Friedrich Gempp

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Friedrich Gempp (born July 6, 1873 in Freiburg im Breisgau ; † April 21, 1947 in Moscow , declared dead on August 11, 1946) was a German major general , section head in the intelligence service III b of the Great General Staff as well as commissioned founder and first until 1927 Head of the Intelligence Service Department of Defense of the Reichswehr .

Life

Life and professional history

Friedrich was the son of Major Otto Gempp and his wife Mathilde, née Kapferer. He attended the general education schools in his hometown and passed the Abitur. He then began studying law at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace. As a one-year volunteer , he joined the Infantry Regiment No. 132 of the Prussian Army on April 1, 1893 and was promoted to lieutenant by the end of January 1895 . From October 1, 1897, Gempp served as a battalion adjutant and from 1900 was active as a court officer. From 1903 to 1906 he attended the War Academy , where he also learned the Russian language. During this time he was promoted to first lieutenant in 1904 . On March 22, 1907, he was assigned to the General Staff for 18 months and in 1909 he was employed as a company commander in the 2nd Upper Alsatian Infantry Regiment No. 171 . With effect from August 15, 1913, he was again assigned to the General Staff and from there assigned to the I. Army Corps in Koenigsberg as a defense officer . Here he took over the work area of ​​an intelligence officer established by Walter Nicolai from 1906 and was trained in the special work tasks for about three months by his predecessor Wolfgang Fleck (1879–1939). His place of work was Königsberg, but an initial disadvantage was that Gempp was not familiar with the regional conditions of the neighboring area in Russia.

After the mobilization for the First World War in August 1914, the head of Section III b of the Great General Staff Walter Nicolai also assigned him the same function in the General Staff of Army High Command 8 . As a result, Gempp was now in charge of the IIIb military intelligence service against northern Russia. All intelligence officers (NO) of this section of the front were subordinate to him. Due to the new conditions that set in immediately with the mobilization in Russia, almost all previous information channels for gathering news in and to Russia had collapsed. The efforts at this time were primarily aimed at establishing these peacetime connections with the informants and establishing new contacts in the areas of the opposite Russian territory. In March 1915 he was promoted to major in the field of news in the Ober Ost staff , as the previous NO of the east section, Captain Frantz, was assigned to Vienna as a liaison officer to the Imperial and Royal Intelligence Service. From October 1915, Gempp was in charge of III b in the entire Russian section of the front. This activity as an intelligence officer required the management and guidance of all intelligence officers of the individual army corps, coordination with the secret field police and the central police stations (C.St.) of the region concerned, as well as the management of counter-espionage . For this he was specially commissioned by War Minister Adolf Wild von Hohenborn (1860–1925). In order to structure the associated tasks more clearly, the Ober Ost intelligence service was spun off from the mobile III b and became an independent command unit that was only subordinate to Section III b in Berlin. From November he had 5 officers on his own staff and 20 intelligence officers from a total of 4 army groups. It was important for his work that under these difficult conditions he had succeeded in establishing a certain relationship of trust with the Commander-in-Chief Erich Ludendorff , who was responsible for the front section . Because at the time of his induction, he still harbored great distrust of Gempp and, as a NO, did not even give him insight into the current map material.

In January 1917, Gempp was assigned to the Chief of the General Staff of the Field Army at the headquarters in Berlin as an Abwehr officer and was temporarily deputy to Colonel Walter Nicolai, the head of Department III b . Since he had to stay mainly at the respective operational site of the Supreme Army Command, i.e. in the front areas, the work of the III b had been divided since the outbreak of war. From this point on, Gempp was responsible for the war intelligence service (KND), the cooperation with the war intelligence agencies (KNSt.), The domestic intelligence service created in February 1916 and the counter-espionage section. This meant that he was primarily responsible for the classic areas of responsibility for intelligence gathering information. Nicolai was responsible for the war press, the coordination with the military attachés, the organization of patriotic instruction in the troops and the personnel department. In May 1917, the Foreign Armies department was set up in the General Staff of the Field Army to assess the enemy situation and at the same time improve information work. Colonel Leopold von Rauch (1876–1955) was the department head of Foreign Army . Gempp remained in this position in the OHL until its dissolution at the end of October 1919. For his services during the First World War , Gempp u. a. with both classes of the Iron Cross and the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords.

