Franz von Roques (officer)
Franz von Roques (born September 1, 1877 in Treysa ; † August 7, 1967 ibid) was a German officer , most recently a general of the infantry in World War II . During World War I fought on the front lines in several major battles in France and later worked in staffs. During the Second World War, from March 1941 to March 1943, he was in command of the Rear Army Area of Army Group North . Despite the use of terrorist measures, he did not get the partisan formations in his area under control, but from mid-1942 increasingly lost control of his army territory. On April 1, 1943, he was transferred to the Führerreserve . The retirement from the Wehrmacht took place on July 31, 1943.
family
Franz von Roques came from a noble Huguenot family. The ancestors of Roques fled like around a quarter of a million Huguenots ( French Protestants ) when, under Louis XIV, from 1685 after the Edict of Fontainebleau, there was a mass flight from France , which the refugees particularly often to Württemberg , Brandenburg-Prussia and the Landgraviate of Hesse -Kassel . In Hessen-Kassel, the male members of the Roques family were initially mainly civil servants and later officers. In the 19th century there were six officers in the family. His father Christian was a medical councilor in Treysa. Roques attended the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Kassel and graduated from high school there in 1896 . In 1904 he married Hildegard Schülke, daughter of an engineer from Jena. In 1906 a daughter was born and in 1914 the son Friedrich Karl, who later became a doctor.
Franz von Roques was the cousin of Karl von Roques , who was three years his junior , and later also General of the Infantry and Commander of the Central Rear Army Area . He had also attended the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Kassel.
Military career
In 1896, as a two-year-old volunteer, Roques joined the 1st Kurhessian Infantry Regiment No. 81 of the Prussian Army , in which several members of his family had already served as officers. He graduated from war school and showed average performance there, with leadership qualities being certified on his graduation certificate on June 16, 1897. Subsequently promoted to Second Lieutenant, Roques served as battalion and regimental adjutant . In 1905 he passed the French military interpreter exam. In 1910 he was assigned to the Great General Staff in Berlin . From 1912 Roques graduated from the Prussian War Academy as a first lieutenant .
First World War
After the beginning of the First World War , Captain Roques was deployed as a general staff officer in a division and an army corps on the Western Front. The commander of the 113th division and the commanding general of the Bavarian III. Army corps proposed Roques for higher employment. From mid-1915 he commanded a battalion with which he fought near Verdun and on the Somme .
This was followed by assignments as Quartermaster in the 1st Army Corps and as First General Staff Officer in the 239th Division . After completing the so-called Sedan course for general staff officers, he was employed as a staff officer in the X Army Corps from 1917 onwards . At Christmas 1917 he was briefly assigned to the staff of the Carpathian Corps in Bukovina (south-east Galicia ). He experienced the end of the war during trench warfare in his corps in Alsace .
In his war diary, which is in the Federal Archives in Freiburg, his experiences during the war are recorded. In it he reports on assaults, the gas war and thoughts as a staff officer. He also collected numerous documents from his service. Personal letters to his wife from the war have also been preserved. Franz von Roques seems, as his letters suggest, to have lost his trust in the old leadership of the empire in the course of the war. Apparently he saw the political situation more openly and clearly than most other officers. He wrote on October 25, 1918:
“The Social Democrats cannot be held responsible for the outcome, and neither can the new government; it only draws the conclusions from the situation it has found and whatever else one may say about the new government, it cannot be worse than the old one be, that's just not possible. "
He also writes:
"I hope that we will get by with our money in the future if we cannot make big leaps in inflation either."
Roques believed, unlike many fellow officers, never in the so-called stab- in-the -back legend, according to which the army victorious in the field had received a "stab in the back" from opposition "patriotic" civilians from home.
