Günther Rüdel

Günther Rüdel (born November 15, 1883 in Metz , † April 22, 1950 in Munich ) was a German officer , most recently Colonel General of the Air Force in World War II .

Military career

Rüdel joined the Bavarian Army in 1902 and was promoted to lieutenant on March 9, 1904 after successfully attending the Munich War School . He served in the 3rd field artillery regiment "Prince Leopold" and was first lieutenant when the First World War broke out . After the mobilization he was first used as an orderly officer with the staff of the 6th Royal Bavarian Field Artillery Brigade . In the spring of 1915 he was appointed leader of the Ostend motor vehicle guns command. This was directly subordinate to the Supreme Army Command and carried out the training of the leaders and operators of the then still very simple anti-aircraft guns.

In May 1915, Rüdel set up the mountain cannon battery No. 8 of the newly formed Alpine Corps in Munich . In June he was appointed their leader and the unit moved to South Tyrol . On August 9, 1915, Günther Rüdel was promoted to captain, but then gave up his battery in October 1915 and was briefly re-assigned to the training command in Ostend , which had meanwhile been expanded to become a flak school . In February 1916 he was finally transferred to the Prussian Artillery Examination Commission at the War Ministry in Berlin, where he had worked as an assistant from 1912 to 1914 and dealt with the development of balloon and anti-aircraft guns. Now, however, his main area of ​​responsibility was the organization of the theoretical and practical training for the infantry gun batteries at the Prussian Artillery School in Jüterbog .

For his achievements, Rüdel was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross , the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords, the Military Merit Order IV Class with Swords, the Hanseatic Cross Hamburg, the Wilhelm Ernst War Cross and the Order of the Iron Crown and the Austrian Military Merit Cross III. Class awarded with war decoration.

Rüdel also remained in the staff service in the Reichswehr and in 1930 was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel with the secret construction of the anti-aircraft cartillery, a weapon the possession of which the German Reich was forbidden at the time. When increased rearmament began in the Third Reich, he moved to the Air Force as major general in 1935 . There Rüdel was appointed inspector of the anti-aircraft cartillery and air raid protection , a position he held until he was retired in 1942. Over time, he was promoted several times, most recently on November 1, 1942 Colonel General .

The Rüdel controversy in the Bundeswehr

When the Bundeswehr was rebuilt, the barracks of the Army Air Defense School in Rendsburg was named after Günther Rüdel in 1964. This led to controversy in the late 1990s after it became known that Rüdel had been appointed an honorary assessor at the People's Court . In the course of the dispute, the then Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping ordered the renaming of the accommodation to Feldwebel-Schmid-Kaserne on May 8, 2000 . Anton Schmid said to have up to 300 Jews rescued and was in favor of a court-martial of the Army sentenced to death and shot . It later emerged that Rüdel (as one of around 150 honorary judges) had only participated in a single trial and had not been involved in terrorist judgments, as previously alleged. In addition, Rüdel had obtained an acquittal at this hearing . Defense Minister Peter Struck then agreed to a rehabilitation of Rüdel in 2002, and the assembly hall in the officers' quarters of what is now Feldwebel-Schmid-Kaserne was named after Günther Rüdel. This renaming is considered a milestone in the decades-long dispute about the tradition of the Bundeswehr . In autumn 2010 a new staff building in Munster was named after Rüdel. In the conference room of the “Rüdel House”, a whole wall of memory is dedicated to Colonel General Rüdel.

literature

• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 . (Short biography)
• Günther Rüdel: German mountain artillery. In: Gustaf von Dickhuth-Harrach (Hrsg.): In the field undefeated. The world war in 24 individual representations, vol. II. JF Lehmanns Verlag , Munich 1921.

Web links

• Air War in World War II
• https://web.archive.org/web/20010913100907/http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/lessons/20000510wednesday_print.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20010913100928/http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20000510wednesday.html

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Niklas Napp: The German Air Force in the First World War. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2017, p. 143.
2. ↑ Helmut Gruber (Ed.): Ridge walks. Memoirs of Wolfgang Gruber (1886–1971). Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2018, p. 182.
3. ↑ Helmut Gruber (Ed.): Ridge walks. Memoirs of Wolfgang Gruber (1886–1971). Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2018, p. 192ff.
4. ↑ Reichswehr Ministry (Ed.): Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres. ES Mittler & Sohn . Berlin 1924. p. 136.