Bernhard Bechler

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Bernhard Max Bechler (born February 9, 1911 in Grün ; † November 30, 2002 in Kleinmachnow ) was Interior Minister of the State of Brandenburg in the Soviet occupation zone and an officer in the Wehrmacht and later in the National People's Army .

Life

As the son of a Saxon factory director, he first attended high school and then embarked on a military career with the Reichswehr .

Military career in the Wehrmacht

1931 Joined the Reichswehr as a soldier. Training as an officer , then platoon leader in Bautzen. From September 1938 to September 1939, Bechler was initially as a lieutenant adjutant to the commander of Infantry Command 24 in Altenburg / Thuringia . He then served from September 1939 to June 1940 as a first lieutenant and orderly officer in the 87th Infantry Division . After his promotion to captain , he was a company commander in the 294th Infantry Division on the Siegfried Line , before being transferred to the officer reserve of the Army High Command (OKH) in the 102nd Infantry Regiment in Chemnitz from July to August 1940 . Bechler completed general staff training without an examination and was adjutant to General z. b. V. Eugen Müller at the Army High Command (OKH) in Zossen. In March 1942, Bechler was appointed commander of the 1st Battalion of Infantry Regiment 29 (motorized) of the 3rd Infantry Division (motorized) of the 6th Army and was promoted to major early . On January 28, 1943, Bechler was captured in the Battle of Stalingrad and remained in Soviet captivity until 1945 , initially in the Frolow camps and in the Jelabuga officers' camp on the Kama. Contrary to the occasional representation in the literature, Bechler was at no time a member of the NSDAP ; Membership cannot be proven in the NSDAP's archive of members. The accusations made in the literature that he participated in the “ Commissar Order ” or the Operation Order Barbarossa are also completely unfounded.

Work in the National Committee for Free Germany (NKFD) and in the Federation of German Officers (BDO)

Contemporary witnesses like Heinz Keßler attested Bechler a drastic inner distancing from the Nazi ideology and a profound inner reversal as a result of the disaster in Stalingrad and the " scorched earth tactics" practiced by the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union . Bechler was co-signatory of the founding documents of the National Committee Free Germany (NKFD) on 12./13. July 1943 and on 11/12. September 1943 founding member and board member of the Association of German Officers in Lunjowo. He was also a co-author of the “Appeal to the German Generals and Officers! An Volk und Wehrmacht! ”Of September 12, 1943. In 1943, Bechler in Lunowa (near Moscow) declared himself ready to work actively in the NKFD as an editor for the NKFD newspaper“ Free Germany ”and for radio broadcasts. In 1944 he graduated as a POW, the "Central Antifa-Schule" in Krasnogorsk and was then considered one of 4,000 Front representative at the Belarusian 2. Front of the Red Army used. In this role, Bechler undertook to persuade German Wehrmacht soldiers to surrender and surrender through leaflet campaigns and speeches over trench loudspeakers. He received the Order of the Great Patriotic War for his work in the Graudenz pocket . Bechler reached Berlin in 1945 with the Red Army. In mid-May 1945, Bechler was released from Soviet captivity. Bechler himself stated that he was sentenced to death in absentia for his work in the NKFD and the BDO . A possible conviction by the competent Reich Court Martial can no longer be traced today due to the destruction of the files. A conviction by the People's Court is ruled out because of its lack of jurisdiction over military personnel and the death of the People's Court President Freisler , after which no more death sentences were passed there. It has not been established whether Bechler was disgraced from the Wehrmacht, as the literature sometimes claims. Bechler was non-party until the end of the war.