Interwar years
From the end of 1918 until the demobilization and dissolution in April 1919, Roques was again with the 1st Kurhessian Infantry Regiment No. 81 . Until October 1919 he was a liaison officer to the French occupation troops on the left bank of the Rhine. Like only 4,000 other officers, he was selected from around 34,000 officers of the "Old Army" , accepted into the Provisional Reichswehr and appointed commander of the 10 intelligence department. When the so-called Kapp Putsch came about, his letters to his wife showed that Roques was clearly one of the moderate bourgeois forces. He wrote on March 22, 1920:
“The Kapp-Lüttwitz enterprise was also a crime, and I would put the authors against the wall, because in the end it unleashed Bolshevism. Hopefully the matter will be mastered, but the civil war is here. Infinite values are being lost, work is everywhere, famine is approaching. It is really no longer a joy to live. "
At the beginning of February 1923 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and in mid-1923 he was transferred to Berlin , where he became chief of staff at the intelligence agency's inspector . On January 1, 1928, he was promoted to colonel . In April 1929 he was appointed Inspector of the Intelligence Force. On February 1, 1931, he was appointed major general and transferred to Hanover as Infantry Leader VI . On February 4, 1932, he was appointed lieutenant general . On August 15, 1933, he submitted his departure, as he was informed by the Army Personnel Office that "the small number of the highest leadership positions" made further employment impossible. His service ended on October 1, 1933. In the next few years he lived as a pensioner in Frankfurt. From July 1938 to October 1938, Roques was reactivated for the first time and deployed to General Command IX.
Second World War until early March 1941
In September 1939 Roques was reactivated for the second time and commanded the 177th Replacement Division in Vienna . The 177th Replacement Division was responsible for training the replacement troops of the XVII. Army Corps in charge. As the commander of a training unit, he was apparently not satisfied, but would have liked to have been a commanding officer, as he wrote to his wife. On May 25, 1940 he became General for Special Use (ZBV) I of a staff to set up new divisions in Nuremberg. At the beginning of the campaign in the west, his staff was first ordered to Belgium and later to the front in France. Only after the armistice did he briefly receive command of the " Green Line ", which divided the occupied from the unoccupied part of France. In a letter to his wife, he was repeatedly critical of the government. Roques wrote e.g. B. on July 1, 1940:
“You follow Napoleon's footsteps and perpetuate your enmity. There is no pretext for detachment that existed for Poland and Upper Silesia. The return of Alsace-Lorraine is a matter of course, one should also be modest and not try a 'solution for 1000 (!) Years'. "
He wrote prophetically on July 19, 1940, following Adolf Hitler's victory speech against France before the Reichstag
“What are the dangers of that time? America, Russia, raw materials too. "
On August 15, 1940 he was given responsibility for training the state rifle battalions deployed in France . As a general for the training of the state rifle battalions, he was based in the Hotel Claridge on the Champs-Élysées .
Commander of the Rear Army Area North
On March 16, 1941, Franz von Roques became the commander of the Rear Army Area ("Berück") of Army Group North . On October 11, he took over command of a task force from the 126th Infantry Division and the Spanish Blue Division on the Volkhov Front in the area of the 16th Army for a month . At that time, the association was involved in heavy fighting for the city of Tikhvin . Roques wrote about this time in 1951:
"If my work on the Volkhov was only an interlude, it was the climax of my soldierly life, as I was privileged to lead a large unit in front of the enemy."
During his absence, the commander of the 207th Security Division , Lieutenant General Carl von Tiedemann , had represented him. On October 27, 1942 Franco Franz von Roques awarded the Grand Cross of the Spanish Military Order of Merit for his service with the Spanish division. For this mission he was also awarded the Iron Cross II and I Class Clasp . From the beginning, Roques' staff was very critical of the Eastern campaign. In 1950, Peter Kleist , liaison officer of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories until November 1941, wrote in a book about the opinions of this staff:
"They called the whole war, not least the Eastern campaign, military madness."
