Bogislaw von Bonin

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Bogislaw von Bonin on May 5, 1945 in Niederdorf

Bogislaw von Bonin (born January 17, 1908 in Potsdam , † August 13, 1980 in Lehrte ) was a German officer , military strategist and publicist .

Life

Bogislaw Oskar Adolf Fuerchtegott von Bonin was born in Potsdam on January 17, 1908, the eldest son of the imperial officer Bogislaw von Bonin and his wife Pauline Emilie Mathilde, a daughter of General Adolf von Bülow . He had two younger siblings: Elisabeth (* 1911) and Jürgen-Oskar (* 1914). From 1913 to 1926 he attended general schools in Karlsruhe, Potsdam, Greifenberg and Brandenburg / Havel.

In 1933 Bogislaw married von Bonin. From this marriage three children (Bogislaw, Wedig and Christian) were born.

Reichswehr and Wehrmacht (1926–1945)

On April 1, 1926, he joined the German Reichswehr as a flagjunker of the 4th Cavalry Regiment in Potsdam . He was promoted to lieutenant on February 1, 1930. In 1935 he moved from Bonin to the 6th Panzer Regiment in Neuruppin. From 1936 to 1938 he attended the War Academy in Berlin . His qualification achieved here in 1938 enabled him to work immediately in the 1st Deployment / Operations Department of the Army General Staff at the Army High Command (OKH).

General staff officer in World War II

With the outbreak of the Second World War , he took part as the first general staff officer of the 17th Panzer Division in the Western campaign , the Russian campaign and in the same function in the German-Italian tank army in the Africa campaign. During these years he had demonstrated his skills as a general staff officer and was highly respected. After being promoted to colonel in 1943, he became Chief of Staff of the XIV Tank Corps in Sicily . In 1944 Bonin served successively as Chief of the General Staff of the VI. Panzer Corps and the 1st Hungarian Army.

After the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, he was appointed by Colonel General Heinz Guderian as chief of operations planning for the Army General Staff and exercised this function in close cooperation with General Walther Wenck .

Arrested after evacuation of Warsaw against Hitler's orders

In January 1945 von Bonin arranged for the evacuation of Warsaw against the express orders of Hitler and left the city to the Red Army without a fight . For this reason, he was arrested by the Gestapo on January 17, 1945, on his 37th birthday, at the headquarters of the OKH in Zossen .

From January 18, 1945, von Bonin was in solitary confinement in the Berlin Lehrter-Strasse prison. It was then transferred to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. At the beginning of April 1945, he and other special inmates were transported via the Flossenbürg concentration camp to the Dachau concentration camp .

In an “express letter” dated April 5, 1945, the head of the Gestapo , SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller , the head of the Dachau concentration camp, SS-Obersturmbannführer Eduard Weiter , announced the transfer of ten special prisoners. These included u. a. Kurt Schuschnigg (former Austrian Chancellor) with his wife and child, Hjalmar Schacht (former Reichsbank President and Reich Economics Minister), Colonel General Franz Halder (former Chief of the General Staff of the Army) and Colonel i. G. von Bonin. On the second page it says:

"V. Bonin worked at the Fuehrer's headquarters and is in a kind of honorary position. He is still an active colonel and is likely to remain so. I therefore ask you to treat him particularly well. "

This “express letter” is an important historical document, because immediately after the above quotation the inconspicuous liquidation of the prisoner “Eller” ( Georg Elser ) is ordered. Elser was shot in the Dachau concentration camp shortly after the letter was received, without waiting for the next air raid, as ordered, and without destroying the letter "after knowledge and execution".

Liberation of special inmates and clan prisoners in South Tyrol

Bogislaw von Bonin (in the center of the picture in uniform) on May 5, 1945 in front of the “Pragser Wildsee” hotel near Niederdorf

At the end of April 1945, 141 special prisoners and clan prisoners traveled from Dachau via Innsbruck and the Brenner Pass to South Tyrol. There the transport reached Niederdorf in the Puster Valley on April 28th . In Niederdorf, Bonin succeeded in secretly telephoning General Hans Röttiger , the chief of the general staff of Army Group C in Bolzano, from the local Wehrmacht command .

Thereupon Röttiger commissioned Captain Wichard von Alvensleben , who was stationed in Moos near Sexten , to take care of this matter. On April 30th, with the help of 150 grenadiers from Dobbiaco, he was able to disarm the escort command of the SS and SD .