Political career after the end of the war in Brandenburg

After his release from captivity, Bechler initially took over as head of an anti-fascist school near Stettin. He was then employed as an NKVD member on the instructions of the Political Headquarters of the Red Army (GlawPURKKA) with the preparation of the personnel selection for the provincial administration of Brandenburg. On the personnel list for the function of the 3rd Vice President of a provincial administration to be formed, he put Fritz Rücker, a founding member of the NKFD and former SPD member in the Weimar Republic , among others . According to the Moscow "Guidelines for the Work of German Anti-Fascists" of April 5, 1945, Bechler was commissioned to select not only communists , but " anti-fascists " of various party political orientations and social origins for the administration of Brandenburg, those in the "front school" of the Red Army In Rüdersdorf / Brandenburg, German prisoners of war were to be trained to become mayors and district administrators in rapid proceedings.

On June 29, 1945 Bechler was appointed 1st Vice President of the Brandenburg Provincial Administration, head of the Department of Internal Affairs and Justice and (until October 1948) head of the provincial commissions for denazification and land reform in Brandenburg. The Soviet occupying power confirmed Bechler's appointment on July 4, 1945 and the formation of the province of Brandenburg as a whole with Command 5 of the SMAD on July 9, 1945. After the Brandenburg state election in October 1946, Bechler was Minister of the Interior from December 20, 1946 to September 8, 1949 Provincial government (from July 21, 1947: state government) Brandenburg. In 1946 Bechler became a member of the SED .

Service in the People's Police, the Barracked People's Police of the GDR and the NVA

In September 1949 Bechler ended his political career and joined the People's Police in October 1949. On November 1, 1950, Bechler was appointed Chief Inspector (equivalent to Major General) of the People's Police and Chief of Staff in the Central Training Administration (HVA) at the Ministry of the Interior of the GDR . From September 1, 1952, Bechler was Deputy Chief of Staff for Organization of the Barracked People's Police (KVP) . On October 1, 1952, Bechler was appointed major general of the People's Police. After the establishment of the National People's Army (NVA) in 1956, Bechler became deputy head of the NVA's main staff in 1957. From 1957 to 1959, Bechler attended the General Staff Academy of the Soviet Army in the USSR. After completing general staff training, Bechler was deputy commander of the NVA military academy for operational and tactical training and head of the land forces faculty from 1959 to 1965 . After leaving the military academy, he took over the position of director of the Institute for Mechanization and Automation of Troop Command at the Ministry of National Defense in Dresden from 1965 to 1970 . In 1971 Bechler left the NVA and was retired. After his retirement, Bechler continued to be active until 1989 as a member of the Potsdam district committee of anti-fascist resistance fighters. Since 1971 he has been living in retirement in Kleinmachnow near Berlin.

Family rift with Margret Dreykorn

Bernhard Bechler had been married to Margret Dreykorn since 1938, and the marriage resulted in two children in 1939 and 1940. In contrast to Bechler, his wife always stood by marriage; was also arrested for this (see: Margret Bechler: Waiting for an answer ). Margret Bechler stayed with the children in Altenburg / Thuringia during the war. Because of her husband's work for the NKFD and the BDO, she was threatened with massive reprisals by the Nazi regime . At the end of 1944, the Wehrmacht site commander unsuccessfully suggested a divorce from her husband. After the Gestapo appeared at Margret Bechler's in 1943, she reported, for fear of going to the concentration camp with her children, about anti-fascist couriers who asked her about her husband's work for the NKFD and who sought contact with the NKFD through her. After she had asked Anton Jakob several times not to visit her again, and he put her and her children more and more in danger, she reported him to the Gestapo in 1944 after an incident in the stairwell. Jakob was sentenced to death by the People's Court and executed . Through Margret Bechler's denunciation against Jakob, the Gestapo was also able to arrest two other resistance fighters who were in contact with Jakob, and they were also executed. Margret Bechler declined in writing to support a pardon for Jakob.

