Asia Corps

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The Asia Corps or Levante Corps was an association of the armed forces of the German Empire , which was used in the First World War to support the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East .

Structure and command

The corps, which was put together in two sections (March 1916 and August 1917) and reinforced again in 1918, included the staffs of the Asia Corps and (1918) the 201st Infantry Brigade :

1st Masurian Infantry Regiment No. 146 from Allenstein (from 1918)
Infantry Battalion 701 (Pasha II)
Machine Gun Company 701
Infantry Battalion 702 from Bavaria (Pascha II)
Infantry Battalion 703 (Pascha II) with field battery
Infantry Gun Train 701,
Infantry Gun Train 702,
Infantry Gun Platoon 703
Kurhessisches Reserve Jäger Battalion No. 11 from Marburg (from 1918)
Engineering Department 701, from the Kurhessische pioneer battalion. 11 ( Münden Hann )
Engineer Company 205
Cavalry - squadron Asia Corps
Fliegerabteilung 300 "Pascha", 301 and 302 (set up at Flieger-Ersatz -teilung Breslau - Brieg ), 303 (FEA Altenburg ), 304 b (FEA 1 b Oberschleißheim ) and 305 (FEA Breslau), from 1918 Jagdstaffel 55 (later renamed in hunting season 1 F )
Mountain blinker trains 27 (from 1918) and 28, news department Pascha II (since 1918)
Surveying Department 27
Medical formations.

In addition, the fortress railway construction company 11 and the railway company 44/48 were used on the Hejaz Railway in 1917/18 .

The commander-in-chief of the Asia Corps was Major General Friedrich Freiherr Kreß von Kressenstein (1870-1948) as the commander of the 1st Turkish Expeditionary Corps and later commander of the Gaza Front. From July 1917 to August 1918, Major General Werner von Frankenberg and Proschlitz (1868–1933) led it, and during the last months of the war, Colonel Gustav von Oppen (1867–1918) led. The corps was directly under the command of the Ottoman Army Group F , which was led by General Erich von Falkenhayn and from February 1918 until the end of the war by Marshal Liman von Sanders .

Excursus: Austro-Hungarian troops in Palestine

Austria-Hungary had joined the German-Turkish secret treaties of August 2, 1914 and January 11, 1915 in the form of an exchange of notes. In terms of economic policy, they did not want to be inferior to Turkey's German ally. In order to strengthen the political influence in Turkey, like the German Levant Corps, smaller military contingents were sent there. These were artillery, technical troops and motorized transport columns.

history

After the alliance between Turkey and Germany on November 2, 1914, Great Britain , France and Russia declared war on Turkey. The Turkish troops were initially able to achieve success in Armenia , Mesopotamia and southern Palestine .

Pasha I.

As early as 1914/15, German pioneer troops were involved in the construction of the field railway in the Sinai to the Suez Canal , which was built by the 4th Turkish Army under the technical direction of Heinrich August Meißner Pascha (1862-1940). A marine hygiene expedition was also organized in December 1914 under the direction of the Hamburg tropical medicine specialist Prof. Dr. Peter Mühlens (1873–1943) compiled. She worked with the Turkish medical services to curb the infectious diseases such as relapsing fever , typhus , typhoid , abdominal typhus , paratyphoid fever , amoebic dysentery , bacterial dysentery and cholera that occur during water and road construction in the desert . Protective vaccines against typhus and cholera were produced in Jerusalem from typical strains of pathogens. German Borromeans and Kaiserswerth deaconesses from Jerusalem helped with the care in the hospitals .

In order to support the Ottoman armed forces more effectively with war material, German officers in command of the troops, military pilots and troop contingents, a German "Asia Corps" was put together in 1916 to be deployed on the Sinai and Palestine front. In mid-January 1916, Colonel Kress von Kressenstein and some officers from the General Command undertook an inspection ride through the desert to close to the Suez Canal . In March 1916, the Pascha I expeditionary force arrived on the Sinai Peninsula via the Balkans-Constantinople-Taurus-Aleppo-Damascus-Jerusalem Desert . On April 1, 1916, the Aviation Detachment 300 "Pascha" under the leadership of Captain Hellmuth Felmy with 14 Rumpler CI aircraft was stationed in Be'er Scheva . In April the first German and Austrian troops also moved into quarters in Beersheba. The aviation department was relocated to northern Sinai: in June to Wadi al-Arish and in July to Bir el-'Abd .

Since the arrival of the German troops was delayed, the planned major offensive against the Suez Canal only took place in the heat of July 1916 and failed. The Turkish-German troops were quickly thrown back to Palestine after the Battle of Bir Romani (August 3–5). In December 1916, al-Arish, the last air base on Sinai, fell. Aviation Detachment 300 was relocated to Beersheba again from October and to Ramla in January 1917 . In the spring of 1917 the German headquarters moved to Tell esch-Scheria ( Gerar ); On March 26th and April 17th, the Turks won two battles against the British under General Archibald Murray in the Gaza area .

