Felix Tarbuk

Felix Josef Gabriel Tarbuk (born August 3, 1893 in Vienna-Hietzing ; † June 16, 1982 in Vienna-Ottakring ; 1904 to 1919 Tarbuk von Sensenhorst; also Tarbuk-Sensenhorst ) was a railway engineer and an Austrian officer in a kuk railway company later colonel of the Abwehr in the German armed forces , from 1955 director of the Austrian Wood Research Institute.

Life

family

Tarbuk came from an originally Croatian family of "Militärgrenzern" at the military frontier , the border region of Austria to the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, whose parent series with Ciril Tarbuk in Tušilović started (mentioned 1803-1815), and was the son of the still born there kuk Field Marshal Lieutenant Johann Tarbuk , Edler von Sensenhorst (1853–1919; grandson of the aforementioned Ciril) and Mathilde Josefa, b. Bayrhammer (1856-1926). On November 18, 1904, the family was raised to the Austrian nobility with the addition of "Edle von Sensenhorst". With the Nobility Repeal Act of April 1919, they were lost again.

Felix Tarbuk was first married to Consuelo von Putti († 1926), then from 1939 to Maria Seiller , born Grazzer (born August 14, 1892 in Trieste ; † December 25, 1947) and finally from 1962 to Yolanta Przibil, born Kohany . All three marriages remained childless, but he adopted the son of his second wife, Mario Seiller-Tarbuk (* 1925). He had the four brothers Karl , Hans , Robert and Fritz Tarbuk and two sisters.

Military career

Felix Tarbuk von Sensenhorst in 1914

28. Railway company, inspection by War Minister Feldzeugmeister Freiherr von Krobatin and First Lieutenant Felix Tarbuk von Sensenhorst

First Lieutenant Tarbuk von Sensenhorst in Belgrade - Semlin

Felix Tarbuk von Sensenhorst attended the military high school in Mährisch-Weißkirchen , then graduated from the kuk Technical Military Academy in Mödling and was retired from the kuk railway regiment. During the First World War he served as a pioneer officer of the 28th railway company and in 1915 led, among other things, the reconstruction of the destroyed bridge over the Prut near Czernowitz . Tarbuk also worked with the 28th railway company on the restoration of the railway bridge in Zalescziki, the Sava railway bridge Belgrade - Semlin and, at the end of 1914 to 1915, on the construction of the Prislop railway (narrow gauge with 750 millimeter gauge, branch line of the Theresientalbahn) in the northern Carpathians from Borșa in the Maramures over the Prislop Pass (1416 meters) into the Bukovina . Later - thanks to the good superstructure and the 400-meter-long passing points - this railway ensured efficient removal of the rich wood deposits until 1998 , since the railway required less fuel than truck transporters. The majority of the forest railway network was destroyed and taken out of service in autumn 1998 by storms .

In 1916 the blasted bridge over the Vistula near Ivangorod was rebuilt and, finally, from 1916 to 1917 the first 45-kilometer section of the Fiemme Valley Railway from Auer to Cavalese ( Trentino ) with six tunnels, seven viaducts , eight bridges and the largest narrow-gauge railway station in the Danube Monarchy. A total of 6,000 men were employed during the construction, 3,600 of them - mostly Serbian - prisoners of war . The planning and construction of these military railroad structures from the First World War were - by today's standards - each completed in record time, within a few weeks and months.

After the First World War, Felix Tarbuk joined the Oesterreichische Nationalbank . In February 1939, he had himself reactivated as an officer in order to avoid transferring to the Deutsche Reichsbank and becoming a member of the NSDAP . Later he served in the office group "Abroad / Defense" in the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and from 1941 was assigned to the Office for Abroad / Defense in the OKW.

For military service he was stationed in Italy from 1942 to 1944 , as an Abwehr officer in large-scale Italian industry, in Abwehr or Front Reconnaissance Command 150 (Abwehr I, espionage ) in Rovereto . Tarbuk was not part of the resistance, but he belonged to the broader group of officers of the Wehrmacht who had been initiated in principle and who had recognized the hopelessness of the military situation and the need to limit damage and avoid unnecessary victims from 1943 onwards.

Finally, at the end of the war in northern Italy, he was taken prisoner by the British. After his release from captivity, Tarbuk was kidnapped in 1947 by political commissars of the NKVD Red Army from his apartment in Vienna to the Soviet occupation zone. In an express trial, he was sentenced to a 25-year prison term in a GULAG penal camp in Siberia for alleged espionage , which he served in Vorkuta from 1947 until his release in 1955 . There he suffered severe frostbite and damage to health from malnutrition .

Tarbuk returned to Vienna in 1955 from Soviet captivity and became director of the Austrian Wood Research Institute (today: Holzforschung Austria ), founded in 1953, and devoted himself to the development of alternative motor fuels made from wood and wood gasification engines . He died in Vienna in 1982 and was buried with military honors in the Ober Sankt Veiter Friedhof in Vienna.

literature

• Genealogical manual of the nobility , Adelslexikon Volume XIV, Volume 131 of the complete series, CA Starke Verlag, Limburg (Lahn) 2003, ISSN  0435-2408
• Michael Soltikow: I was right in the middle. My years at Canaris. ; 1986.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Death register of the registry office Vienna-Ottakring No. 1465/1982.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Cf. on the naming of the brothers "Major General Johann Tarbuk , Edler von Sensenhorst" and "Major General Karl Tarbuk , Edler von Sensenhorst" in: Marcel Stein: Österreichs Generale im deutschen Heer: 1938–1945. Black / yellow - red / white / red - swastika. Biblio, Bissendorf 2002, p. 348, ISBN 3-7648-2358-5 . ( Limited preview in Google Book search.)