Eberhard von Breitenbuch
Eberhard von Breitenbuch (born July 20, 1910 in Dietzhausen ; † September 22, 1980 in Göttingen ) belonged to the group of Hitler assassins. He was head forester , Rittmeister d. R. and squire of Remeringhausen in the Schaumburg district .
family
Breitenbuch came from the Thuringian nobility and was the son of the Prussian court chamber councilor and forest counselor Arthur von Breitenbuch (1873-1914) and Clementine Freiin von Münchhausen (1876-1966). On October 18, 1938 in Erfurt he married Marie-Luise von Einsiedel (* 1913 in Dresden ), landlady of Benndorf and Bubendorf in the district of Leipziger Land , the daughter of the royal Saxon captain Haubold von Einsiedel and Elisabeth Freiin von Burgk. The couple had four sons and two daughters.
Life
Breitenbuch attended the monastery school Roßleben , a foundation of the Witzleben (noble family) . He then studied forestry at the Tharandt Forestry University , where he became a member of the Corps Silvania . In order to gain a position in the higher forest career , he had to show a qualification as a reserve officer . The relevant training took place in weekend courses. In 1934 he was hired as a forest trainee in the public service and at the same time was drafted into the 6th Cavalry Regiment in Schwedt / Oder as a soldier . In 1935, Breitenbuch was transferred to the reserve as a non-commissioned officer and at the beginning of the war he was called up as a reserve officer with the rank of lieutenant in the army (Wehrmacht) . Breitenbuch was shaped by his nationally conservative parents. His bride Marie-Luise von Einsiedel was a secretary for the military attaché at the German Embassy in London until the wedding (1938) . Unlike in Germany, in England she was able to read newspapers other than National Socialist. In this way, she informed her very precisely about the political development in Germany from the other perspective, taught her and influenced her husband accordingly.
Second World War
After the outbreak of the Second World War , Breitenbuch first served as a lieutenant in Cavalry Regiment 9 in Fürstenwalde / Spree and from 1940 as Ordonnanzoffizier with Colonel General Erwin von Witzleben , later he was promoted to Rittmeister of the reserve. In 1941, Breitenbuch was promoted to forest assessor in his civilian work . On January 10, 1942, at the request of the Reichsjagdamt, he resigned from the staff of Commander-in-Chief West and was transferred to the Forestry Office of Bialowies (Białowieża) in Poland as part of a leave of absence from military service . On August 1, 1941, the area was subordinated to the administration of East Prussia and thus effectively annexed by the German Reich. There, Breitenbuch experienced the murder of people of Jewish faith and communist sentiments in connection with the evacuation of villages in the Białowieża Forest, which had already begun before he took office. He also experienced the war between the police and partisans there.
In the early summer of 1943, Breitenbuch returned to the Wehrmacht and became an orderly officer in Russia for Colonel von Davans in the High Command of the 4th Army . Through the mediation of Lieutenant Colonel i. G. Hans-Alexander von Voss , whom he had met in France on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief West , he joined the staff of Army Group Center . When Hitler visited her in May 1943, General Field Marshal Günther von Kluge forbade an assassination attempt on him because he wanted to prevent a civil war with the SS . The decisive factor was that Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler had not come to the war front . Had Hitler been killed and the SS leadership remained alive, authority over the Wehrmacht and the Nazi state would have passed to the SS alone. Colonel i. As Chief of Staff, G. Henning von Tresckow was the second most important man after the commander of Army Group Center. Tresckow won Rittmeister von Breitenbuch for his resistance movement; he transferred him to Army Group Center in 1943 and suggested that Hitler kill Hitler with a bomb ; Breitenbuch refused to do so because of insufficient experience in handling bombs. Instead, he proposed to commit the planned assassination attempt with a pistol when Hitler visited the front , since his position as orderly officer Kluges would allow him to get close enough to Hitler.
Even before Colonel i. G. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg decided in July 1944 to kill Hitler himself, and thus moved into the center of the action, von Breitenbuch was supposed to shoot Hitler at close range and thus trigger the coup and the Valkyrie enterprise ; Kluge had an accident before the assassination attempt was carried out in a car accident and was dismissed from his position due to his injuries. His successor General Field Marshal Ernst Busch could not be initiated into the assassination plans due to his pronounced National Socialist attitude.
A briefing was scheduled for March 11, 1944, with the participation of Busch and von Breitenbuch in Hitler's Berghof (Obersalzberg) ; but contrary to usual practice, orderly officers were for the first time not admitted to the meeting by the SS guards. Access to Breitenbuch was denied without giving a reason. He couldn't carry out the attack like that. Instead, he sat in the anteroom for about two hours with the loaded pistol, a 7.65 mm Browning , in the mistaken belief that they had heard of the conspirators' plans and would shortly arrest him.
Before Breitenbuch, von Tresckow , von Schlabrendorff , von Gersdorff , von dem Bussche and von Kleist had tried unsuccessfully to kill Hitler. After March 1944, Major General Stieff failed on July 7, 1944, and finally Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944.
post war period
Arrested by the British in Schleswig-Holstein in May 1945 , Breitenbuch was sent to Neumünster prison . He was released in October. In the post-war period in Germany , Breitenbuch worked in the Lower Saxony forest administration in Coppenbrügge and Soltau . In 1957 he became a member of the Corps Franconia Fribergensis . After he retired in 1973 , he lived with his family on his estate in Remeringhausen near Stadthagen in the Schaumburg district . He was a legal knight of the Order of St. John . At the age of 70 he succumbed to cancer .
Works
- Memoirs of a reserve officer 1939–1945 , edited by his son Andreas von Breitenbuch . Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2010, ISBN 978-3-8391-7025-0 .
literature
- Genealogical manual of the nobility , noble houses A Volume XXV, p. 124, Volume 117 of the complete series. CA Starke Verlag, Limburg (Lahn) 1998, ISSN 0435-2408 .
- Roger Moorhouse : Killing Hitler - The assassins, the plans and why they failed. Marix, 2007, pp. 320-321.
- Hans-Ulrich Textor: The 40th assassination attempt on Hitler. The corps student Eberhard von Breitenbuch in the military resistance. In: Einst und Jetzt , Vol. 47 2002, pp. 253–261.
- Hans-Ulrich Textor: Eberhard von Breitenbuch - a prevented assassin. In: Sebastian Sigler (Ed.): Corps students in the resistance against Hitler. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-428-14319-1 , pp. 421-430.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1996, 155/157.
- ^ Corps list Corps Franconia in Freiberg, Saxony, March 5, 1838 to October 27, 1935, and Corps Franconia Fribergensis in Aachen since November 28, 1953, as of the 1985 summer semester, p. 29.
- ↑ History , Gut Remeringhausen, accessed on May 15, 2019
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Breitenbuch, Eberhard von |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Breitenbuch, Arthur Eberhard Börries Wolf Alfred von (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German graduate forest engineer and head forester |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 20, 1910 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Dietzhausen near Suhl |
| DATE OF DEATH | September 22, 1980 |
| Place of death | Goettingen |