The Berücks chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Arno Kriegsheim , was dishonorably discharged from the army in May 1942 because he had given his opinion on the actual war situation to Kleist's successor, Hauptmann Unterstab, at two meetings in November and December 1941 . Unterab had reported this to his superiors and this report reached the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler and the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg . Roques was unable to help Kriegsheim, who before the war was a special representative for the security of the Reich's food supply and also a member of the NSDAP and Hauptsturmführer of the general SS, could only obtain a transfer from the lower staff. Kriegsheim and Roques were linked by a "close relationship of trust". Both had served together several times before the First World War, including at the War Academy and on the General Staff.
In the winter of 1941/42 there was a famine among the civilian population in the cities of the Northern Army Area and in the entire occupied part of the Soviet Union . In the spring of 1942, only part of the fields could be cultivated, as 60,000 panje wagons and horses were confiscated by the Wehrmacht and other agencies in the winter . Roques had asked for the teams to be returned and for the troops to participate in the spring order. In the old Russian part of the army area, Roques had people's kitchens opened and in April introduced a food card system. Because of the low fixed prices, a black market developed in liquor and cigarettes as currency. In May, Roques asked Army Group North to prohibit supply trips by soldiers to Estonia , part of his army territory. Even later soldiers were involved in black market deals. With administrative order No. 5, Roques ordered that all open spaces in cities be used for growing food. In the North Army Area there was relatively good cooperation with the North Economic Inspectorate , which was responsible for economic use. Both were in conflict over competences with the civil administration in the General Commissariat of Estonia . When the 1942 harvest turned out to be better than expected in some cases, the North Economic Inspectorate increased the delivery target significantly. Protests by the staff of the army area were unsuccessful. There was passive resistance from the peasants to the handover. In the winter of 1942/43, too, the city population had to starve.
On April 1, 1943, like some other senior officers, he was transferred from the division commander up on the Eastern Front to the Fuehrer's reserve. As part of the “Winter Resistance” campaign, the Army Personnel Office transferred those generals “who are unlikely to be able to cope with the high demands of the Russian winter” to the Führer reserve. As a farewell, he was awarded the German Silver Cross for his services in the rear army area . He also received a personal letter of thanks from Hitler. In his letter, Hitler mentioned Roques' contribution to securing the Volkhov front in the winter of 1941/42. The departure from the Wehrmacht itself took place on July 31, 1943. After experiencing heavy bombing raids on Frankfurt am Main , he and his wife moved back to his native Treysa.
Fight against partisans in the North Army area under Roques command
The fight against partisans played practically no role in the first few weeks in the Baltic States . The three security divisions 207, 285 and 281 as well as other units briefly subordinate to the Roques command were busy capturing dispersed Soviet soldiers during the first weeks of the campaign against the Soviet Union. In Lithuania , Latvia and Estonia , Baltic self-protection troops set up active assistance or even took them over completely. It was only when the old Russian territory came under the control of the army in July that the security units had to intensify their search for dispersed soldiers or partisans. Following a recommendation by Army Group North on August 6th, “Structure and working methods of the partisans according to previous findings and proposals for combating them”, the procedure was tightened. For the first time, reprisals were carried out against entire villages.
After increasing cases of sabotage and attacks, Roques issued a daily order on September 14 to “Fight the Russian Partisans”. In the "Guidelines for the Training of the Security Divisions and the Forces Subordinate to the Commander of the Rear Army Area, RH22 / 271" issued by the Army High Command on March 21, 1941, the fight against partisans only occurred marginally. Roques was therefore in the order of the day to educate his troops about the partisans. Roques stated in his diary:
"Since we are only at the beginning of fighting partisans, general rules of combat cannot yet be given due to a lack of experience."
He instructed his troops to create a network of confidants in the population and to pass reports about partisans on to the Army Area Command. He warned the troops not to shoot suspects immediately, but to interrogate them in order to obtain information about the organization of the partisans. Roques assumed that the partisan combat groups consisted of 10 to 50 men. He ordered his troops to take offensive action:
"The basic principle in the fight must be that we worry the partisans, but they don't worry us."