Pasha II

When Baghdad was taken by the British on March 11, 1917, the Ottoman Empire faced defeat. Germany now increased military support. In order to stabilize the Turkish army, Army Group F was built up with an almost exclusively German general staff (so-called company “Blitz”, Turkish “Yılderım Orduları Grubu”).

German anti-aircraft battery on Heeresstrasse in front of Bir-es-Seba , April 1917

In August 1917 the Supreme Army Command sent a German expeditionary corps Pascha II under Major General von Frankenberg and Proschlitz to the Middle East via the Balkans and Constantinople to stop the British from advancing further. The German troops were originally supposed to help retake Baghdad from the British, but in October 1917 this goal was abandoned. The soldiers were transferred to Palestine to secure the front, to stop the English advance there.

For further air support, Army Group F was assigned the Air Force Divisions 301-305 and Fighter Squadron 55 with a total of 55 aircraft in September 1917. Two -seat aircraft types such as the reconnaissance aircraft AEG C.IV or Albatros C.III , the fighter aircraft Pfalz EI , Pfalz E.II or Albatros D.III and the reconnaissance aircraft or bomber Rumpler CI were in use.

Arab militias under the leadership of Thomas Edward Lawrence (" Lawrence of Arabia ") waged a guerrilla war against the Turkish-German troops by means of ambushes and coups d'état, especially against the Hejaz Railway, in order to prevent the relocation of troops and logistics.

British offensive November – December 1917

In September 1917 the Sinai front collapsed. At the end of October 1917, the aviation detachments were stationed in es-Sawafir, Ramla, et-Tina (near today's Kirjat Malʾachi ) and Iraq al-Manshiyya (in the area of ​​today's Kirjat Gat ). General Edmund Allenby defeated the Ottomans on October 31 - the last successful cavalry attack in history - in Beer Sheva and on November 7 in Gaza. The German aviation detachments were then withdrawn to the north of Palestine: to Bethlehem in Galilee and Waldheim (today Allone Abba between Haifa and Nazareth), Jenin , Samach on the Sea of ​​Galilee (today desert near the Kibbutz Ma'agan), Merchavya near Afula ( el-Fule) near Nazareth . In Darʿā (southern Syria), too , 10 aircraft were deployed together with the Turkish flight division 14 against the Arab militias.

After the defeat of the Turks, Jerusalem was evacuated by the Turkish troops on December 9, 1917 and the following days, and the German high command also left its headquarters on the Mount of Olives in the Auguste Viktoria Hospital and withdrew to Nazareth . The headquarters were there from December 1917 to September 1918. The kuk stage group command and kuk field post office No. 452 were in Aleppo from 1917 to 1918 .

Between December 1917 and April 1918 there was trench warfare in central Palestine, and from April to September 1918 there was also fighting in the East Bank. The German troops in Palestine were reinforced again; there were a total of about 16,000 German soldiers in Palestine. In April and May 1918 the 1st Masurian Infantry Regiment No. 146 under Major Frithjof von Hammerstein-Gesmold (1870–1944) and from May to July the Kurhessische Reserve Jäger Battalion No. 11 (“ Marburger Jäger “) With over 1000 men and 468 horses under Major von Menges. During this time, the German aviation departments were partly relocated to Amman , Rayak , Aleppo, Hama and Homs .

Defeat and retreat

German paramedics transport the wounded by camel (Palestine Front May / June 1918).

The defeat of the Turkish-German army in Palestine and Mesopotamia was unstoppable. After the Battle of Palestine , which began on September 19, 1918, and the capture of Damascus , the troops continued to withdraw. Numerous smaller German units of the Asian Corps had to fend for themselves during the military collapse of the Ottoman Empire in order to save their bare life. Your opponent Thomas E. Lawrence set the following monument to the German departments:

"Here for the first time I grew proud of the enemy which had killed my brothers. They were two thousand miles from home, without hope and without guides, in conditions mad enough to break the bravest nerves. Yet their sections held together, in firm rank, sheering through the wrack of Turk and Arab like armored ships, high-faced and silent. When attacked they halted, took position, fired to order. There was no haste, no crying, no hesitation. They were glorious. "

“Here for the first time I became proud of the enemy who had killed my brothers. They were two thousand miles from home, hopeless in a strange unknown country, in a position desperate enough to break even the strongest nerves. Nevertheless, their troops held together, ordered in rank and file, and steered through the wild sea of ​​Turks and Arabs like ironclad ships, silent and with their heads held high. If they were attacked, they stopped, took up battle positions and gave well-aimed fire. There was no hurry, no shouting, no uncertainty. They were magnificent. "

The flight detachments were in retreat at the beginning of October, except for one that remained in Hama, to Muslimiya near Aleppo and finally to Pozantı in Adana Province . It was here that the last commander of the Asian Corps, who was posthumously awarded the Order of Pour le Mérite , Colonel Gustav von Oppen (1867–1918), died of cholera.