The special prisoners and clan prisoners liberated from the Wehrmacht included - in addition to the aforementioned Kurt Schuschnigg with his wife Vera and daughter "Sissy", Hjalmar Schacht and Franz Halder with his wife Gertrud - family members of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and Carl Friedrich Goerdeler , the former French Prime Minister Léon Blum with his wife Jeanne and Fritz Thyssen with his wife Amélie . He and 140 other prisoners from sixteen countries owed their liberation from the hands of the SS to the courageous initiative of von Bonins.

Captivity of war (1945–1947)

Notwithstanding these merits, von Bonin was taken prisoner of war by American troops in May 1945 and was not released until Christmas 1947.

New start in the private sector (1948–1952)

After his release from captivity, von Bonin worked in commercial activities, as a transport company and with an employment contract at Daimler-Benz AG.

Office Blank (1952–1955)

Head of the "Military Planning" sub-department (1952–1953)

On June 3, 1952, he was appointed as a military expert in the new Blank office in Bonn, where he took over the management of the “Military Planning” sub-department. His task was to prepare the planning of the German contribution to the future European Defense Community (EDG). However, after the founding of the EVG failed in 1954, German membership in NATO came a year later .

In the summer of 1953 he expressed doubts to EVG committees in Paris about the feasibility of a 500,000-strong Bundeswehr within just four years, as Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had promised the western negotiating partners.

As von Bonin's activities threatened to trigger a military-political scandal, Theodor Blank , security officer of the federal government and head of the office that bears his name, was forced to relieve him of his post as head of the "Military Planning" subdivision in November 1953. His successor was the former General Staff Colonel Kurt Fett.

Further activity until termination (1954–1955)

However, since von Bonin was to remain as the future commander of the future Bundeswehr, he was initially entrusted with trips abroad, which took him three weeks to Great Britain and eight weeks to the USA . Then he was commissioned to work out a study on the possibilities of repelling a Russian attack on West German territory while the West German troops were being deployed.

Rejection of his alternative concept

The defense preparations of NATO at that time were geared towards giving up space in the event of a Soviet attack and flexibly evading the Soviets. According to von Bonin's criticism, West German soldiers would not find an opportunity to defend their homeland. In his opinion, German soldiers should not defend Europe on the Rhine, but rather the Federal Republic of Germany with an anti-tank bar directly on the 800-kilometer border to the GDR and Czechoslovakia . The situation of a divided Germany requires a special military conception that inevitably differs from that of America or France. According to Bonin's recommendation, future German troops should be clearly defensive and also externally recognizable. This avoids the risk of the Soviet Union blocking reunification. It will take four years to lay a foundation for the planned army, which for the time being could only consist of volunteers with a strength of 120,000 men.

Von Bonin submitted these theses to his superiors in July 1954. Several internal statements were prepared in the Blank office:

  • Adolf Heusinger , the future first general inspector of the Bundeswehr , rejected von Bonin's considerations in a statement dated August 20, 1954. An effective linear anti-tank defense on the border with GDR and Czechoslovakia is not possible due to the terrain alone. By concentrating its forces, the enemy could break through the line of defense with motorized infantry , supported by tactical parachute units . The enemy armored divisions could then follow this tactical breakthrough in a second wave.
  • Hans Speidel , who later became the commander in chief of the allied land forces in Central Europe at NATO, spoke out on September 20, 1954 against such a tank defense zone, which could be breached by any strong infantry attack. Then the tank units could push through the breach and come to free operation. But then exactly the opposite of what Bonin wanted was achieved.
  • Kurt Fett, Bonin's successor as head of the “Military Planning” sub-department, complained in his statement of August 31, 1954 that a purely defensive anti-tank system was defenseless against infantry attacks and enemy artillery. The future West German army needed attack and defense divisions for operational mobility and should not be weakened by renouncing the law of action for pure anti-tank defense.

In addition, von Bonin's plan was considered politically dangerous, as the stationing of West German troops along the zone border could be misunderstood as recognition of the division of Germany. At the end of October 1954, Theodor Blank informed him that his study had been rejected.

Memoranda

Thereupon von Bonin wrote the memoranda “The limit of the tolerable” of December 5, 1954 and “Reunification and rearming - no contradiction” of February 1955. At the same time, he wanted to bypass his superiors with his memorandum “Reunification and security at the same time: A proposed solution for Coalition and Opposition ”directly to Federal President Theodor Heuss and Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

Timely, followed by termination without notice

Since he was also disseminating his positions outside the office, in contradiction to the official policy of integration with the West , on March 22, 1955, with Adenauer's approval, Theodor Blank gave him notice of termination on September 30th.

The publication of the article “Defense Plans. What I tell my son? "In the" mirror "of 30 May 1955 led to a special session of the German Bundestag and finally in July 1955 its immediate termination by Theodor Blank, who on June 7, 1955 the first Federal Minister of Defense appointed was.