In the spring of 1920 Gempp was commissioned to set up a new military intelligence service for the Reichswehr . On December 18, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel retrospectively to October 1, and on January 1, 1921, he took up the work of the Abwehr group in the Army Statistics Department (T 3) of the military office, of which he remained until his provisional retirement in 1927. When he passed on June 30, 1927, he was given the character of major general. His successor was Lieutenant Colonel Günther Schwantes (1881–1942).

Gempp report and reactivation in World War II

From 1928 to 1944 Gempp wrote the multi-volume work Secret Intelligence Service and Counter-Espionage of the Army , the so-called "Gempp Report", on behalf of the Abwehr Department for their internal use . In this he documented and justified the work of the German military secret service in detail up to the end of the First World War. Through this report, which came into American hands in 1945, former and, in some cases, unidentified agents or command officers such as Elsbeth Schragmüller became known. The report was then inaccessible to the public until it was returned to Germany in the mid-1970s at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, DC and is now in the Freiburg Military Archives .

On August 26, 1939, at the time of mobilization on the occasion of the attack on Poland , Gempp was again made available to the army and was deployed in the Foreign Office / Defense of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) until May 1943 . On February 1, 1941, he was promoted to major general, and on May 31, 1943, his position as a mob was lifted and retired. After he was taken prisoner by the Soviets because of his activities during the war in 1946 , he was considered missing. He was declared dead retrospectively with the date of death August 11, 1946.

Arrest, Death, and Rehabilitation

Gempp was arrested on August 11, 1946 by employees of the Smersch military intelligence service in Rostock . He was admitted to Moscow's Butyrka prison on January 3, 1947, in whose prison hospital he died of cardiac paralysis on April 21, 1947.

According to the decision of the Chief Military Prosecutor of the Russian Federation on September 10, 2001, Gempp's arrest was politically motivated. As a result, the verdict was overtaken and Gempp rehabilitated.

literature

  • Dermot Bradley (ed.), Karl-Friedrich Hildebrand, Markus Rövekamp: The Generals of the Army 1921–1945. The military careers of the generals, as well as the doctors, veterinarians, intendants, judges and ministerial officials with the rank of general. Volume 4: Fleck – Gyldenfeldt. Biblio Verlag, Osnabrück 1996, ISBN 3-7648-2488-3 , pp. 225-226.
  • Helmut Roewer , Stefan Schäfer, Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Herbig, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7766-2317-9 .
  • Jürgen W. Schmidt : Against Russia and France. The German military secret service 1890–1914. 3. Edition. Ludwigsfelder Verlags-Haus, Ludwigsfelde 2009, ISBN 978-3-933022-44-8 ( Secret Service History 1).
  • Kenneth J. Campbell: Major General Friedrich Gempp: German Intelligence Leader. In: American Intelligence Journal. 25, 1, 2007, ISSN  0883-072X , pp. 75-81.
  • Markus Pöhlmann : German Intelligence at War, 1914-1918. In: Journal of Intelligence History. 5, 2005, pp. 33-62.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Personalblatt Gempp, BA-MA, MSg 109/10846. In: Jürgen W. Schmidt: Against Russia and France. The German military secret service 1890–1914. Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus 2009, p. 592 f.
  2. ↑ Hilmar-Detlef Brückner, The intelligence officers of Section III b of the Great General Staff of the Prussian Army, 1906–1918, p. 40 in: Jürgen W. Schmidt, Secret Service, Military and Politics in Germany, Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus 2008
  3. ↑ Klaus Walter Frey, Colonel Walter Nicolai, head of the German military intelligence service III b in the Great General Staff (1913-1918) p. 166ff in: Jürgen W. Schmidt, Secret Service, Military and Politics in Germany, Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus 2008
  4. ↑ Reichswehr Ministry (Ed.): Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres. ES Mittler & Sohn , Berlin 1924, p. 116.
personal data
SURNAME Gempp, Friedrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gempp, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German major general, chief of the defense department of the Reichswehr
DATE OF BIRTH July 6, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Freiburg in Breisgau
DATE OF DEATH April 21, 1947
Place of death Moscow