On October 30, 1918, Turkey surrendered and concluded the Mudros (on Limnos ) armistice on October 31, 1918 , which assured the German and Austro-Hungarian troops safe conduct. After the surrender, the German Asia Corps was transported to Constantinople on the Anatolian railway and interned there with the other German soldiers. The German soldiers returned to Germany partly via the Black Sea and the Ukraine and partly via the Mediterranean from January 1919. The Austrian returnees arrived in Vienna via Trieste on January 24, 1919.

The war graves of the fallen soldiers are particularly in Baghdad, Jerusalem, Nazareth , Aleppo, Damascus and in English military cemeteries . Aviation memorials for fallen German pilots in World War I are in Jenin ( Palestine ) on the road to Nazareth and on the Templar cemetery in Haifa .

League of Asian Fighters

After the end of the war, the veterans of the Asian Corps came together in the Association of Asian Fighters (BdAK, rare Association of German Asian Fighters). Founded in Berlin in September 1919, there were soon groups in every major city in the Reich. The main goals were mutual welfare support and the reappraisal of their own history, in particular finding missing units, including the sisters of the DRK . The federal government published its own magazine, the “ Orient Rundschau ”, and a “year book”. In the course of the Gleichschaltung in 1933 it was initially affiliated with the NSDAP, but in 1938 it was banned and dissolved.

Significance for archeology, art history and cartography

2,872 glass plates of the city and landscape photographs of the Aviation Department 304 of the Asia Corps are still preserved in the Bavarian Main State Archives , Section IV Bavarian War Archives , in Munich. Their scientific evaluation is important for aerial archeology today . The 1916 by Mayor a. D. Hans von Ramsay map of southern Palestine and the Sinai (1: 250,000) recorded in 4 sheets as well as the topographical maps produced by the surveying department 27 in 1917/18 (39 sheets 1: 50,000, 7 sheets 1: 25,000, 1 map 1: 100,000 ) are used to clarify scientific questions.

The archaeologist Theodor Wiegand (1864–1936) was stationed as captain of the Landwehr artillery in Damascus and headed a German-Turkish monument protection command that carried out numerous scientific surveys and construction surveys of ancient monuments during the Palestine campaign of 1916–1918 in Damascus, Petra and Sinai . In working with Wiegand, the Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984), who had been assigned to the Austrian Army of the Orient as an artillery observer, also received many suggestions.

Movies

  • The Palestine Campaign and the Arab Revolt were filmed in 1962 in Lawrence of Arabia .
  • The 1987 Australian film " The Lighthorsemen " portrays the Palestine campaign and the attack on Beersheba .

See also

swell

  • The kuk 24 cm motor mortar battery No. 9 in Asia Minor. Sascha-Messter weekly report series 132A from May 27, 1917, Vienna: Sascha-Messter Film (Filmarchiv Austria).
  • Great General Staff (ed.): The battles and skirmishes of the Great War 1914–1918. Source work according to the official names, Berlin 1919.
  • Gustaf Dalman : Hundreds of German aviator pictures from Palestine. (Writings of the German Palestine Institute, Vol. 2), Gütersloh 1925.