Professional activity in the private sector and publication activity (1955-1970)

Bogislaw von Bonin went down as the first military-political "rebel" in the history of the Bundeswehr, which was founded in May 1956. From 1956 he was employed in commercial activities at Auto-Union in Düsseldorf, Minden and Hanover and later as a representative of Daimler-Benz in Hanover.

Continuation of political and military strategic engagement

After leaving Blank, Bonin sought the support of the CDU and SPD for his strategic military ideas in vain . He had some media coverage, including a. with the plan of a "German Council" for reunification together with the former FDP member Artur Stegner .

Contact with Soviet agencies

On December 9, 1955, Bonin traveled to East Berlin on his own, where he made contacts with Soviet authorities. He was offered an intelligence service for the Soviet Union . In the Gehlen organization , the attempt at contact with the East was processed by Heinz Felfe under the case name Mercedes .

Information letter "All of Germany" (1961–1970)

From October 1961 to September 1970, von Bonin was the editor of the confidential, private information letter “The whole of Germany”. The letters published in hectographed form appeared at irregular intervals and usually comprised four pages.

All editions of this information letter are recorded in the Federal Archives-Military Archives in Freiburg im Breisgau .

The Battle of Kursk as a Model for the Defense of the Federal Republic (1966)

He caused a stir again in November 1966 with the publication of an article entitled "The Battle of Kursk - A Model for the Defense of the Federal Republic" in "Spiegel". In his opinion, all nuclear weapons should disappear from the soil of the Federal Republic. In future, the Bundeswehr, reduced to 250,000 men, was to concentrate only on the immediate protection of the border against a Soviet attack, whereby the successful Russian defense of the Kursk front arc in 1943 was to be regarded as a military model.

This led to statements from German and foreign experts, among them Friedrich Ruge , inspector of the Federal Navy a. D. and former President of the Association of Reservists of the German Armed Forces , as well as Helmut Schmidt , the defense expert of the SPD parliamentary group at the time and later Federal Chancellor. In February 1967 the then Defense Minister Gerhard Schröder had a detailed synopsis drawn up to refute Bonin's theses.

The Battle of Kursk (→  Enterprise Citadel ) took place during the Second World War in July 1943 and was the largest land battle in history. At that time the German Wehrmacht tried unsuccessfully to conquer the area around Kursk, which was defended by 1.9 million Soviet soldiers, with almost eight hundred thousand soldiers and around two thousand five hundred technically superior tanks in a pincer attack. At that time the defenders had twice as many tanks, almost three times as many aircraft, and more than thirty thousand guns, four times as many as the Germans. In the village of Prokhorovka a tank battle took place, is considered the largest in history. In this respect, it is astonishing that von Bonin contradicted many points at the time, but no one pointed out the obvious lack of analogy between the Russian defense of the Kursk arch and a defense of the inner-German border in the 1960s with the means he proposed.

Withdrawal from the public eye and death (1970–1980)

At the beginning of the seventies, he considered his "efforts to achieve reason", as he himself called his work, to be complete. He withdrew into private life, which he led in Lehrte near Hanover.

He died there in 1980 at the age of seventy-two. As it was said in the obituary of the "Spiegel", the Bundeswehr had "in recent years at least partially come closer to the ideas of a strong anti-tank defense".

literature

  • Bogislaw von Bonin: Opposition to Adenauer's security policy. A documentation. Compiled by Heinz Brill . Verlag Neue Politik, Hamburg 1976, ISBN 978-3921593011 .
  • Bogislaw von Bonin: The whole of Germany. Confidential information letters. Bibliographic Notes 1961-1970. Compiled by Heinz Brill . Bensberg near Cologne 1979.
  • Heinz Brill : Bogislaw von Bonin in the field of tension between rearmament - western integration - reunification . 2 volumes, Nomos-Verlag, Baden-Baden 1987/89.
  • Volume 1: A contribution to the history of the emergence of the Bundeswehr, 1952–1955 (= military, armaments, security . Vol. 49). 1987, ISBN 3-7890-0673-4 .
  • Volume 2: Contributions to the history of the development of the Bundeswehr. Documents and materials (= military, armaments, security . Vol. 52). 1989, ISBN 3-7890-1828-7 .

