Erwin von Lahousen

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Erwin Lahousen as a witness during the Nuremberg trials

Erwin Heinrich René Lahousen Edler von Vivremont (born October 25, 1897 in Vienna ; † February 24, 1955 in Innsbruck ) was an Austrian officer who was major general of the Wehrmacht and a member of the military resistance during the Second World War . From 1939 to 1943 he headed the department for sabotage and special assignments of the Foreign Office / Defense of the Wehrmacht. From August 1943 to July 1944 he was a colonel in command of various regiments on the Eastern Front . After the war he appeared as a key witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials .

Life

origin

Grave of the Austro-Hungarian Field Marshal Lieutenant Wilhelm Lahousen von Vivremont

Lahousen's father, Wilhelm Carl, was a colonel in the Austro-Hungarian Infantry Regiment No. 88 and subsequently advanced to the rank of Austro-Hungarian Lieutenant Field Marshal . The family, consisting mainly of pastors and councilors , came from Osnabrück and later settled in Verden an der Aller . She was awarded the coat of arms in the Hanseatic city of Osnabrück in 1590 . One line took hold of the soldier profession, which Erwin Lahousen was to choose in uninterrupted sequence in the eighth generation. One of his ancestors, Friedrich Christian von Lahousen, had settled in Linz after participating in the reconquest of Belgrade in 1789, where he also acquired the homeland permit. In 1880 the family was ennobled .

In the first World War

After four classes of lower secondary school, three years of military high school in Mährisch-Weißkirchen and, due to the war, only two years of the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt , Lahousen was retired on August 18, 1915 as a lieutenant in the Upper Austrian Infantry Regiment No. 14 in Linz. His hopes of being assigned to the cavalry were not fulfilled. Despite his father's request for an immediate agent in this regard , he was put off until the end of the war. Lahousen spent the entire time of the First World War at the front and at the military hot spots: on May 25, 1916, he was critically wounded by a shot in the lung when he stormed Monte Cimone . He owed his survival only to a risky operation by the famous Upper Austrian surgeon Anton Eiselsberg . Nevertheless, he did not wait for his full recovery, but asked to be reassigned to a combat unit at the front. So he was posted to the southern front in August 1917 . He took part in the 11th Isonzo battle and in its frame in the fighting on Monte San Gabriele .

On September 8, 1917 , Lahousen, who was promoted to first lieutenant on May 1 of the same year, fell ill with central pneumonia as a result of gas poisoning , the treatment of which was difficult and lengthy with the medication available at the time. Nevertheless, he was used again at his own request in 1918 directly in the front area in the section of the 50th Infantry Troop Division. For his services he was awarded the Military Merit Cross with Swords and War Decoration , the Karl Troop Cross , the Merit Medal and the Hessian Medal of Bravery. After the end of the war he marched back with his division from the front to Vienna, which enabled him to escape Italian captivity . Lahousen's experiences in the First World War meant that he later became a staunch opponent and therefore completely rejected Adolf Hitler's war policy from the outset.

In the army of the First Republic

Lieutenant Lahousen served from January 1, 1919 to 1920 in the People's Army , the first provisional army in the Republic of German-Austria , as platoon commander of the Korneuburg and Kaiserebersdorf depot guards . On October 25, 1920, he took the oath of service in the professional army of the First Republic and was transferred back to Linz with effect from May 30, 1921 and then to Freistadt in 1922 . On May 1, 1925, he was promoted to captain . With this, the armed forces paid tribute to his exemplary commitment in the First World War. This was followed in 1929 by an "army psychotechnical course" and in 1930 he was admitted to the three-year training course for higher military service (general staff course), which he completed as number 2 out of more than 200 aspirants. Promoted to major on August 25, 1933 , after a trial phase in various uses, he was transferred to the Ministry of Defense with effect from January 1, 1935. Here, promoted to lieutenant colonel of the higher military service on June 8 , until 1938, he was in charge of the evidence - and information service, whereby he had to work together on the intelligence service against Czechoslovakia on the basis of the secret supplementary agreement to the State Treaty of July 11, 1936, which Hitler forced on the Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg and to forward the reports through the German military attaché, Lieutenant General Wolfgang Muff .

Defense officer in the resistance

After the takeover in the German Wehrmacht , Lieutenant Colonel i. G. von Lahousen initially from January 1, 1939, Department II of the Foreign Office / Defense. At this point Lahousen began to create a service diary on behalf of Wilhelm Canaris ; Admiral Canaris himself kept a diary "whose purpose it should be to show posterity in their true form those who at that time directed the fate of the German people". This fragmentary preserved service diary of Lahousen is now in the National Archives in Washington and represents an important historical source. The daily orders that he received and issued were the contents of this diary and the service diaries of the other department heads who were assigned to lead Canaris had ordered: “Write this down, gentlemen. You will have to answer questions sometime. "

On August 25 and 26, 1939, Lahousen was tasked with occupying the Jablunka Pass , a commando operation in the run-up to the attack on Poland .

