Fabian von Schlabrendorff

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Fabian von Schlabrendorff (born July 1, 1907 in Halle (Saale) ; † September 3, 1980 in Wiesbaden ) was a German lawyer , reserve officer and resistance fighter from July 20, 1944 . From 1967 to 1975 he was a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court .

Life

Pre-war period

Fabian von Schlabrendorff attended the Leopoldinum grammar school in Detmold and, after completing his studies and doctorate in law, worked as an assistant to Herbert von Bismarck (Gut Lasbek / Pommern), the State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. Both shared an aversion to the National Socialists. Von Schlabrendorff married Luitgarde von Bismarck (1914–1999), a granddaughter of the resistance fighter Ruth von Kleist-Retzow .

According to his own account, Schlabrendorff, who spoke excellent English, flew to London on behalf of Berlin resistance circles in mid-August 1939 to meet high officials in the Foreign Office about the secret negotiations between the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov and German plans for to inform an attack on Poland. But he was not taken seriously. He met Winston Churchill and explained to him that there was definitely resistance to Hitler's plans in the German Reich.

In World War II

Von Schlabrendorff was one of the conservative opponents of National Socialism from an early age . As a lieutenant in the reserve in 1942 he became an adjutant to Colonel Henning von Tresckow , his cousin, one of the leading figures in the military resistance against Hitler, and took part in the various coup plans and attempts by the conspirators. Von Schlabrendorff acted primarily as a secret liaison between Tresckow, who was a general staff officer at Army Group Center headquarters on the Eastern Front, and the group of conspirators in Berlin around Ludwig Beck , Carl Friedrich Goerdeler , Hans Oster and Friedrich Olbricht .

On March 13, 1943, von Schlabrendorff smuggled an explosive bomb into Hitler's Focke-Wulf Fw 200 in a box with two bottles of Cointreau as a present for Hellmuth Stieff when he wanted to fly back from a front inspection to his headquarters in Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg . One of the co-conspirators, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff , had obtained the explosives and the required silent pencil detonators of English origin . Von Schlabrendorff activated the detonator himself and handed the package over to Lieutenant Colonel Heinz Brandt , who was on Hitler's plane. However, the explosive device did not explode - as was later found out because of the extreme cold in the aircraft's hold. The next morning, von Schlabrendorff flew to East Prussia in a courier plane at the highest risk , found Brandt and exchanged the package again.

Schlabrendorff witnessed the exhumations of the victims of the Katyn massacre in spring 1943 and had no doubts about the Soviet perpetrators.

After the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , von Schlabrendorff was arrested and transferred to the Gestapo prison in Berlin. Despite repeated severe torture, the Gestapo did not succeed in persuading von Schlabrendorff to confess about co-conspirators and details of the resistance plans. In February 1945 the trial against von Schlabrendorff was scheduled before the People's Court in Berlin. On February 3, 1945, however, a direct bomb hit destroyed large parts of the courthouse, and the President of the People's Court, Roland Freisler, was killed. According to von Schlabrendorff's account, he was holding his file in his hand when he died.

His trial had to be suspended, and when the case was brought up again in mid-March, von Schlabrendorff, with reference to the torture he had suffered, was acquitted before the People's Court, chaired by Wilhelm Crohne . In the following month von Schlabrendorff was transferred to different concentration camps one after the other : Sachsenhausen , Flossenbürg , Dachau . On April 24, 1945 von Schlabrendorff was transported to Niederdorf (South Tyrol) together with about 140 prominent inmates from twelve nations (whose SS guards had been ordered not to let these inmates fall alive into enemy hands ) . Wichard von Alvensleben freed this transport as a captain of the Wehrmacht . The prisoners were finally freed by American troops on May 4, 1945 (see Liberation of the SS hostages in South Tyrol ).

post war period

Grave site in the cemetery of St. Martin zu Morsum (Sylt )

During the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals , he was part of the senior staff of the Chief of the American secret OSS , General William J. Donovan , the first adviser to the US Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson was. As only became known six decades later after the OSS documents were released, Schlabrendorff wrote analyzes for Donovan about the resistance against Hitler and about the generals of the Wehrmacht. His memorandum, in which he refused to attribute the Katyn massacre to the Germans, led Jackson to the conviction that this point should be deleted from the Nuremberg indictment.

According to a documentation from the CIA, the USA proposed to Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1950 that Schlabrendorff be appointed first head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV); but Schlabrendorff himself rejected this suggestion for health reasons.

Instead, he initially worked again as a lawyer. From July 1955 to 1956 he was a member of the personnel appraisal committee for the new Bundeswehr . From 1967 to 1975 he was a judge at the Federal Constitutional Court . In 1967 Schlabrendorff was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany .

Fabian von Schlabrendorff published the first book of the post-war period on the military resistance against the Nazi regime under the title Officers against Hitler . The first edition appeared in 1946; Several new editions followed, making it one of the most famous works of the post-war period on this subject. In this autobiographical work and in the one from 1979, however, some descriptions of events later turned out to be in contradiction to historical sources, such as the circumstances of Freisler's death.

There are streets named after him in Frankfurt am Main , Detmold and Rangsdorf .

Quotes

"To prevent Hitler's success under all circumstances and by all means, even at the expense of a severe defeat of the Third Reich, was our most urgent task."

- Fabian von Schlabrendorff : Officers against Hitler. Europa-Verlag, Zurich, 1946 edition, p. 38.

Works

  • Officers against Hitler. Zurich 1946 (TB Goldmann, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-442-12861-7 ).
  • Encounters in five decades. Tuebingen 1979.

literature

Web links

Commons : Fabian von Schlabrendorff  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fabian von Schlabrendorff in the Munzinger archive , accessed on April 25, 2012 ( beginning of the article freely available).
  2. ^ Fabian von Schlabrendorff: Officers against Hitler. Zurich 1951, pp. 52–54.
  3. ^ Fabian von Schlabrendorff: The bomb attack on Hitler on March 13, 1943. In: Online edition Myth Elser.
  4. ^ Fabian von Schlabrendorff: Officers against Hitler . Zurich 1951, pp. 116–117.
  5. Thomas Urban : Katyn 1940. History of a crime. Munich 2015, pp. 82, 101.
  6. See Joachim Fest : Coup. The long way to July 20th. Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-88680-539-5 , p. 318.
  7. Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol. In: Online-Edition Mythos Elser 2006.
  8. ^ How the Katyn massacre disappeared from the prosecution sueddeutsche.de, May 14, 2015.
  9. Delmege Trimble: The Defections of Dr. John
  10. ^ Died: Fabian von Schlabrendorff . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1980, pp. 236 ( online - Sept. 8, 1980 ).
  11. ^ Constitutional judge : Wise on the edge . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 1967, p. 35 ( online - 24 July 1967 ).
  12. ^ Gert Buchheit : Judge in red robe: Freisler, President of the People's Court. List, 1968, p. 274.
  13. Simone Hannemann: Robert Havemann and the resistance group "European Union": a representation of the events and their interpretation after 1945 (= series of publications of the Robert Havemann archive, vol. 6). Robert Havemann Archive (Berlin), ISBN 978-3-9804920-5-8 , p. 80, footnote 263.