Movie

In Wir, Geiseln der SS , a two-part TV documentary series filmed in 2014/15 in cooperation with ZDF , ARTE , ORF and RAI , Bogislaw von Bonin was played by Tim Bergmann in one of the leading roles .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry Bogislaw von Bonin in Munzinger Online / Personen - Internationales Biographisches Archiv.
  2. ↑ Heinz Brill : Bogislaw von Bonin in the field of tension between rearmament - western integration - reunification. A contribution to the history of the development of the Bundeswehr, 1952–1955. Nomos publishing companies, Baden-Baden, 1987, p. 32ff.
  3. ^ Hans-Günter Richardi : SS hostages in the Alpine fortress. The deportation of prominent concentration camp prisoners from Germany to South Tyrol . Bozen 2005, ISBN 88-7283-229-2 , pp. 110-111.
  4. ↑ Facsimile of page 1 of the express letter from April 5, 1945 on mythoselser.de.
  5. ↑ Facsimile of page 2 of the express letter from April 5, 1945 on mythoselser.de.
  6. ^ Bogislaw von Bonin: Witness hearing protocol of September 21, 1951. State Archives Munich, STAnw MII VSG 25/2. Facsimile on mythoselser.de.
  7. ^ A b Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol. In: Online-Edition Mythos Elser 2006.
  8. ↑ Heinz Brill (1987) p. 45.
  9. ↑ Heinz Brill (1987) p. 47.
  10. ↑ a b c d e Olaf Theiler: deterrence or defense . The Federal Republic's security dilemma. Failed outsider - The rebel Bogislaw von Bonin . In: Federal Ministry of Defense (Ed.): IF. Journal for Inner Leadership, November 29, 2006.
  11. ↑ Heinz Brill (1987) p. 96ff.
  12. ↑ Heinz Brill (1987) p. 113ff.
  13. ↑ Heinz Brill (1987) p. 118ff.
  14. ↑ a b Defense plans. What do I tell my son? . In: Der Spiegel , Issue 14 of May 30, 1955, pp. 7–12, here: S 11. Facsimile (PDF).
  15. ↑ Defense plans p. 7.
  16. ↑ Defense plans p. 10.
  17. ↑ Defense plans p. 9.
  18. ↑ Defense plans p. 8.
  19. ↑ Heinz Brill : Bogislaw von Bonin in the field of tension between rearmament - western integration - reunification . Volume II: Contributions to the history of the development of the Bundeswehr. Documents and materials. Nomos publishing companies, Baden-Baden, 1989, pp. 102-107.
  20. ↑ Heinz Brill (1989) pp. 108-110.
  21. ↑ Heinz Brill (1989) pp. 111-116.
  22. ↑ Heinz Brill (1987) p. 122.
  23. ↑ Defense plans p. 9.
  24. ↑ Heinz Brill (1987) p. 129.
  25. ^ Defense plans pp. 8–9. - See also: Bogislaw von Bonin, Reunification and rearmament - no contradiction (February 1955) and the reaction of Theodor Blank (March 3, 1955).
  26. ↑ Heinz Brill (1987) p. 158.
  27. ↑ Heinz Brill (1989) p. 12.
  28. ↑ Bogislaw von Bonin: The battle of Kursk - a model for the defense of the Federal Republic . In: Der Spiegel, issue 48 of November 21, 1966, pp. 42-53, here: p. 42. Facsimile (PDF).
  29. ↑ Stegner-Bonin plan of October 1955. In: Bogislaw von Bonin: Opposition against Adenauer's security policy. A documentation. Compiled by Heinz Brill . Verlag Neue Politik, Hamburg 1976, pp. 27–31.
  30. ↑ Bodo V. Hechelhammer : Spy without borders. Heinz Felfe. Agent in seven secret services . Piper , Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-492-05793-6 , pp. 147 .
  31. ↑ Heinz Brill (1989) p. 337.
  32. ↑ The Battle of Kursk p. 42.
  33. ^ Bogislaw von Bonin: The whole of Germany. Confidential information letters. Bibliographic Notes 1961-1970. Compiled by Heinz Brill . Bensberg near Cologne 1979.
  34. ^ Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin. - Collection by Heinz Brill (inventory). BArch MSG 162.
  35. ↑ The Battle of Kursk .
  36. ↑ Heinz Brill (1989) p. 284.
  37. ↑ Armaments target met, security not guaranteed. German and foreign defense experts on the Bonin Plan . In: Der Spiegel, issue 51 of December 12, 1966, pp. 65-68. Facsimile (PDF).
  38. ↑ Heinz Brill (1989) pp. 293-310.
  39. ↑ Heinz Brill (1987) p. 296.
  40. ^ Bogislaw von Bonin . In: Der Spiegel, No. 35 of August 25, 1980, p. 180.
  41. ↑ We hostages of the SS - 1st part: Journey into the unknown and We hostages of the SS - 2nd part: On a knife's edge on vimeo.com.
personal data
SURNAME Bonin, Bogislaw of
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH January 17, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Potsdam
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1980
Place of death Taught