Alfred-Ingemar Berndt

Alfred-Ingemar Berndt (born April 22, 1905 in Bromberg ( West Prussia ); † probably March 28, 1945 near Veszprém ) was a German journalist and writer and a close collaborator of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels . He is considered to be the propagandist creator of the “desert fox” myth surrounding the German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel .

Life

Youth and first political activities

In 1919 he fought with the Border Guard Battalion III . Berndt's family was expelled from the province of West Prussia , which fell to Poland , and expropriated in 1920 . The family moved to Berlin. Berndt joined the NSDAP in Berlin as a 17-year-old in 1922 ( membership number 24,688) and then the SA . After the NSDAP was banned, he briefly rejoined the party in 1925 and finally in May 1932. (Membership number 1.101.961). In 1926 he played a leading role in setting up the organization and structures of the Hitler Youth in Berlin.

After dropping out of German studies and doing internships at various newspapers, he joined Wolff's Telegraphic Bureau (WTB), the largest and most important German news agency at the time, as "Expert for Eastern Issues" in December 1928 . Berndt knew how to cleverly hide his ongoing National Socialist agitation behind a serious journalistic cloak. At this time he was writing under various pseudonyms as a columnist and commentator for Nazi newspapers such as the “Völkischer Beobachter” or the Berlin party organ “ The Attack ”. In 1931 he became head of the “editorial group” at the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur , a pool of Nazi-minded writers, university lecturers, journalists and cultural workers. From 1932 he was a member of the Berlin Gaupresseamt. In the late phase of the Weimar Republic he was sentenced several times to fines and short prison terms for political offenses.

Hitler's seizure of power as a career boost

Immediately after Hitler's " seizure of power " in January 1933, Berndt began converting Wolff's telegraph office into a strictly Nazi-oriented press agency - the German News Office (DNB). At the same time he was responsible for the synchronization of the Reich Association of the German Press (RDP). Subsequently, in December 1933, he became chief editor of the DNB he had created. From February 1933 Berndt was deputy to the Reich Press Chief of the NSDAP, Otto Dietrich . In May 1933 he was the initiator and co-founder of the Bund Deutscher Osten .

After the so-called Röhm Putsch , Berndt left the SA in 1934 and joined the SS , in which he achieved the rank of SS Brigade Leader of the General SS in April 1943 (SS No. 242.890).

Promotion to the Propaganda Ministry

In November 1935, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels appointed Berndt to head the Reich Press Office in the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP). In April 1936 he was appointed head of the press department of the RMVP (Department IV) and was promoted to Ministerialrat . After the press department was split up in March 1938, Berndt became head of the newly created domestic press department (department IV-A) and in this function was responsible for the propaganda support of the Anschluss in Austria and the Sudetenland . In recognition of this Goebbels promoted him in October 1938 for Ministerialdirigenten . At Otto Dietrich's instigation , Berndt was replaced as head of the press department by Hans Fritzsche . In December 1938, at Goebbels' personal request, he took over the Literature Department (Department VIII), which, among other things, had the task of censoring literature and the ideological surveillance of writers and authors.

As a propagandist in the war

On August 30, 1939, two days before the start of the Second World War , Berndt was appointed ministerial conductor to head the radio department of the RMVP (department III). At the beginning of November 1939 Goebbels was informed of Berndt's conflicts with the Reichspost , which rejected him as negotiator for the Propaganda Ministry. In February 1940, Berndt announced that he had fulfilled his task of adapting German broadcasting to the requirements of the war and war propaganda, had himself released from all functions in the RMVP and signed up as a volunteer for the Wehrmacht . He took part in the French campaign as a sergeant in the heavy tank destroyer division 605. He was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class on May 27, 1940 and the Iron Cross 1st class on June 6, 1940. About his experiences he wrote the book Panzerjäger break through! (1940).

Head of the propaganda department and orderly officer at Rommel

Around August 1940, Berndt returned to the RMVP, but largely left the administration of office to his previous deputies. In May 1941 he went back to the front; this time as a lieutenant in the staff of the German Africa Corps . Berndt became Rommel's orderly officer and - with his brilliant connections - also his "propaganda manager". After the attack on the Soviet Union, Goebbels ordered him back to Berlin in August 1941 and, promoted to Ministerial Director , made him head of the Propaganda Department (Department II). At the same time, Berndt continued to commute regularly between Berlin and Rommel's headquarters in North Africa until the end of Rommel's mission in April 1943. During this time, he popularized the myth of the "desert fox" and built Rommel into a figure that many Germans could identify with.