When in the course of the war all protests of the members of the Office for Foreign Affairs / Defense against the crimes of the German military were ignored, Canaris and Lahousen decided to use the modified plans to attempt an assassination attempt on Hitler, combined with an overthrow of the Nazi system of the company Walküre to actively support. Canaris advocated the arrest of Hitler, but let Lahousen with his assassination preparations.

When Canaris, accompanied by Lahousen and Hans von Dohnanyi , flew to the headquarters of Army Group Center in Smolensk on March 7, 1943, Lahousen managed to take a box with English explosives and silent English detonators for an assassination attempt on Hitler. Colonel Henning von Tresckow and Oberleutnant Fabian von Schlabrendorff prepared the explosives after experiments in such a way that it resembled a package with two bottles.

On March 13, 1943, Schlabrendorff handed the parcel to the ignorant Colonel Brandt , who was on Hitler's plane. As is often shown in the specialist literature, the attack failed for technical reasons. Lahousen's ability to resist was also drawing to a close. As Colonel i. G. he had to complete a six-month probationary period at the front before being appointed major general , which is why he officially had to hand over the management of Department II to Colonel Wessel Freytag von Loringhoven on August 1, 1943 .

Subsequently, Lahousen took over command of the grenadier regiments 96 and later 4 on the Eastern Front and then of the Jägerregiment 41 (L). In the course of the fighting during Operation Bagration , Lahousen's command post received a direct hit on July 19, 1944, in which he was seriously wounded. For this reason he was transferred to the Führer Reserve as unfit for the front , awarded the Iron Cross First Class and the German Cross in Gold and promoted to major general on January 1, 1945 with rank number 1 . His membership in the resistance had gone unnoticed by the Gestapo and the SD as a result of his deployment to the front .

post war period

Erwin Lahousen on the witness stand at the Nuremberg trial
Grave of the Lahousen-Vivremont family, in which Erwin Lahousen is also buried

After the end of the war, Major General Lahousen was captured by the US and was interrogated by the British Secret Service from August 23 to December 8, 1946 , where he was also in the hospital.

From November 30, 1945 he testified in Nuremberg as the only key witness for the prosecution during the trial of the main war criminals . "I have to testify for everyone who murdered you - I am the only survivor [of the senior officers of the Abwehr Office]," he emphasized - according to his knowledge at the time - to the American prison psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert , who was looking for him , asked to testify in the process in Nuremberg and accompanied him there.

The central subject of his declarations was the criminal background of the war, which in the East was conceived as a pure war of extermination , as well as the treatment of millions of Russian prisoners of war, whose death was often consciously accepted. In February 1942, for example, of over three million Soviet prisoners, only just under one million were alive as a result of poor treatment in the camps. Lahousen also gave detailed information about the non-carried out murder assignments to the Foreign / Abwehr Office, the triggering of the war against Poland , the murder actions of the SS and the Einsatzgruppen behind the front and many other crimes of the Nazi regime . Thus, he has played an essential and enormously meritorious part in the conviction of war criminals who could not have been held accountable without his testimony.

After his release from US captivity on June 4, 1947, Lahousen retired to Seefeld in Tyrol . In 1953 he married the widow of the former Austrian State Secretary Theodor Znidaric and moved with her and their three children to Innsbruck , where he died of his third heart attack on February 24, 1955.

literature

  • Karl Glaubauf , Stefanie Lahousen: Major General Erwin Lahousen, Edler von Vivremont. A Linz defense officer in the military resistance. LIT Verlag, Berlin, Hamburg, Münster, 2005, ISBN 978-3-8258-7259-5 .
  • The Nuremberg Trial. The protocol of the trial of the major war criminals before the international military tribunal, November 14, 1945 - October 1, 1946 , Digitale Bibliothek 4, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-932544-25-0 .
  • Karl Heinz Abshagen : Canaris, patriot and cosmopolitan , collaboration with Lahousen, standard work, Munich - Berlin 1955.
  • Wette, Wolfram (Ed.): Rescuers in Uniform, Scope of Action in the War of Extermination of the Wehrmacht , Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2002, ISBN 3-596-15221-6 .
  • Harry Carl Schaub: Defense General Erwin Lahousen. The first witness at the Nuremberg trial , Böhlau 2015.

Movie

Web links

Commons : Erwin von Lahousen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Lahousen, Erwin von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lahousen, Erwin Edler von Vivremont
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH February 24, 1955
Place of death innsbruck