Antifascist Committee Free Germany

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AKFD call on August 10, 1944

The Antifascist Committee for Free Germany ( AKFD ) was an organization of former German Wehrmacht soldiers operating in the Balkans based on the model of the NKFD and existed from August to December 1944.

prehistory

German soldiers who deserted from the Wehrmacht or were prisoners of war had been fighting for a long time, and especially since the summer of 1943 (when more units of the Penal Division 999 were transferred to Greece and defected) in isolated groups with the Greek People's Liberation Army ELAS against the German and Italian occupation troops and those with them collaborating Greek militias. They were directly included in ELAS associations and were not organized in special independent German partisan units.

Soon, however, in the course of the Free Germany movement initiated by the Central Committee of the KPD , there were plans in Greece to found a committee based on the model and suggestion of the NKFD , as well as for German soldiers, prisoners of war, defectors and emigrants on the Western Front who sympathized with the Resistance (“ Movement Free Germany for the West ”, officially Comité“ Allemagne libre ”pour l'Ouest (CALPO)). Namely through Falk Harnack, who had been working directly at the ELAS headquarters in Kastania (municipality of Kalambaka ) since the beginning of 1944 , before the liquidation by the SS due to involvement with the White Rose and contacts with the Kreisau district , and who also deserted from a 999 punitive battalion and supposedly already Young communist Gerhard Reinhardt , instructed by Hans Hauschulz in the Heuberg camp in 1943 , a German-language appeal for the establishment of the Anti-Fascist Committee Free Germany (AKFD) was published in the EAM newspaper Eleftheri Ellada . However, due to combat operations by German anti-fascists in partisan warfare, including against Greek nationalist EDES units, the establishment of the AKFD was postponed for the time being.

After previous underground activities within the Wehrmacht ( Heinz Steyer ), some former German resistance members of the Penal Division 999 (including Paul Gässner, Ludwig Haase, Reinhold Hüttner, Erich Schultz, Richard Wagner, Fritz Klapper) founded at the suggestion of Werner Illmer on the occasion of the attempted coup on July 20 In 1944, regardless of the plans at the ELAS headquarters, the Association of German Antifascists in Tropea on the Peloponnese , the seat of the 3,000-strong ELAS division. Also at the end of July 1944, after talks with a Soviet military mission, there was a meeting between the ELAS High Command and Falk Harnack and Gerhard Reinhardt in Kastania. The ELAS commander Stefanos Sarafis , ELAS legal advisor Konstantinos Despotopoulos and the Minister of Culture Petros Kokkalis also took part in the meeting.

Official founding of the AKFD

The constitution took place on August 10, 1944, at the same time as an "appeal to all German soldiers in Greece" published in several newspapers to take an active part in the fight against Hitler's Wehrmacht. The AKFD was recognized by the management of the NKFD in Moscow by telegram. From the end of August, NKFD broadcasts from Moscow were also regularly heard at the ELAS headquarters.

Structure of the AKFD

The AKFD was headed by the central committee, consisting of the political director, Falk Harnack , Gerhard Reinhardt, who is responsible for organizational issues, and other members (Willi Schrade, Paul Fritz, Erich Klose, Hans Schüller, Franz Oberweger, Wilhelm Hansen, Robert Hermann, Rudolf Schiller et al.), Mostly defectors from the XXI. Fortress Infantry Battalion of the Penal Division 999, which later became commanders of the hundreds to be recruited. These were to be made up of the German soldiers who were already scattered around the ELAS and were to be reinforced by prisoners of war and defectors from the Wehrmacht who had been gained through propaganda . A hundred should be assigned to an ELAS unit ( regiment or division ) and in groups of 30 men, which in turn are divided into cells of 10 men each.

Recruiting and setting up the hundreds

From August 14th, three instructors (portrayed by the Greek artist Dimitris Megalidis during the break ) set out from the ELAS headquarters and organized the following AKFD units, among others:

  • Falk Harnack alias "Ikarus" moved through the middle mountains and to the west coast in the direction of Albania:
    • Hundreds of Rumeli right at the ELAS headquarters
    • Hundred Agrinion with 21 men, commander and political leader Kurt Lohberger (former XXI. Bat. 999) in the 34th and 42nd ELAS regiments
    • Harnack was able to win Captain Otto Emersleben (later professor of physics at the University of Greifswald ) as a political-humanistic educator for prisoners of war
  • Gerhard Reinhardt moved to the northeast via Volos in the direction of Thessaloniki and stayed with the 13th ELAS division
    • Hundreds of Volos with 51 men, then by October 1944 approx. 90 men, command Willi Schrade (formerly XXI. Bat. 999) with the 54th ELAS regiment.
    • Hundreds of Larisa with 38 men, command Erich Klose (formerly XXI. Bat. 999)
    • Hundreds of Saloniki with about 30 men, (former 999 and other defectors) since Sept./Oct. 1944 with the 11th ELAS division; former "German Antifascist Committee of Macedonia 'Free Germany'" "
  • Kurt Adam was supposed to travel to the Peloponnese to Tropea to the 3rd ELAS-Division in order to integrate the association of German anti-fascists in the Peloponnese, about 60 men strong at the end of August 1944 . According to Falk Harnack, however, Kurt Adam defected on his trip to British units.