During this time Berndt also increasingly became Rommel's personal reporter at the Fuehrer's headquarters . On July 17, 1943, Hitler presented him with the German Cross in Gold in recognition of his services in the Africa campaign . During his time as head of the propaganda department, the battle of Stalingrad , the surrender in the Tunisian campaign and the discovery of the mass graves of the Katyn massacre also took place .

From April 1943 he was chairman of the inter-ministerial Air War Damage Committee, which was responsible for collecting the damage balance and coordinating the relief and reconstruction measures after bomb attacks.

A murder and a front line operation

In the spring of 1944, the leaders of the Third Reich planned lynching of captured Allied airmen . Goebbels discussed this with Hitler and stated in an article in the Völkischer Beobachter on May 25, 1944 that the government would not do anything against lynching of Allied airmen who had shot at civilians. On May 24, 1944, his ministerial director Berndt stopped his car next to two land guards accompanying the captured US pilot, Dennis, and shot him in cold blood. Goebbels hoped from this article that the “big pilot hunt would begin” in Germany and that Allied aviators would be deterred from enemy operations against Germany. This resulted in around 350 lynching of Allied airmen.

The Allied landing in Normandy led to a rift between Goebbels and Berndt. Goebbels accused Berndt - who had expressed himself very pessimistically about the war situation after a visit to Rommel's headquarters on the western front - defeatism , withdrew him from the propaganda department and suspended him from duty for an unlimited period of time. Berndt then volunteered to be deployed at the front and was called up in September 1944 through Himmler's mediation with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer for the Waffen-SS .

According to several eyewitnesses, Berndt was killed as commander of the 2nd battalion of the 5th SS Panzer Regiment "Wiking" on March 28, 1945 near Veszprém ( Hungary ) in an attack by Soviet low-flying aircraft. He is considered missing.

Many of Berndt's writings were placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone .

Books

• We experience the liberation of the Saar (Scherl, Berlin 1935)
• From the workplace to the M.-G. Dreyse (Otto Stollberg, Berlin 1936)
• From art judge to art servant (VB-Zeitungsverlag, Berlin 1936)
• Give me four years! - Documents on the Fuehrer's first four-year plan (Franz Eher Nachf., Munich 1937)
• Milestones of the Third Reich (Franz Eher Nachf., Munich 1938)
• The March into the Greater German Reich (Franz Eher Nachf., Munich 1939)
• The German East and German Culture (NSDAP Gauleitung Danzig-West Prussia, Danzig 1939)
• Tank destroyers break through! (Franz Eher Nachf., Munich 1940)
• The song of the front - song collection of the Großdeutscher Rundfunk (Georg Kallmeyer, Wolfenbüttel 1943)
• Germany in battle (Otto Stollberg, Berlin 1944)

In addition, various forewords and afterwords to publications by other authors as well as several hundred newspaper articles in various, including non-National Socialist newspapers of the Weimar Republic as well as Nazi party papers. Later also occasional activity as a political commentator in the program of Großdeutscher Rundfunk.

literature

• Willi A. Boelcke (Ed.): War Propaganda 1939–1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1966.
• Ernst Klee : Alfred-Ingemar Berndt , entry in ders .: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Updated edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 42
• Günter Neliba: Lynch justice on American prisoners of war in the Opel city of Rüsselsheim. Reconstruction of one of the first war crimes trials in Germany based on trial files (1945-1947) . Brandes & Apsel, Frankfurt a. M. 2000, ISBN 3-86099-205-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Alfred-Ingemar Berndt in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Alfred-Ingemar Berndt in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ [1]
2. ^ Willi A. Boelcke: War Propaganda 1939–1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry. DVA, Stuttgart 1966, p. 76f.
3. ^ Willi A. Boelcke: War Propaganda 1939–1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry. DVA, Stuttgart 1966, p. 77.
4. ^ Willi A. Boelcke: War Propaganda 1939–1941. Secret ministerial conferences in the Reich Propaganda Ministry. DVA, Stuttgart 1966, p. 78.
5. ↑ Joseph Goebbels: A word on air warfare . Peter Longerich: Goebbels - biography . Munich 2010, p. 618.
6. ^ Georg Hoffmann: Fliegerlynchjustiz. Violence against allied aircrews shot down 1943–1945. (War in History Vol. 88). Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2015, ISBN 978-3-506-78137-6 . P. 172. Hoffmann refers to the false information given by Neliba on the case.
7. ^ Ralf Georg Reuth: Goebbels. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1990, ISBN 3-492-03183-8 , p. 540.
8. ↑ See Peter Longerich: Ebda.
9. ↑ Barbara Grimm estimate according to Hoffmann, Paderborn 2015, p. 21.
10. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet occupation zone, list of literature to be sorted out