He gave orders to set up hunting squads. He also planned to evacuate entire villages on endangered roads and railways. The order of the day emphasizes the smooth cooperation of all departments, since the fight against partisans has been delayed through official channels. Unlike the Army Group, on August 6th he refrained from tightening the procedure against the civilian population.
As a result, various large companies were carried out against partisans. These large companies remained rather unsuccessful, as the partisans simply evaded the German units.
On October 7th, Roques drew his conclusions from the previous course of the fight against partisans in a new order. Large companies should be avoided in the future. At the same time, the security divisions were to be divided into smaller groups in order to control the localities across the board. He ordered a ban on civil traffic on the streets. ID cards should no longer be issued because they had been misused by partisans. He called for increased propaganda against the population. He demanded that the population be treated well and that partisans and suspects should not be shot immediately, but that decisions should be made according to the situation. Partisans who gave important information during questioning should not be shot. Partisans who surrendered and did not actively fight should even be released. The defectors should be given permanent residence and controlled by the mayor. He hoped that word of this would get around and lead to more defectors. Collective measures should only be carried out in exceptional cases, as these “drive the peasants into the arms of the partisans.” The treatment of partisans or defectors and reprisals against villages as proposed by Roques was in contradiction to instructions from the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) and OHK. The Berück associations seem to have implemented this new approach. Wehrmacht associations that were not subject to this, however, continued to resort to terrorist measures. For example, on October 12, members of the Air Force shot five residents and burned four villages when a truck was burned in an attack.
From July to the end of October 1941, 32,392 soldiers were captured and 1,552 soldiers or partisans were killed. In November 515 partisans were killed, but there were still 26 attacks and 16 railroad tracks. On December 19, Roques tightened the procedure when he put an "amendment to the guidelines for field and local commanderships" into force. He ordered a permanent control of the population, especially the men of military age, especially the immigrants. He ordered: "Those found guilty will be shot." Immigrants without suspicion should be arrested. The prisoners were to be given prison sentences. These rates were insufficient for survival and even these were not issued in the winter of 1941/42. Roques had now largely adopted the “anti-partisan policy” of other German agencies. In winter the partisan activities slackened due to the weather. In the first months of 1942, the Red Army made deep incursions in counter-attacks, especially in the command area of the 16th Army . In the area of the 281st Security Division they also reached the army area. Sometimes regular units attacked here in cooperation with partisans. The rest of the army area remained relatively calm, but terrorist measures were increasingly used. The Commander-in-Chief of Army Group North, Colonel-General Georg von Küchler , ordered on March 29th to shoot all residents of villages who could not identify themselves. In March Roques ordered anti-partisan training courses. Unlike in the Central Army Area, these courses took place without the SS . He also ordered the formation of mobile hunting units. He ordered that the fighting be carried out by the respective field command and not by the security divisions. Because he assumed they would know their area best. Temporary priorities should be set against larger partisan associations. Since there were too few German security groups and some troops had been sent to the front, Roques ordered the “formation of combat and defense units” in March. Security associations from residents of the country in the east ”because he had tried in vain to get SS and police associations. Partisan activities increased sharply in the summer. The partisans concentrated on destabilizing the German occupation administration and attacking supplies. The partisans killed collaborating residents, especially mayors and their families, as the local law enforcement officers in the villages were only weakly armed. There was also looting and destruction of factories. Roads, railways and bridges were attacked at military targets. The partisans mostly shied away from direct attacks on German soldiers. German posts were set up by the 285th Security Division on a railway line at a distance of one kilometer. Four residents, including women, had to occupy positions between these posts. In the event of attacks, retaliation against local residents was threatened. Roques recommended this approach to other associations. In a corps order, he once again made it clear that the field commanders were responsible for fighting the partisans and the railroad safety and that this had to be enforced against other units, as there had been competence problems. On July 27th he ordered:
"These gangs must be hunted like the hunter hunts game."
