Association of German Officers

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The Association of German Officers ( BDO ) was founded on 11./12. Founded September 1943 by 95 German officers in the Lunjowo prison camp near Moscow. Shortly after it was founded, the federal government was merged with the National Committee for Free Germany .

Colonel Hans-Günther van Hooven on the founding of the Bund, September 1943

Role during the war

Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach (center, seated) at a meeting, Erich Weinert sitting to his right , 1943

The initiators of the federal government hoped, through cooperation with the Soviet Union, to make a contribution to the preservation of the German Empire after the expected defeat. Under the leadership of General of the Artillery Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach , Lieutenant General Alexander Edler von Daniels and later also promoted by General Field Marshal Paulus , the BDO called on the German soldiers in leaflets and radio broadcasts to overflow and to fight against the Hitler dictatorship . Especially in the after the Battle of Stalingrad in captivity geratenen German soldiers won the conviction room that Hitler , the Wehrmacht was abusing in ruthless fashion.

Neither these appeals nor the efforts to influence Soviet policy in Germany had any noteworthy success. After the Tehran conference and the acceptance of the Anglo-American demands for unconditional surrender by the Soviet Union, the BDO's room for maneuver shrank. With its goals to end the war and the creation of a democratic Germany, the BDO remained a political-ideological entity dependent on the Soviet Union until its dissolution by Stalin on November 2, 1945, which increasingly lost importance and credibility.

Role in the GDR

Nevertheless, the BDO continued to exist in the Soviet occupation zone for a few years and established itself in a kind of conservative-liberal memorial community and in the wake of the Soviet military secret service in the church of Potsdam-Bornstedt, around the victims of the Hitler attack of July 20, 1944 to commemorate. Not only Friedrich-Wilhelm Krummacher , Vincenz Müller , Luitpold Steidle or Mischa Wolf belonged in the immediate vicinity of the BDO , but also many of the old officer families in Potsdam who were loyal to the emperor and who were officially not allowed to exist in the subsequent GDR. The BDO circle in Potsdam-Bornstedt was not banned by the expanding authorities of the Ulbricht State, but it was not publicly promoted either. The main reason for this was that the Potsdam officers did not put themselves in the public spotlight because they not only represented a complex opinion on the Hitler attack, but were also supported by the military defense of the Soviet Army in Potsdam. Increasingly more openly, this BDO circle in Potsdam-Bornstedt propagated a traditional military friendship between Germany and the Soviet Union, which had run through Prussian-German history since the times of Tsar Peter I of Russia and the Soldier King. The political differences of opinion between the official memorial for the victims of July 20 in Berlin and the Bornstedter Kreis grew to the point of intolerance. Ultimately, however, the Bornstedter BDO circle had nevertheless achieved decisive influence within the Ulbricht state and was able to regard itself as the midwife of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship (DSF), which Friedrich Krummacher, who was appointed Bishop of Greifswald in 1955, was the driving force within stood firmly by the side of the Evangelical Church.

Assessment after 1990

In 1995, a team of German and Russian historians was able to use new archive finds to show that the members of the Association of German Officers between 1943 and 1945 were more than just helpers of the Moscow leadership. For the editing historian of the anthology, Gerd R. Ueberschär , they are

"Examples of the serious effort to take part in the fight and resistance against Hitler while being a prisoner of war - comparable to the various attempts to fight National Socialism from exile [...] They are to be regarded as part of the resistance of German opponents of Hitler."

At the memorial event in 2000 at the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin, the President of the Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse judged the post-war work in the Association of German Officers, which was initially not recognized as resistance, but even regarded as treason:

"The Kreisau Circle" resisted Hitler, as did the "White Rose", the "National Committee for Free Germany" and the "Association of German Officers"; the lone assassin Georg Elser like Cardinal von Galen and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Julius Leber like Fritz Jacob and the members of the “Red Orchestra”. Resistance against Hitler - that was the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto as well as the fight against the dictator by those who have joined foreign resistance movements. Recently, the importance of exile has finally come more into focus. "

literature

  • Egbert von Frankenberg and Proschlitz : My decision , German military publisher, (East) Berlin 1963.
  • Heinz Gerlach : Odyssey in Red , Munich 1966.
  • Bodo Scheurig : traitors or patriots. The National Committee “Free Germany” and the Federation of German Officers in the Soviet Union 1943–1945. Berlin, Frankfurt am Main 1993.
  • Bodo Scheurig: Prussian disobedience. Fölbach, Koblenz 1999, ISBN 3-923532-98-9 .
  • Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): The National Committee “Free Germany” and the Association of German Officers . Frankfurt am Main 1995.
  • Nikolai N. Bernikow and Anatoli Krupennikow: For Germany - against Hitler (Russian), documents of the National Committee "Free Germany" and the Federation of German Officers , Moscow 1993.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bodo Scheurig: Free Germany. The National Committee and the Association of German Officers in the Soviet Union 1943–1945. Cologne 1984, pp. 35-43; Constantin Goschler, reparation , 1992, p. 30.
  2. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: The NKFD and the BDO in the fight against Hitler 1943-1945 . In the S. (Ed.): The National Committee "Free Germany" and the Association of German Officers . Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp. 31-51, here p. 44.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Thierse: A light in the darkest night ( Memento from May 26, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 68 kB). Commemorative speech by the President of the German Bundestag Wolfgang Thierse on July 20, 2000 in the courtyard of the German Resistance Memorial Center, Berlin . German Resistance Memorial Center, Berlin 2004.