1914 , he came to the front on August 7. When his column was attacked by French outposts, Veltjens and three of his comrades tried in vain to defend the vehicles. After the cars were set on fire, he fought his way through to the Leib Grenadier Regiment No. 8 as a displaced person and, with the transition to trench warfare, came to Corps Motor Vehicle Column 8. Veltjens quickly moved up to become Vice Sergeant . After several attempts, he finally managed to get into the air force . On December 2, 1915, he completed his first school flight in Berlin-Johannisthal , after three days his first solo flight and on December 15 the pilot's exam. Without a ticket he drove to the front at the airfield in Tergnier during the Christmas vacation and actually achieved his request as a plane. On May 10, 1916, Veltjens came to Feld-Flieger -teilung 23 and became leader of a series of picture trains during the Battle of the Somme . In March 1917 he was requested as a pilot by Captain Rudolf Berthold for his Fighter Squadron 14. Veltjens, already a five-time winner in the air, followed Berthold to Jasta 18 in Flanders in August 1917 and thus joined Jagdgeschwader 2. In March 1918 Veltjens came to Jasta, whose command he temporarily took over in May. Shortly afterwards he received the Knight's Cross with Swords for the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern . When Captain Berthold came to the hospital because of an injury, Veltjens temporarily took over the deputy leadership of the fighter squadron. Veltjens shot down three enemy aircraft during a flight on August 11, 1918, including two of the Caudron bombers, which were considered invincible because of their armor. Lieutenant Veltjens, awarded the order Pour le Mérite on August 11, 1918, took over the Jasta 15 again on August 22, 1918 and led it in his Fokker D.VII, marked with a white arrow on the hull, until the end of the war. Veltjens and seven of his squadron comrades, including Lieutenant Georg von Hantelmann and Oliver von Beaulieu-Marconnay with 26 each, Lieutenant Johannes Klein with 16 and Lieutenant Hugo Schäfer with 11 aerial victories, shot in the last months of the war during the breakthrough battle on the Somme near Montdidier , then on the Aisne and finally against American planes at Verdun a total of 157 enemy aircraft - according to the army report 81 aircraft in six days alone - with only two losses of their own. Veltjens himself had 35 kills by the end of the war.

After the end of the war, the squadron in Halle was demobilized. Veltjens now reported to the armored vehicle department, where he was wounded by three shots while storming Bremen as an armored car commander in the Gerstenberg Freikorps . Veltjens then came to Bremerhaven and later to Düsseldorf , then to the government troops in Berlin . He was wounded three times in the fighting with the Spartakists . Later Veltjens went with several comrades on his own 100-ton freighter "Merkur" as a seaman "Joe Veltjens" in order to create such an existence; then he became a partner in a large arms trade company . Veltjens was a personal friend of Hermann Göring from the time of the First World War . He joined the NSDAP after the First World War but resigned from the party and the SA in 1931 because of a personal dispute with Hitler. On July 22, 1936, the German steamship Girgenti was searched for weapons by the militia in the port of Valencia . The captain of the Girgenti evacuated the ship by force. The German Foreign Ministry protested to the democratic government in Madrid. Shortly afterwards, the Girgenti von Veltjens was chartered and loaded on August 22, 1936 in Hamburg with weapons from the special staff W for the coup d'état in La Coruña . Veltjens delivered six He 51s to Emilio Mola on August 14, 1936 . In September 1936, Veltjens delivered a second batch of ten thousand rounds of caliber 7.92 mm . At the end of 1936, Veltjens formed a new shipping company with Henry Aschpurwis from Hamburg, which operated three ships under the name Hansagesellschaft Aschpurwis & Veltjens . In November 1936, the Urundi steamship transported 600 volunteers from the Irish Volunteer Brigade, led by Eoin O'Duffy , to the Spain of the coup d'état. In 1938 Aschpurwis & Veltjens bought an office in Hamburg for one million Reichsmarks . Veltjens' main business area was explosive transport for HISMA , ROWAK and OKW . During the Spanish Civil War , Veltjens was in a contract with the coup d'état to supply the Spanish calibres. While HISMA bartered, Veltjens delivered for convertible British pounds , since imported nickel and tungsten were required to manufacture weapons . In early 1937, Aschpurwis & Veltjens bought a French, a Danish and a Swedish freighter to hide their activities from the Non-Interference Committee and the rest of the German government. When asked by the Russians in Paris, he also negotiated a cargo of arms and ammunition to be delivered to the Republic of Spain, but only transported stones, which got him into trouble with the Swedish government because the ship was leaving Stockholm.

Josef Veltjens was reactivated by the Air Force . Personally commissioned by Hermann Göring, he led the negotiations with Finland as a colonel , which preceded the German troops' invasion of Lapland on June 8, 1941, and the Wehrmacht the use of Finnish territory as a deployment area and the use of the Baltic Sea port of Kemi as a supply base and permanent occupancy from Petsamo and other airfields.

Veltjens went to Milan on October 6, 1943 with the assignment to negotiate with the "Duce" Benito Mussolini in view of the Allied advance over the relocation of the Italian gold reserves . Before flying to Rome , he was warned of British interceptors in Milan. Therefore, the pilot continued the flight at a very low altitude. The plane crashed into a mountain in the Apennines . Only the radio operator of the Junkers Ju 52 was able to save himself with serious injuries before the machine burned out.

Josef Veltjens remains were transferred to Lübeck and buried in the local cemetery.

See also

literature

  • Whitehouse, Arch: Flieger-Ase 1914–1918, Stuttgart 1970

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Klaus Veltjens: Seppl: a step ahead of politics , CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform , 2012, ISBN 978-1442145825 .
personal data
SURNAME Veltjens, Joseph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Veltjens, Josef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German fighter pilot in the First World War
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Funds
DATE OF DEATH October 6, 1943
Place of death Piacenza