German Voluntary Motorized Company in Eritrea

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The German Voluntary Motorized Company in Eritrea (officially Italian Compagnia Autocarrata Tedesca ) was a German volunteer association in the Italian armed forces in East Africa during World War II .

history

When Italy entered the war on June 10, 1940 on the side of Germany against France and Great Britain , East Africa also became a theater of war, where Italian and British colonies bordered one another. East African Germans and crew members of German merchant ships in the ports of the East African colonies of Italy volunteered for the Italian army after Italy entered the war and at the end of June 1940 the Italians in Asmara , the capital of the Italian colony Eritrea , became the Compagnia Autocarrata Tedesca (Deutsche Motorized Company) summarized. The company had a strength of 138 men.

After training, the company, equipped with Italian uniforms, weapons and trucks, went to the front in the British Sudan , near the border with Eritrea , in mid-October 1940 - incorporated into an Italian motorized battalion . In early November 1940, the company moved into the Sudanese city of Kassala . In the area around Kassala, the German volunteer company was then fighting against attacking British associations. With the abandonment of Kassala by the Italians on January 22, 1941, the German company was with the units that covered the retreat of the Italian forces on Asmara as rearguard . There was heavy fighting for the company around Agordat and the city of Keren in northern Eritrea.

The voluntary German unit was standing in the area of ​​the Eritrean port city of Massaua on the Red Sea when the order came from Berlin to man the German merchant ships in Massaua with the men of the company and to use the ships to break through to neutral or own ports in order to reach them not to drop or sink them into British hands . Parts of the company are said to have been wiped out in the ensuing fighting back south, to the mountain area of Amba Alagi , in the Italian colony of Ethiopia . On May 18, 1941, the Italian troops capitulated after the battle for the Amba Alagi .

In January 1941 the company's first commander, First Lieutenant Gustav Hamel, a reserve officer who had already served in World War I , was replaced by Lieutenant Heinz Werner Schmidt, who had flown in from Germany. In March 1941, Heinz Werner Schmidt was assigned to the Africa Corps and flew from Eritrea to Libya , where Erwin Rommel , the commander of the Africa Corps, made him his orderly officer .

According to Heinz Werner Schmidt, a few men from the German Voluntary Motorized Company in Eritrea were said to have been on board the four Italian submarines that managed to break out of Italian East Africa and which reached German-occupied Bordeaux on the French Atlantic coast in May 1941 .

The crew of the German tug Kionga in Chisimaio, Somalia, also volunteered to fight on the Italian side in East Africa in June 1940 . The German Navy approved the use of the ship as a minesweeper for the Italian Navy in front of the port of Chisimaio, but sailing under the German war flag.

literature

  • Heinz Werner Schmidt: With Rommel in the Desert . Ballantine, New York, 1967.
  • Janusz Piekałkiewicz : The Second World War , ECON Verlag, Düsseldorf and Vienna 1985, ISBN 3-430-17479-1 . Pages 424-427.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heinz Werner Schmidt: With Rommel in the Desert. Panther Books, London 1955. Pages 14, 15 and 56.
  2. ^ Heinz Werner Schmidt: With Rommel in the Desert. Panther Books, London 1955. Pages 9 and 56.
  3. ^ Heinz Werner Schmidt: With Rommel in the Desert. Panther Books, London 1955. Page 59.
  4. ↑ Jürgen Rohwer / Gerhard Hümmelchen : Chronicle of the Naval War 1939-1945. Manfred Pawlak Verlagsgesellschaft, Herrsching, no year, ISBN 3-88199-0097 . Page 107.
  5. ^ War diary of the Naval War Command 1939–1945. Entry from June 27, 1940. Page 289