Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim

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Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, 1944
Memorial stone in the old St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof at the short-term burial place of Mertz von Quirnheim and his four officer comrades who were murdered with him on the evening of July 20, 1944

Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim (born March 25, 1905 in Munich , † July 21, 1944 in Berlin ), Albrecht von Mertz for short , was a Colonel in the General Staff , resistance fighter against National Socialism and belonged to the closest circle around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg during the assassination attempt dated July 20, 1944 .

Life

Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim was the son of the then captain in the Bavarian General Staff or later Lieutenant General and President of the Reichsarchiv Hermann Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim and his wife Eleonore née Hohmann, the sister of space pioneer Walter Hohmann . Albrecht von Mertz 'father Hermann was in 1911 from the General Staff of III. Army corps transferred to the 6th Infantry Regiment in Amberg . The family lived in the Alte Veste on Eichenforstgäßchen.

Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim entered the Königlich Humanist Gymnasium Amberg in 1914 at the age of nine and attended it until 1920. In 1919 his family moved to Potsdam because his father became the head of the newly established Reichsarchiv. As a young man through his family he met the later resistance fighters Werner von Haeften and Hans Bernd von Haeften , whose father Hans von Haeften succeeded Albrecht von Mertz Vater in the office of President of the Reich Archives in 1931.

After graduating from the Victoria High School in Potsdam in 1923, Mertz von Quirnheim joined the 19th (Bavarian) Infantry Regiment of the Reichswehr as an officer candidate , in its training battalion in Landshut . As early as 1925, Albrecht von Mertz made friends with his classmate Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg , who later became Hitler's assassin, during the officers' course they attended together at the Dresden Infantry School . After various deployments of the troops, from 1936 - again together with Stauffenberg - he completed general staff training at the War Academy in Berlin. As a captain in the general staff, Mertz von Quirnheim was employed in the General Command of the V Army Corps in 1939/40 , then in the rank of major as head of the "Organization and Demobilization" department in the organizational department of the General Staff of the Army.

After he had welcomed the takeover of power by the National Socialists , he distanced himself more and more from the Nazi regime over the years. At the beginning of the Second World War , Mertz von Quirnheim was employed as a staff officer in the organizational department of the General Staff. In 1941 there was a dispute with the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, and the Reich Commissioner for Ukraine Erich Koch , because Mertz von Quirnheim advocated a more humane treatment of the civilian population in the occupied territory . From 1942, contacts to the resistance against Hitler and National Socialism also intensified through his brother-in-law Wilhelm Dieckmann . Wilhelm Dieckmann had joined the military opposition as captain of the reserve in the 9th Potsdam Infantry Regiment  .

Mertz von Quirnheim was a lieutenant colonel in November 1942 as chief of staff of the XXIV Panzer Corps on the Eastern Front . In 1943 he was promoted to colonel and shortly before July 20, 1944, his second marriage was to the widowed Hilde Baier née Voswinkel; he had his first marriage in 1934 with Charlotte Alice Kraudzun.

Since September 1943 he was privy to the plan to eliminate Adolf Hitler by assassination . Together with his superior, General of the Infantry Friedrich Olbricht , and Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, he worked out changes to the "Valkyrie" operation plan for the takeover of power after the assassination attempt on Hitler , which is actually used in the event of an uprising by foreign workers in the Reich should.

In 1944 Mertz von Quirnheim succeeded Stauffenberg as chief of staff at the General Army Office in Berlin ( Bendler block ). Immediately after the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , Mertz von Quirnheim urged General Olbricht to initiate Operation "Valkyrie", although he could not be sure whether Hitler was actually dead. The measures stipulated therein were not implemented or not fully implemented because the military commanders received news of Hitler's survival almost simultaneously. On the night of July 20, 1944, Mertz von Quirnheim, together with Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, General der Infanterie Olbricht and First Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, was overpowered by military officials loyal to the regime and at the instigation of Colonel General Friedrich Fromm , who tried to disguise his own complicity, in the courtyard of the Bendler block shortly after midnight summarily shot . Their corpses were buried in the old St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof Berlin-Schöneberg, but a short time later on Heinrich Himmler's orders they were exhumed , cremated and the ashes scattered on sewage fields . A few days later, Mertz von Quirnheim's parents and one of his sisters were arrested by the Gestapo . After brutal interrogation, his brother-in-law Wilhelm Dieckmann was shot from behind by the Gestapo on September 13, 1944 in the Lehrter Strasse cell prison in Berlin .

Another brother-in-law of Mertz von Quirnheim was Major General of the Wehrmacht and later of the Barracked People's Police, Otto Korfes , who emerged as a leading member of the National Committee for Free Germany and the Federation of German Officers . One cousin was Johannes Dieckmann .

Honors

Representations in film and television

In Operation Walküre - The Stauffenberg Assassination , Christian Berkel played Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim. In the television film Stauffenberg , the role is cast with David C. Bunners , in Stauffenberg - Conspiracy against Hitler Burkhard Heyl and in The Officers' Hour Florian Martens plays the role of Quirnheim.

literature

Web links

Commons : Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marc Zirlewagen:  Dieckmann, William. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 24, Bautz, Nordhausen 2005, ISBN 3-88309-247-9 , Sp. 501-504.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  2. ↑ Homepage of Mertz von Quirnheim , Homepage: Field and military lodge "Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim", April 11, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Mertz von Quirnheim, Albrecht
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mertz, Albrecht von; Mertz von Quirnheim, Albrecht Ritter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighters against National Socialism
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH July 21, 1944
Place of death Berlin