Edmund Glaise-Horstenau

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Edmund Glaise von Horstenau , from 1919 Edmund Glaise-Horstenau (born February 27, 1882 in Braunau am Inn ; † July 20, 1946 in the Langwasser camp near Nuremberg ) was an Austrian National Socialist , military historian , publicist , Vice Chancellor in the Seyß-Inquart cabinet and general of the Infantry .

Life until the Anschluss in 1938

Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, who came from an officer's family, was educated in a military school after the early death of his father and then entered the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt . From 1903 professional officer, his general staff training took place at the war school. In 1913 he was assigned to the Austrian war archives as captain dG .

During the First World War , Glaise-Horstenau served after a brief period at the front as a general staff officer in Galicia from 1915 in the department for press and politics in the Austro-Hungarian Army High Command (AOK). In this function he worked closely with the German military plenipotentiary at the Austro-Hungarian General Staff August von Cramon , and is likely to have leaked important information to him about the separate peace explorations conducted by Emperor Charles without the knowledge of the German ally . In 1918 he returned to the War Archives , of which he was director between 1925 and 1938.

From 1919 to 1921 Glaise studied at the University of Vienna , among others with Heinrich von Srbik . From 1924 he was Austrian Councilor . In 1932 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Munich , and in 1934 he received the Venia legendi at the University of Vienna for modern war and army history.

Glaise-Horstenau also worked in the intelligence service of the Austrian Armed Forces , where he was appointed Colonel in the records in 1934 . During this time he came into contact through the intelligence officer Wilhelm Ergert with the German military attaché Wolfgang Muff , who was in close contact with the Austrian intelligence service, in order to campaign for an annexation of Austria to Germany.

From monarchism , a strong emotional participation in the struggle of the South Tyroleans against Italianization , a romantic ideology of the empire and a belief in immovable determinants of geopolitics , he developed into a "emphatically national" person in the 1930s. Political ambition and personal vanity motivated the publicist Glaise, who had a certain degree of public awareness in Austria and Germany through popular military-historical and military-political lectures and publications, to offer himself to Kurt Schuschnigg as a potential liaison to the German-national opposition circles from 1934 onwards .

Since 1934 State Council in the Austrian corporate state , Schuschnigg made him Federal Minister without portfolio on July 11, 1936 , who was to serve as a wingman of the government to the German-national opposition circles within the framework of "internal satisfaction". As a middleman between Schuschnigg and Adolf Hitler, Glaise played a role alongside Franz von Papen in the conclusion of the Austro-German agreement of July 11, 1936 ( July Agreement ).

The Anschluss of Austria and National Socialism

When Schuschnigg scheduled a referendum on March 13, 1938 to avert the invasion by the Germans, Glaise-Horstenau and Seyß-Inquart forced the Chancellor to resign on March 11, after a telephone consultation with Göring . Glaise-Horstenau was appointed vice chancellor in the transitional cabinet that was then formed (March 11, 12, and 13, 1938) of the National Socialist Arthur Seyß-Inquart. After the occupation of Austria by German troops and the “ Anschlussgesetz ”, Glaise-Horstenau became a member of the Austrian provincial government appointed by Adolf Hitler with the title “German Minister of State” under Reichsstatthalter Seyß-Inquart. At the same time he became a member of the Greater German Reichstag and a member of the SA , in which he was appointed group leader in 1943.

Glaise-Horstenau (right) with Wilhelm Canaris (left) and the Hungarian Defense Minister Károly Bartha (center) on January 23, 1941

In 1939 Glaise-Horstenau was appointed to the advisory board of the anti-Semitic research department of the Jewish question at the Reich Institute for History in Munich.

After the start of the war , Glaise-Horstenau was named “General z. b. V. “(for special use) at the OKW and initially deported as inspector of the war graves commission. Therefore, he was able to work as an honorary professor for army and troop history at the University of Vienna from 1940 .