literature

  • Josef Drexler: With Jilderim to the holy land. Memories and glosses on the Palestine campaign 1917–1918. Self-published by the author in 1919.
  • Cyril Falls: Armageddon, 1918. The Final Palestinian Campaign of World War I. Philadelphia 2003 (1964)
  • Robert-Tarek Fischer : Austria-Hungary's struggle for the Holy Land. Imperial Palestine Policy in World War I. Bern / Frankfurt a. M. [u. a.]: Peter Lang 2004 ISBN 978-3-631-52268-4 .
  • Dov Gavish, Foreign Intelligence Maps: Offshoots of the 1: 100,000 Topographic Map of Israel. in: Imago Mundi 48 (1996), pp. 174-184.
  • Dieter Gröschel, Jürgen Ladek: Wings over the Sinai and Palestine. in: Over the Front. Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 1998.
  • Otto Hartenstein: The Kurhessian Pioneer Battalion No. 11 in the World War 1914–1918. Zeulenroda 1936.
  • R. Holzhausen: The activity of the surveying department 27 in Palestine. In: Orient-Rundschau. 19: 52-55 (1937); ders., German aviators in the service of archeology. In: Luftwelt. 2 (1935), pp. 487-489.
  • Otto Huntemüller: Cholera on the Sinai Front 1917. A contribution to the epidemiology and the fight against infectious diseases. In: Journal of Hygiene and Infectious Diseases. (now: Medical Microbiology and Immunology. ) 89/3 (Dec. 1919), pp. 416-436.
  • Peter Jung: The Austro-Hungarian Formations in Turkey 1915–1918. (Austrian military history, part 2. The kuk armed forces in the First World War 1914–1918), Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-901208-12-7 .
  • Benjamin Ze'ev Kedar (בנימין זאב קדר), Moscheh Milner (משה מילנר, Photos): .מבט ועוד מבט על ארץ־ישראל: תצלומי־אוויר מימי מלחמת העוולם היי (לחמת העוולם הרaba לaba י י וśalʼ ראשaba לaba י וśalʼ ראשaba לaba י וśalʼ Erאשaba : tatslume-Avir mi-yeme Milḥemet ha-ha-'Olam Rishonah mul tatslumim bene zemanenu), Jerusalem: יד יצחק בן-צבי (Yad Ben-Yitshak Tsevi) and Tel Aviv: משרד הבטחון (Misrad ha-biṭaḥon), 1991. ISBN 9650505865 . (Annotated aerial photos of Palestine, as well as photos of the planes, from the Bavarian War Archives and others from the years 1917–1918 compared with aerial photographs from 1987–1991)
  • Willy Koert: Geological observations in Syria and Palestine during the 1917/18 campaign. with palaeontological articles by W. Janensch and H. Rauff, in: Journal of the German Society for Geosciences 76 (1924), pp. 1-59
  • The 1st Masurian Infantry Regiment No. 146. 1897–1919. With 5 general maps, 40 sketches of battle and 90 pictures, Berlin 1929.
  • Hans Werner Neulen: Field gray in Jerusalem. The Levant Corps of Imperial Germany. Universitas, Munich 1991 (2nd edition 2002) ISBN 3-8004-1437-6 .
  • Bryan Perrett, Megiddo 1918. The Last Great Cavalry Victory. Oxford 1999.
  • Harald Potempa: The Royal Bavarian Air Force 1914–1918. (diss. Munich 1995), Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-631-30508-7 .
  • Jan Christoph Reichmann: “Brave Askers” and “Feige Araber”. The Ottoman ally from the perspective of German soldiers in the Orient 1914–1918. diss. phil. Münster 2009 ( download page of the University and State Library of Münster).
  • Erwin Schermuly, Marc Falinski: The Reserve Jäger Battalion No. 11 indicated by maps and pictures. 1914 to 1919. Marburg 2006.
  • Gerd M. Schulz: The use and the successes of the 304b aviation division in Palestine . In: Blätter zur Geschichte der Deutschen Luft- und Raumfahrt 19 (2013), pp. 89–93 ( PDF from the German Aerospace Society - Lilienthal-Oberth eV )
  • Norbert Schwake: German soldiers graves in Israel. The deployment of German soldiers on the Palestine front in the First World War and the fate of their graves. Munster 2009.
  • Werner Steuber: Jildirim. German fighters on holy ground. Series: Battles of World War. Volume 5, Stalling, Oldenburg, edition 1922, 2nd edition 1925.
  • Charlotte Trümpler, the German-Turkish Monument Protection Command and aerial photo archeology. in: Charlotte Trümpler (ed.): The big game. Archeology and Politics during the Colonial Period (1860–1940). Essen 2008, pp. 474-483, ISBN 3-8321-9063-5 .
  • Theodor Wiegand (ed.): Scientific publications of the German-Turkish monument protection command. (6 issues), Berlin: de Gruyter 1920–1924.
  • Stefan Wulf: Jerusalem - Aleppo - Constantinople. The Hamburg tropical medicine specialist Peter Mühlens in the Ottoman Empire on the eve and at the beginning of the First World War. (Hamburg Studies on the History of Medicine 5), Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8258-7941-0 .

Web links

proof

  1. ↑ See the structure in detail Werner Steuber : War organization of the German units of the army group "Jilderim" on the Palestine front . In: "Jilderim". German fighters on holy ground . (Battles of World War 4). 2nd edition Gerhard Stalling, Oldenburg i. O. / Berlin, 1925, appendix (with maps) ( digitized version of the Upper Austrian State Library Linz).
  2. ^ Thomas E. Lawrence: Revolt in the desert , 1927.
  3. ↑ Thomas E. Lawrence: Uprising in the Desert , 1927.
  4. ↑ Until 1917 von Oppen commanded the Fusilier Regiment No. 73, to which Ernst Jünger belonged.
  5. ^ Hans-Ulrich Seidt: Berlin, Kabul, Moscow. Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer and Germany's geopolitics . Universitas Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-8004-1438-4 , p. 140; and Ludmila Hanisch: The successors of the exegetes. German-language exploration of the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century. Harrassowitz, 2003 ISBN 3-447-04758-5 , p. 106.