Adolf Strauss

This article deals with General Adolf Strauss. For the composer see Adolf Strauss .

Adolf Strauss (right), June 1941

Adolf Strauss (born September 6, 1879 in Schermcke , † March 20, 1973 in Lübeck ) was a German colonel general during World War II .

Life

family

Adolf was a son of the Prussian chief bailiff and domain tenant Karl Strauss and his wife Amalie, nee Gutknecht. In 1921 he married Hanna von Schröder, with whom he had two daughters Ingeborg (* 1921) and Helga (* 1924).

Military career

Strauss joined the Infantry Regiment No. 137 of the Prussian Army in Hagenau on March 15, 1898 as an ensign . His promotion to lieutenant took place on October 17, 1901 in Infantry Regiment No. 162 in Lübeck . On June 16, 1910, he was promoted to first lieutenant and sent to the military academy , where he received general staff training.

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I , he was promoted to captain on October 8, 1914 . At the end of the war, he was a battalion commander in the 2nd Upper Rhine Infantry Regiment No. 99 , awarded both classes of the Iron Cross and the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords . After joining the Reichswehr , he was promoted to major on January 1, 1924 and appointed as a teacher at the infantry school in Dresden . In May 1929 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and transferred to the staff of the 6th Infantry Regiment in Lübeck . In October 1932 he took over command of the 4th (Prussian) Infantry Regiment in Kolberg as a colonel . In September 1934, Strauss then moved to the Reichswehr Ministry in Berlin as inspector of the infantry . He was subsequently promoted to major general in December of the same year . In October 1935 he took over command of the newly established 22nd Infantry Division in Bremen. After being promoted to Lieutenant General in April 1937, he was appointed Commanding General of the II Army Corps and Commander in Military District II (Stettin) in October 1938 and handed over his command to Hans von Sponeck .

Wiktor Thommée handing over the Modlin Fortress to Adolf Strauss on September 29, 1939

With this unit, Strauss took part in the attack on Poland at the beginning of the Second World War. The 2nd Army Corps broke through the positions on both sides of the Polish Crown on the Brahe on September 2, 1939 , crossed the Vistula near Kulm on September 3 and established a connection between Pomerania and East Prussia . Along with Hermann Hoth and Werner Kempf, Strauss was one of the German commanders in the battle for Modlin . The first recorded case of war crimes followed the battle. At the end of October 1939, Strauss received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and was relocated to the Western Front with his large association. There he was appointed Commander in Chief of the 9th Army on May 30, 1940 . Subsequently, in the course of Operation Barbarossa , he advanced eastward with the Army Group in mid- 1941. For health reasons, he was released from his command on January 16, 1942. After his recovery, he was transferred to the Führerreserve and finally found a job in August 1944 as head of the fortification expansion of the Oder-Warthe position, before he became commander of the eastern fortification area in January 1945. From May 1945 to May 1948 Strauss was a British prisoner of war .

On August 23, 1949 a trial took place in the Hamburg Curiohaus . Walther von Brauchitsch would have been charged, but had died shortly before. Erich von Manstein and Gerd von Rundstedt were among his co-defendants . However, Strauss then no longer needed to take part in the process because he was “unsuitable”.

literature

• Johannes Hürter : Hitler's military leader. The German commanders-in-chief in the war against the Soviet Union in 1941/42. R. Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-486-57982-7 , ( short biography p. 664 f.)

Web links

• Historic.de - Military history of Bremen and the surrounding area (accessed on July 23, 2009)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Samuel W. Mitcham: German Order of Battle: 1st-290th Infantry divisions in World War II . Stackpole Books, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8117-3416-5 , pp. 68 ( google.de [accessed on July 20, 2019]).
2. ↑ The most capable . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1949, pp. 25 ( online ).