Military Police Service (Reichswehr)

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The Feldjägerdienst ( Fjd ) of the Reichswehr was a secret or illegal military association for small-scale warfare in the event of an occupation of the German Reich territory by foreign troops.

Conception

Due to the personnel and material weakness of the Reichswehr as a result of the conditions of the Peace Treaty of Versailles , a concept for small warfare behind enemy lines, but on its own territory , was developed in the Troop Office from March 1924 . A first memorandum was created on October 21, 1924, apparently largely under the influence of Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel . The troops were expressly not supposed to wage partisans but rather a guerrilla war. The Feldjäger were members of regular, albeit secret, Reich Defense Units and were supposed to wear either uniform or clearly recognizable military badges and open their weapons.

tasks

In the internal memorandum for the military police , which appeared on April 1, 1928 and was apparently written by its head at the time, Lieutenant Colonel a. D. von Voss had written, the tasks of the troops were described in detail. In contrast to the border guards , which were supposed to keep fighting in the border area in order to delay the penetration of an enemy, the military police should let the front run over them and then carry out classic small-scale war operations behind the enemy. This included acts of sabotage , the interruption of communication and logistics lines such as railway lines, roads and waterways and the destruction of their own infrastructure . With little personal effort, strong enemy forces were to be bound and worn down and, in addition, the own population was encouraged to passive resistance .

Designed strength and personnel selection

The basic unit of the military police service was the company with a strength of 100 men, divided into three platoons of four groups each . The plan was to set up 30 to 40 companies per military district , i.e. a good 21,000 to 28,000 men. Personnel should be carefully selected and trained. Members of military associations were considered unsuitable because they were not trusted to engage in conspiratorial activities.

In 1927 a good 8,850 trained military police were available, apparently mainly in East Prussia and Danzig . According to Arno Rose, the Feldjägerdienst also supported Ukrainian combat organizations in Poland , which were to be deployed in the rear of the Polish army in the event of war , and also maintained contacts with Hungary . In West Germany there seem to have been no or only small Fjd units.

Dissolution in 1929 and a model for the werewolf in 1944/45

At the request of the Prussian government , the military police service was terminated in 1929. On the one hand, it had not been possible to recruit sufficient personnel, on the other hand, the mere existence of the military police appeared to be a heavy political burden, since it contradicted the Versailles Treaty and the political consequences, if discovered, would be of no use to a possible military effect.

In the autumn of 1944, SS-Obergruppenführer and general of the Waffen-SS, Hans-Adolf Prützmann, began setting up the werewolf , for which he apparently resorted to the military police concept. According to Rose, the military police regulations and the werewolf training instructions written by Prützmann's colleague Arthur Ehrhardt . Wink for Hunting Units , which was published for the first time in 1970, shows strong similarities and concludes from this that there was a transfer of experience from military police to werewolf .

Parts of the in the Federal Archives-Military Archives in Freiburg i. Br. Archived files on the military police were, according to the archive management, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, confiscated by an unspecified German secret service .

literature

  • Arno Rose: Werewolf 1944–1945. A documentation , Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-87943-700-9 .
  • Jun Nakata: Border and State Protection in the Weimar Republic 1918–1933. The secret rearmament and the German society , Freiburg i. Br. 2002.
  • Rüdiger Bergien: State within State? On the cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Republic on the issue of border and state protection , in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , 56th vol., No. 4 (October 2008), pp. 643–78 ( PDF ).
  • Matthias Strohn: The German Army and the Defense of the Reich. Military Doctrine and the Conduct of the Defensive Battle 1918-1939 , Cambridge University Press 2011, ISBN 978-0-521-19199-9 .