From April 1941 to September 1944 he was the "German Plenipotentiary General in Croatia " representative of the Wehrmacht in the Ustaša regime in Agram . As a military diplomat and temporary territorial commander in chief of German troops, he showed remarkable courage and skill in numerous attempts to contain or at least mitigate the atrocities committed by all sides in combat. B. in the crimes of the Ustaša in the Jasenovac concentration camp . In the process, he came into increasing tension with his ally Italy and the Ustaša regime and was recalled in the autumn , among other things, following personal intervention by the Croatian dictator Pavelić .

After his fall, Glaise experienced the collapse of the Nazi state in Vienna and Salzburg . From February to April 1945 it was in connection with attempts to conclude a special armistice for Austria with the Western powers, similar to that for the Italian area.

In 1943 Glaise-Horstenau asked Hitler for help with a financial bottleneck. In lengthy negotiations between the Reich Ministry of Finance and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers , a donation to Glaise-Horstenau was ventilated so that he could continue to pay the mortgage for his house. When the Ministry of Finance declined the donation, Hitler decided in January 1944 to give Glaise-Horstenau a donation of 100,000 Reichsmarks .

End of life

Glaise-Horstenau appeared as a witness in the Nuremberg trials . He feared that he would be severely punished in Austria for his role in the German annexation of Austria. He committed in the prison camp Nuremberg-Langwasser 1946 on 20 July suicide .

During his time as a military diplomat in Agram , he had begun writing his autobiography, which he continued during his imprisonment in 1945/46 until shortly before his death. His extensive memories offer a portrait of the Austrian elites in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the interwar period . They were collected, edited and published between 1980 and 1988 by the Austrian state archivist Peter Broucek .

Major works

  • Austria-Hungary's Last War , 7 volumes, 1931–35 (Ed.)
  • The disaster , 1928
  • Franz Joseph's companion , 1930

literature

  • Volume 1: Kuk General Staff Officer and Historian (= publications of the Commission for Modern History of Austria . Vol. 67). 1980, ISBN 3-205-08740-2 .
  • Volume 2: Minister in the corporate state and general in the OKW (= publications of the Commission for Modern History of Austria . Vol. 70). 1983, ISBN 3-205-08743-7 .
  • Volume 3: German Plenipotentiary General in Croatia and witness to the fall of the "Thousand Year Reich" (= publications of the Commission for Modern History of Austria . Vol. 76). 1988, ISBN 3-205-08749-6 .
  • Austrian State Archives (Ed.), Communications from the Austrian State Archives , Volume 47, 1999.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The title was made bourgeois on the basis of the "Law on the Abolition of the Nobility, Secular Knights and Ladies Orders and Certain Titles and Dignities" of the Republic of Austria (Nobility Repeal Act ) of April 3, 1919 with effect from April 10, 1919.
  2. ↑ August von Cramon (1861–1940), see Cramon, August von in the online version of the edition files of the Reich Chancellery. Weimar Republic
  3. ↑ Austrian State Archives 1999, page 210f
  4. ↑ a b Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 270.
  5. ^ Wolf Oschlies : The Croatian Jasenovac concentration camp . November 6, 2004 on the homepage of the “Future needs memories” [1] Accessed June 4, 2015
  6. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär , Winfried Vogel : Serve and earn. Hitler's gifts to his elites. Fischer-TB 14966, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-596-14966-5 , pp. 175-178.
  7. ^ Rudolf Kiszling:  Glaise von Horstenau, Edmund. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 423 f. ( Digitized version ).
personal data
SURNAME Glaise-Horstenau, Edmund
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Horstenau, Edmund Glaise von (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian National Socialist, military historian, publicist, Vice Chancellor in the Seyß-Inquart cabinet and General of the Infantry
DATE OF BIRTH February 27, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Braunau am Inn
DATE OF DEATH July 20, 1946
Place of death Langwasser camp near Nuremberg