Otto Kumm

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Otto Kumm in the uniform of an SS-Obersturmbannführer, propaganda photo by Friedrich Zschäckel , March 1943

Otto Kumm (born October 1, 1909 in Hamburg , † March 23, 2004 in Offenburg ) was a German SS brigade leader and major general of the Waffen SS . As such, he commanded units of the Waffen SS in various theaters of war in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during World War II . 1944-45 he was commander of in numerous war crimes involved the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division "Prinz Eugen" . Kumm was one of the founders of the mutual aid community of former members of the Waffen-SS e. V. (HIAG).

Life

Kumm was the son of a merchant. After graduating from secondary school , he did an apprenticeship from April 1, 1925 to March 31, 1929 and then worked for five years as a typesetter .

Promotion with the SS

Charkow, Waffen SS in front of a burning house, propaganda photo by Friedrich Zschäckel, February – March 1943

Otto Kumm joined the NSDAP on December 1, 1931 ( membership number 421.230) and was accepted into the SS as an SS man that same month . On April 1, 1934 he joined the rank of SS second lieutenant as a volunteer in the under construction SS-Verfügungstruppe and served in the I. / SS regiment "Germania" in Hamburg. In August 1934 he became leader of the Hamburg Political Readiness. Meanwhile SS-Obersturmführer, in July 1935 he became chief of the 4th (MG) company of the Standarte. In September 1936 he was appointed SS-Hauptsturmführer. From December 1936 he served as chief of the 2nd company of the SS standard "Germany" in Munich .

After the “Anschluss” of Austria , Kumm became company commander in the SS standard “Der Führer” stationed in Klagenfurt in March 1938 and took part in the 1939 attack on Poland with the latter . In April 1940 he took over a heavy standard company with which he marched into Holland in the western campaign . During the fighting he became the commander of the III. Battalion appointed. On October 1, 1940, he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer. In the spring of 1941, Kumm and his battalion took part in the attack on Yugoslavia as part of the "Reich" (motorized) SS division during the Balkan campaign . At the beginning of June it was ready for the attack on the Soviet Union in the Lublin area . On July 12, 1941 he took over the leadership of the SS regiment “Der Führer” from Georg Keppler .

The SS regiment "Der Führer" under Obersturmbannführer Kumm held a thin barrier at the Battle of Rzhev from January 1942 , which secured a connection with neighboring army units. Of the 2,000 men who were subordinate to Kumm, 35 survived.

V. l. To the right: Sylvester Stadler , Hans Weiß , Christian Tychsen , Otto Kumm, Vinzenz Kaiser and Karl-Heinz Worthmann in the Soviet Union (April 1943); Propaganda photo by Friedrich Zschäckel

Kumm's next combat mission with his regiment came when after the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943 the collapse of the southern eastern front threatened. The division “Das Reich” was transferred to the threatened section of the front as part of the now established SS Panzer Corps and took part in the Battle of Kharkov . In the same month he handed over his command to Sylvester Stadler and returned to Germany.

In July 1943, Kumm was appointed Chief of Staff of the V. SS Mountain Corps under Artur Phleps . In this function he worked from October 1943 in the war against the Tito partisans in Bosnia . On January 30, 1944, while being promoted to SS-Oberführer at the same time, he was appointed commander of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen” , which was also deployed in occupied Yugoslavia .

On March 28, 1944, the SS division "Prinz Eugen" killed the inhabitants of several villages in the Knin area , including Otok near Sinj . The Croatian Foreign Minister Stijepo Perić protested in Berlin that the residents were herded into the houses and shot through the windows with machine guns. At the 7th Nuremberg trial of the war criminals , the number of victims on March 28, 1944 was put at 2,014 deaths in 22 villages. Men, women and children were then downright slaughtered and the villages plundered. The evidence presented to the court by the Yugoslav delegation also included photos that "documented the burning of villages, slaughter of the population, torture of captured partisans" by the "7th SS Mountain Volunteer Division, Prince Eugene led by Otto Kumm".

On November 9, 1944 Otto Kumm was promoted to SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the Waffen SS. With the "Prinz Eugen" division, he withdrew to Hungary.

From 6 to March 16, 1945 Otto Kumm took over as commander of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH), which he after wounding Wilhelm Mohnkes took over in early February, at the operation Spring Awakening in part, the last major German offensive of the Second World War in the area of Lake Balaton , which among other things was supposed to secure the oil wells and fuel reserves there for the German war economy. Despite initial gains in terrain, the operation was unsuccessful. The 6th Panzer Army under Sepp Dietrich and the LSSAH under Otto Kumm had to retreat towards Vienna .

After 1945

After his capture Kumm was by his own admission in the internment Dachau the US Army transferred and then across half a year in Nuremberg as a witness in the process generals in Southeast Europe interrogated, but then returned to Dachau. According to his own account, he escaped extradition to Yugoslavia by fleeing over the wall of the Dachau internment camp.