On June 9, 1945, Margret Bechler was arrested by the American occupation forces on charges of crimes against humanity on charges of crimes against humanity on the basis of a complaint from Jacob's widow about her involvement in the death of Jacob and the two other anti-fascists , and handed over to the Soviet occupation forces on July 1, 1945. Subsequently, until 1950 she was without charge and without judgment on the basis of the Allied Control Council Act No. 10 on the "Punishment of persons guilty of war crimes, crimes against peace or against humanity" (KG 10) in various Soviet internments - and special camps still imprisoned. In January 1950, she was handed over to the GDR judiciary by the Soviet occupying forces.She was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Chemnitz District Court under her maiden name Margret Dreykorn because of her involvement in the deaths of three anti-fascists , and she was imprisoned in the Hoheneck prison, but on April 25, 1956 pardoned and released to the Federal Republic of Germany at her request.

Bechler had looked for his wife in June 1945 and learned from the Soviet occupation forces that she had been arrested by the Americans. Bechler probably also learned that his wife had extradited NKFD supporters to the Gestapo. From July 1945, Bechler withdrew his wife's children. In a statement dated June 30, 1946, Bechler stated that the Soviet occupation authorities had informed him in July 1945 that his wife had been found guilty but could no longer be found. The state of Brandenburg officially declared Margret Bechler dead on September 16, 1946, the marriage thus officially ended, Bechler was a widower in the legal sense. Bechler then married the widow and communist Erna Voll. Investigations by the anti-communist West Berlin Committee of Freedom Lawyers into the charge of bigamy against Bechler did not reveal any evidence for this charge.

After Bechler learned of the impending trial against his wife in 1950, he handed over incriminating material from her diary about her betrayal and denunciation to Anton Jakob to the investigating authorities and had the court established that the marriage had been annulled by the earlier official death declaration.

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Torsten Diedrich: Bernhard Bechler - The uninhibited careerist . In: Hans Ehlert, Armin Wagner (ed.): Comrade General - The GDR's military elite in biographical sketches. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 978-3-86153-312-2 , p. 61 ff.
  2. ↑ cf. Helmut Krausnick : Commissioner's order and 'Barbarossa jurisdiction decree' in a new perspective. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 25, 1977, pp. 702ff, 714f
  3. ↑ Daniel Niemetz: The field-gray legacy. The Wehrmacht Influences in the Army of the Soviet Zone / GDR (1948 / 49–1989) . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86153-421-1 , p. 213.
  4. ^ Friederike Sattler: Economic order in transition. Politics, organization and function of the KPD / SED in the state of Brandenburg during the establishment of the central planned economy in the Soviet Zone / GDR 1945–52 , Volume 1. Münster / Hamburg / London 2002, ISBN 978-3-8258-6321-0 , p. 121.
  5. ^ Friederike Sattler: Economic order in transition. Politics, organization and function of the KPD / SED in the state of Brandenburg during the establishment of the central planned economy in the Soviet Zone / GDR 1945–52. In: Dictatorship and Resistance, Vol. 5. Münster 2002, ISBN 3-8258-6321-2 , p. 119.
  6. ↑ Neues Deutschland from July 4, 1965, p. 2; so also: Arnd Bauerkämper: rural society in the communist dictatorship, ISBN 3412161012 , p. 68; so also: SBZ manual: State administrations, parties, social organizations and their executives in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany 1945–1949, Oldenburg 1993, ISBN 3486552627 ; so also: Katrin and Ralf Baus: The founding of the Christian-Democratic Union of Germany in Brandenburg 1945, in: Historisch-Politische Mitteilungen Archive for Christian-Democratic Politics, issue 06/1999, p. 80; so also: Matthias Helle: Post-war years in the provinces: The Brandenburg district of Zauch-Belzig 1945 to 1952, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86732-111-2 , p. 62; also: Beatrix W. Bouvier: Antifascist Cooperation, Entitlement to Independence and Unification tendencies, in: Archive for Social History 1976, p. 430
  7. ↑ cf. Daniel Niemetz: The field-gray legacy. The Wehrmacht Influences in the Army of the Soviet Zone / GDR (1948 / 49–1989) . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86153-421-1 , p. 18.
personal data
SURNAME Bechler, Bernhard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bechler, Bernhard Max (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer in the Wehrmacht and the NVA
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH green
DATE OF DEATH November 30, 2002
Place of death Kleinmachnow