Tactical instructions from Roques to fight partisans were partly taken over by the OKH and the SS. In October there were 104 battles and 90 track blasts in the army area. Unlike in the Central Army Area, where at that time all security formations were used to secure the railway, Roques ordered that only the most necessary formations be deployed. The other units were used for the offensive fight against partisans. Five partisan brigades operated in the army, which had been sent by the Red Army through the thinly manned front line into the army. In September the 388th Field Training Division was sent to support the army. At the end of October, Roques ordered the creation of a no-man's-land, u. a. Clear cutting of the 100 m wide areas on both sides of the railway lines, and forced use of the residents for railway protection, although the 285th Security Division had already stopped this, as this meant there was a lack of workers for other tasks. In October the security units smashed four of the five partisan brigades in a large company in the Pleskau area . Roques stated in an order dated November 6, after no dead bodies and weapons were found despite reports of 113 dead partisans:
“Even if some of the dead may have been taken with them, others may have been burned in the houses, it is still striking that none of so many dead are said to have remained. Involuntarily one wonders what the figure is based on and doubts the first message. If, however, the leadership cannot rely on the troops' reports, it lacks the basis for assessing the situation and making decisions. I make it a serious duty of every leader to absolutely adhere to the truth and to refrain from exaggerating one side or the other. "
In November the partisan situation calmed down somewhat, but partisan units appeared in the southern army area that had evaded large companies in the area of Army Group Center and others that had seeped through the front line . In the southern military area, 37 mayors or village elders and 35 other collaborators were murdered. Since the Germans could not protect them, the food deliveries to the German administration were stopped there. The partisans now spread out with larger units towards the Latvian border and to Opotscha . On January 30, 1943, Roques found that the partisans were now recruiting men fit for military service according to plan and that all those who worked with Germans were shot. Mayors now fled to the protection of German bases. When eight of them were brutally murdered at a mayors' meeting, 140 partisans or suspects were shot in retaliation. The fight against partisans increasingly led to mere terrorist measures with shootings and the burning of villages. According to the final report of February 15, 2283 people were shot at the company Schneehase and 288 were herded together for work. In cooperation with the 16th Army , several large-scale operations were carried out, with a large number of killed partisans repeatedly being reported. Most of the dead consisted of civilians who were shot as suspects, while the partisan units simply evaded. After a short rest, the partisans returned to their old areas. With the beginning of the mud period ( Rasputitsa ), Franz von Roques handed over his command to General of the Infantry Kuno-Hans von Both .
post war period
Roques was not interned after the end of the war, but was interrogated six times in Nuremberg in autumn 1946 about his service as commander of the Rear Army Area of Army Group North. While his cousin Karl von Roques, who was also being interrogated because of his service as the commander of a rear army area, was arrested, Franz von Roques was unmolested. At the OKW trial , one of the twelve follow-up trials in Nuremberg , Karl von Roques was indicted on February 5, 1948 as one of twelve generals. Franz von Roques only gave an affidavit for the trial and did not have to testify as a witness. On October 28, 1948, Karl was sentenced to twenty years in prison. In the period that followed, until Karl's death in December 1949, supported by the two large churches, his cousin Franz campaigned in vain for a petition for clemency.
In 1951 Franz von Roques wrote a 117-page draft "Commander in the rear army area north". In the same year he handed over his estate to the Hessian State Archives in Marburg . This estate went to the Federal Archives Department of the Military Archives in Freiburg in 1966 . It contains u. a. his draft, his personal war diary from 1914 to 1919 and personal papers from his military service. The Roques personnel file, however, has been lost.
literature
- Jörn Hasenclever: Wehrmacht and occupation policy in the Soviet Union. The commanders of the rear army areas 1941–1943. Schöningh, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-76709-7 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Roques, Franz von |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German officer, most recently General of the Infantry in World War II |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 1, 1877 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Treysa |
| DATE OF DEATH | 7th August 1967 |
| Place of death | Treysa |