On January 1, 1949, an approximately 50-strong "Comradeship Group of the Waffen-SS" was founded in Hamburg. Presumably from September 1950 this operated as "Aid Community on Mutuality (HIAG)", Kumm became its first chairman. This designation was taken up by other SS veteran groups. In October 1951, Kumms met with SPD politicians Kurt Schumacher , Annemarie Renger and Herbert Wehner . The topics of conversation were a discrimination alleged by Kumm against former members of the Waffen-SS, their material supplies and the demarcation between Waffen-SS and general SS. During the conversation, according to the military historian Jens Westemeier , Kumm argued with a "strange parallel". For the SPD it should therefore be a matter of course to understand the Waffen-SS as a positive component of the Wehrmacht , because “there has never been a force in Germany whose structure corresponded to the old social-democratic idea of ​​the people's army as it did former Waffen-SS ”. His personal rise from a small skilled worker without a high school diploma to a general only by virtue of his own achievement is a good example of this character of the Waffen-SS as a people's army.

In addition to Kumm in Hamburg, other former Waffen SS officers tried to organize the veterans, such as Herbert Otto Gille in the south of Lower Saxony and Paul Hausser . Like Gille and Hausser, Kumm aimed for a high degree of organization among the former members of the Waffen SS; a nationwide organization should take place together with former soldiers of the Wehrmacht in the Association of German Soldiers (VdS).

In 1952, Kumm also regained a professional footing. The Burda publishing house introduced him as a typesetter and technical head of its printing plant in Offenburg one. Kumm held this position until he retired in 1975.

Kumm provided "war reports" for the 1963 volume, Enterprises Barbarossa, by the former Nazi press chief in the Foreign Office, Paul Carell , which quickly became a bestseller. These support the historical image presented by Carell of a representation of war that made the Barbarossa company appear as an apolitical heroic fight with the Waffen-SS as an integral elite part of the Wehrmacht.

In 1978 and 1983 Kumm published two books on the "Prinz Eugen" division; they were published by Munin-Verlag , which was founded by HIAG. The historian Karsten Wilke classifies Kumm's publication in attempts by the HIAG to "occupy subject areas that have not been dealt with by professional history [...] with their own representations". These attempts were largely successful; In the 1970s at the latest, the HIAG had achieved "a monopoly on the history of the Waffen-SS". Wilke names the “ topos of the 'apolitical' Waffen-SS”, its alleged elite role, the “staging of the troops as a 'European army'” and the “delimitation of war and Nazi crimes” as the four central elements of these “memory structures” ". The division's war crimes and atrocities are suppressed in Kumm's publications. Kumm was aware of attacks on the civilian population by the "Prinz Eugen" division before 1945, as his memo about a conversation with Heinrich Himmler on June 28, 1943 shows. In a publication by the Military History Research Office of the Bundeswehr, Walter Manoschek counts Kumm's works among "memoirs of former military personnel and other apologetic writings that either ignore or downplay the war crimes of the National Socialist occupiers".

Kumms “Vorwärts, Prinz Eugen!” Was reissued in 2007 as a licensed edition by Winkelried-Verlag , which is classified as right-wing extremist by the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania constitution protection agency .

Before Adalbert Lallier , a former SS man in the "Prinz Eugen" division, testified against his former comrade, SS-Unterscharführer Julius Viel , in 1999 for the murder of seven Jewish concentration camp inmates, he asked Kumm whether the law of silence was still going on apply and whether “betrayal of comrades” is justified. Kumm wrote back to him that comradeship ends where war crimes begin.

reception

The right-wing extremist National-Zeitung portrayed Kumm in issue 47/2004 in its series "Great German soldiers - immortal heroes". She certifies that he “opposed the general condemnation of the Waffen SS soldiers”. In the series, only soldiers loyal to the Nazi regime were honored, sometimes using the linguistic formulas of the Wehrmacht and Nazi propaganda. The political scientist Fabian Virchow classifies the series in “the imagination of the extreme right of the men who are oriented towards the deed and who shape the course of events / history in the interest of the 'national' or ' folkish ' collective”. The characterizations referred “at the same time to a conceptualization of masculinity , the profile of which - very unified - would be marked by characteristics such as 'hardness', 'willingness to sacrifice', 'courage to death', 'bravery', 'tenacity', 'cutting' or 'standing qualities' ".