Effect and whereabouts

The AKFD optimized the cooperation with ELAS associations, but by no means combined all German fighters in the ELAS into self-governing German units. Many defectors stayed in the ELAS units to which they defected first. A group of the AKFD worked in the XIII. ELAS division. About forty belonged to the II. ELAS division and the III. ELAS division at least fifty Germans. However, through several leaflet campaigns (including August 22, 1944), sticky note campaigns and appeals, the AKFD weakened the morale of the Wehrmacht units. Since Germans fighting with the ELAS partisans had to be shot immediately when captured by the Wehrmacht, the ELAS leadership finally arranged to keep the Germans out of direct combat operations with the Wehrmacht. By October 1944, Greece was freed from the occupation by the Axis powers . Now German AKFD fighters were also used by ELAS in the beginning of the Greek civil war against British troops and the other militias allied with them, such as the EDES . The AKFD units shared the tragic fate of ELAS until it was driven out by the British Army. Kurt Lohberger , for example, joined Albanian partisans in autumn 1944.

Soon there was also no central leadership of the AKFD. Almost all members of the former central committee were dismissed in Xasia near Athens in December 1944 by representatives of the Communist Party of Greece and, together with various AKFD units, transferred to Albanian, Yugoslav and Bulgarian territory in January 1945. During the march to Yugoslavia, the ELAS and EAM authorities still provided food and accommodation. Many of the AKFD's comrades-in-arms now fought in the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army under Tito , in whose ranks there were around 200 to 350 Germans. In May 1945, all former members of the 999 penalty battalions were withdrawn from the partisan units and transported to Belgrade for demobilization . Here some members from the various units met the head of the AKFD, Falk Harnack, for the first time in a long time. In some cases, AKFD members were taken to prisoner-of-war camps in Yugoslavia, despite their ELAS ID cards, and shot as "mutineers" on minor charges. Among these were the anti-fascists and former members of the XXI. Battalion 999 Alfred Büchle, Erich Davideit, Adlabert Dörnchen, Paul Grünfeld, Alfred Möbius as well as the commander of the AKFD Hundred Larisa , Erich Klose, and many others. On the other hand, AKFD members and German comrades-in-arms of the Tito partisans were collected in a special camp near Belgrade and entered in handwritten lists by the camp management, which were probably drawn up by the AKFD head Falk Harnack himself. He was able to reach Vienna on August 9, 1945 and travel to his home town of Neckargemünd via Linz, Salzburg, Munich and Nuremberg until August 17.

literature

  • Hans Burkhardt, Günter Erxleben, Kurt Nettball : The one with the blue glow. About the anti-fascist resistance in the 999 formations of the fascist German Wehrmacht (1942 to 1945). Military publishing house of the German Democratic Republic, Berlin 1982.
  • Gottfried Hamacher with the assistance of André Lohmar, Herbert Mayer, Günter Wehner and Harald Wittstock: Against Hitler. Germans in the Resistance, in the armed forces of the anti-Hitler coalition and the "Free Germany" movement. Short biographies (= manuscripts / Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Vol. 53). 2nd corrected edition. Karl Dietz, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-320-02941-X ( digital version (PDF; 873 KB) ).
  • Heinz Kühnrich , Franz-Karl Wärme: Germans with Tito's partisans 1941–1945. The fortunes of the war in the Balkans in eyewitness reports and documents. GNN-Verlag, Schkeuditz 1997, ISBN 3-929994-83-6 .
  • Wolfgang Schumann , Gerhart Hass , Walter Bartel , Karl Drechsler : Germany in the Second World War. Volume 6: The smashing of Hitler's fascism and the liberation of the German people (June 1944 to May 8, 1945). Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1985, ISBN 3-7609-0574-9 .
  • Penal Division 999. Experiences and reports from the anti-fascist resistance struggle. German military publisher, Berlin 1965.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Burkhardt, Günter Erxleben , Kurt Nettball: The one with the blue note: About the anti-fascist resistance in the 999 formations of the fascist German Wehrmacht (1942 to 1945) , Military Publishing House of the GDR, Berlin, 1982, DNB 820955175 ( excerpt from Google Books )
  2. ↑ Stefan Doernberg (Ed.): In league with the enemy: Germans on the Allied side , Dietz-Verlag Berlin, 1995, ISBN 978-3-320-01875-7 ( excerpt from Google Books )
  3. ↑ Gerhart Hass : Germany in the Second World War: Smashing Hitler's Fascism and the Liberation of the German People (June 1944 to May 8, 1945) , Pahl-Rugenstein, 1985, p. 345
  4. ^ Heinz Kühnrich, Franz-Karl Wärme: Germans with Tito's Partisans 1941–1945. 1997, p. 180, excerpt from the Google book search. Retrieved January 17, 2015.
  5. ^ Heinz Kühnrich, Franz-Karl Wärme: Germans with Tito's Partisans 1941–1945. 1997, p. 216.