Ernst Munzinger (officer)

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Ernst Gustav Adolf Munzinger (born July 6, 1887 in Riga , Russian Empire , † April 23, 1945 in Berlin ) was an officer in the German Army and later in the Wehrmacht . Munzinger was privy to the plans of the resistance fighters for the attack on July 20, 1944 .

Life

Munzinger, the son of a beer brewer, wanted to become a journalist after finishing school. At the request of his father, whose family had emigrated from Zweibrücken to Riga in 1883 , he began studying law at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1910 he became a member of the Isaria Corps . He broke off his studies, enlisted in the Bavarian Army and served with the Royal Bavarian Infantry Regiment "Prince Wilhelm von Hohenzollern" No. 22 in Zweibrücken.

After the outbreak of World War I , Munzinger's family was expelled from the Russian Empire and moved to Berlin. Munzinger was first deployed on the Western Front and later as an intelligence officer on the Eastern Front. Munzinger achieved the rank of captain and was awarded both Iron Crosses .

After the war he moved back to Riga with his father. Munzinger married in 1920. The marriage resulted in a daughter. After completing his commercial training, Munzinger set up a chemical factory in Riga. After the National Socialists won the Reichstag elections in March 1933 , he was expelled from the country because he openly sympathized with National Socialism and had led the Riga branch of the NSDAP foreign organization. Munzinger moved with his family to Berlin in 1933, where he and his brother-in-law led the clothing and textiles department. After the Reichspogromnacht in 1938 at the latest , Munzinger turned away from National Socialism because of the riots against Jews.

During the Second World War Munzinger worked as an intelligence officer at the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW), where he was assigned to the Abwehr under Wilhelm Canaris . Munzinger later came into contact with the resistance group around Hans von Dohnanyi and Hans Oster . With the rank of lieutenant colonel, his service in the Wehrmacht ended in the spring of 1944 and Munzinger returned to civilian life. Munzinger was already informed about the planned assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 at this time, but his role in the preparations is unknown. After the failed attempt on July 20, 1944, Munzinger was arrested by SS members in Salzburg and taken to the Lehrter Strasse cell prison in Berlin . During the Battle of Berlin Munzinger was shot together with 14 other resistance fighters on the night of April 23, 1945 by members of the Gestapo on a nearby factory site in Invalidenstrasse. Initially, his body was buried in a mass grave in Alt-Moabit , but later transferred to the St. Paul's cemetery in Berlin-Plötzensee .

literature

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Individual evidence

  1. Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 109 , 953
  2. ^ Leader of the NSDAP / AO local group Riga cf. Hans Adolf Jacobsen: National Socialist Foreign Policy 1933–1938 , Metzner, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin 1968, p. 651