Awards

  • German cross in gold on November 29, 1941
  • Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with oak leaves and swords
    • Knight's Cross on February 16, 1942
    • Oak leaves on April 6, 1943 (221st award)
    • Swords on March 17, 1945 (138th award)

Fonts

  • Forward Prince Eugene! History of the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen”. Munin-Verlag , Osnabrück 1978.
  • 7th SS mountain division "Prinz Eugen" in the picture . 1st edition. Munin-Verlag , Osnabrück 1983, ISBN 3-921242-54-1 .

literature

  • Thomas Casagrande: The Volksdeutsche SS Division “Prinz Eugen”: the Banat Swabians and the National Socialist war crimes. Frankfurt am Main 2000.
  • Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period (= War in History. Vol. 71). Edited with the support of the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr . Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77241-1 . Revised version of the relevant dissertation at the University of Potsdam in 2009.
  • Karsten Wilke: The “Aid Community on Mutuality” (HIAG) 1950–1990. Veterans of the Waffen SS in the Federal Republic. Schöningh, Paderborn 2011, ISBN 978-3-506-77235-0 .

Web links

Commons : Otto Kumm  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Zschäckel is the author of the illustrated book Waffen-SS im Westen , which was published in 1941 by Eher , the central publishing house of the NSDAP, and was republished in 2006 by Winkelried.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearers 1939–1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd Edition. Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 484.
  3. ↑ Heinz Höhne: The order under the skull. The history of the SS. In: Der Spiegel 6/1967.
  4. ↑ Klaus Schmider : The Yugoslav Theater of War (January 1943 to May 1945) In: Karl-Heinz Frieser (Ed.): The Eastern Front 1943/44 - The War in the East and on the Side Fronts. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-421-06235-2 , p. 917.
  5. ^ Schmider: Theater of War. P. 1030.
  6. ↑ Martin Seckendorf, Günter Keber, u. a .; Federal Archives (Ed.): The occupation policy of German fascism in Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, Italy and Hungary (1941–1945). Hüthig, Berlin 1992; Decker / Müller, Heidelberg 2000. Series: Europe under the swastika. Volume 6, ISBN 3-8226-1892-6 , pp. 59, 320 f.
  7. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, p. 410.
  8. ↑ At the end of his work “Vorwärts Prinz Eugen” (1978) Otto Kumm writes on page 388: “[T] he Americans [sent] the author back to Dachau with the note:“ Extradition of Yugoslavia ”! By escaping over the wall of the Dachau concentration camp, the author was able to evade this plan and once again jump off certain death. "
  9. ↑ Karsten Wilke: Organized veterans of the Waffen-SS between system opposition and integration . In: Journal of History. Issue 2 2005, p. 154.
  10. ↑ Wilke 2005, p. 154.
  11. ↑ Karsten Wilke: The "Aid Community on Mutuality" (HIAG). Veterans of the Waffen SS in the Federal Republic. Schöningh, Paderborn 2011, ISBN 978-3-506-77235-0 , pp. 38, 329.
  12. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period . Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, p. 467.
  13. ↑ Wilke, Aid Community , p. 42.
  14. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period , Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, p. 543.
  15. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period , Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, p. 566.
  16. ^ Wilke, Aid Community , p. 398.
  17. ^ Wilke, Aid Community , p. 405.
  18. ^ Wilke, Aid Community , p. 408.
  19. ↑ Menachem Shelah: Croatian Jews between Germany and Italy. The role of the Italian army using the example of General Giuseppe Amico 1941–1943 In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1993, issue 2, p. 194 (PDF; 8.2 MB).
  20. ↑ Höhne, Orden , p. 436, footnote 232, footnote text p. 572.
  21. ↑ Walter Manoschek: “Serbia is free of Jews”: military occupation policy and the extermination of Jews in Serbia 1941/42 [1] . Munich 1995, 2nd ed. P. 12f (with footnote 7).
  22. ^ Bibliographical information from the German Library
  23. ↑ taz of November 10, 2010 , the taz gives key points on the political biography of the publisher Eric Kaden .
  24. ↑ Assessment of the direction of Kaden's publishing activities by the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Constitutional Protection: "NPD parliamentary group employee presents biography of Nazi poet Kurt EGGERS" Archived copy ( Memento from March 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  25. ↑ In 2009 the Federal Testing Office for Media Harmful to Young People indexed ten publications / books, one of which is Kaders: "Kurt Eggers - From Freikorps to Waffen-SS". Response of the Federal Government to a request from Petra Pau ( DIE LINKE ), PDF
  26. ↑ New evidence of the murder in Litomerice: SS man Julius Viel imprisoned! (hagalil 10/1999)
  27. ↑ Schwäbische Zeitung of December 14, 2000 according to VVN-BdA Baden-Württemberg
  28. ^ SPD parliamentary group Brandenburg: The German People's Union (DVU). March 2005. online ( memento of December 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) on the homepage of Sören Kosanke .
  29. ↑ Fabian Virchow: Against civilism. International relations and the military in the political conceptions of the extreme right. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 978-3-531-15007-9 , p. 347.
  30. ↑ Virchow, civilism . P. 394.
personal data
SURNAME Kumm, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS brigade leader and major general of the Waffen SS
DATE OF BIRTH October 1, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH March 23, 2004
Place of death Offenburg