Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof

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Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof (born May 26, 1939 in Weimar ) is a former major general in the German Armed Forces and a historical revisionist German author .

Family and military background

Schultze-Rhonhof was born in Weimar in 1939; In 1947 his family fled with him from the Soviet Zone to Kassel . He grew up in Bonn and, after graduating from high school in Koblenz in 1959, he joined the 144 tank battalion ( 14th tank brigade ) in the German armed forces .

He completed his training to become an army officer and worked in the tank troops as a company commander , among other things . Study trips took him to Namibia and South Africa in 1964 and 1965 . Schultze-Rhonhof graduated from the General Staff Course (H) at the Staff College in Hamburg and was then as a staff officer in NATO - Headquarters of the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG); later used in the Federal Ministry of Defense and as commander of a tank battalion. From 1980 to 1984 he was course director at the command academy of the Bundeswehr and from April 1985 to September 1989, with the rank of brigadier general , commander of the 19 Panzergrenadierbrigade in Ahlen. Then he was the commander of the armored forces school in Munster.

While he was promoted to major general , Schultze-Rhonhof was first commander of the 3rd Panzer Division in Buxtehude from September 1991 to September 1994 and commander of the 1st Panzer Division in Hanover from September 1994 to March 1996 . He was also the Territorial Commander for Defense Area II , responsible for Bremen and Lower Saxony. Most recently he led NATO's first “ Partnership for Peace ” exercise in Hungary . In March 1996 he was retired at his own request. As a reason, he stated that in discussions at the time about shortening the basic military service to ten months, he recognized a lack of willingness to defend himself.

He had previously publicly criticized the Federal Constitutional Court for its “ soldiers are murderers ” rulings (1994/95). The German Armed Forces Association did not share the type of dispute initiated by Schultze-Rhonhof. The Federal Ministry of Defense under Volker Rühe referred to the soldiers' duty of restraint and the primacy of politics , but recognized the general's motivation.

Schultze-Rhonhof is married and has three children. He lives in Haldensleben .

Journalism and speaker activity after his retirement

In protest against the demand Bishop Wolfgang Huber , Martin Hohmann from the CDU parliamentary group ruled he stepped out for the duration of the term Huber from the Evangelical Church. For several years, Schultze-Rhonhof has emerged as a publicist, including works on the prehistory of the Second World War in Europe .

In May 2006 he appeared together with the controversial historians Stefan Scheil and Walter Post at a conference of the publishers Wigbert Grabert and Gert Sudholt, who were classified as right-wing extremist by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution . After a training session by the South Tyrolean Shooting Association , in which Schultze-Rhonhof acted as a speaker, the Bolzano public prosecutor's office initiated an investigation into the participants on suspicion of violating the laws against the unity of the Italian state. In 2011, Schultze-Rhonhof gave a lecture at the anti-licensing conference of the Swiss conspiracy theorist Ivo Sasek .

Publications

In his book 1939 - The War That Had Many Fathers, Schultze-Rhonhof assumes that, after several offers of negotiation , Adolf Hitler “wanted to solve the German-Polish problems with a war in the late spring of 1939, if necessary”. He thinks that Poland is partly to blame for the outbreak of World War II by rejecting the German offers to negotiate . Even Great Britain , France , the United States and the Soviet Union were heavily involved in the outbreak of the Second World War because they had ultimately forced Poland to war. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia , the later Allies had a reason for war against Germany , but since the military intervention did not take place, they were then bound by the "peace obligation". He accuses German historians of working with a "narrow tunnel vision" when analyzing war guilt. He also claims that official source volumes such as the files on German foreign policy (ADAP) have been manipulated and that historians and German schoolbook publishers have been forced to lay down German sole guilt for the Second World War.

In the appendix of the 609-page book there are 178 references to sources and literature. These include various authors rated by historical scholars as revisionist and right-wing extremist (such as Gerhard Baumfalk, Hans Bernhardt, Friedrich Grimm , David L. Hoggan , Erich Kern , Paul Rassinier , Jacques Benoist-Méchin , Anneliese von Ribbentrop , Heinrich Schulze- Dirschau, a pseudonym for Franz Kurowski ). There are also controversial historians who represent the preventive war thesis (including Stefan Scheil , Werner Maser and Ernst Topitsch ) and journalists from the right-wing conservative milieu (such as Franz Uhle-Wettler , Heinz Nawratil , Heinz Magenheimer , Dirk Bavendamm ).

On the other hand, there is no discussion of the international historical research status. Instead, he builds his argumentation on a selective examination of already published series of files on the foreign policy of the warring states. In individual cases, unprinted sources are used. Research into the sources used by Schultze-Rhonhof revealed that a random sample to falsify his claim that "between 1933–1938 557,000 Jews from Poland fled to Germany" indicated that he referred to unconfirmed statements by a former Nazi press spokesman as a primary reference. These were previously taken from him elsewhere without being checked.

In 2008 Schultze-Rhonhof published his views on "the Czech-German drama 1918–1939", a book with the subtitle Establishment and Collapse of a Multi-Ethnic State as a prelude to the Second World War .

The openly stated goal of Schultze-Rhonhof is (as of 2007) to reach schoolchildren, students and teachers with his publications in order to “one day redesign the high school and university operations from the bottom up”.

reception

Schultze-Rhonhof's writings on the origins of the Second World War contradict fundamental research findings and have not been accepted in historical studies. In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Christian Hartmann reviewed the book 1939 - The War That Had Many Fathers as "absurd" and "one-sided".

In a review of the book The Czech-German Drama 1918–1939 , Rainer F. Schmidt pointed out in the FAZ that Schultze-Rhonhof had ignored the “entire intensive research on this complex” and instead “drifted into the twilight of revisionism”. based on highly dubious literature ”. Here Schultze-Rhonhof uses "clichés that are upheld by right-wing extremists". On the other hand, a review of the war, which had many fathers by the historian Stefan Scheil , who was mostly classified as a historical revisionist in the weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit, was largely positive . The book The Czech-German Drama 1918–1939 from 2008 was also well received by Scheil.

Awards

Publications

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b fighters on two fronts. Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof for his seventieth . In: Junge Freiheit , issue 24, May 26, 2009.
  2. ↑ a b c Michael Hepp, Viktor Otto (ed.): "Soldiers are murderers". Documentation of a debate 1931–1996 . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-86153-115-1 , p. 204 ff.
  3. ↑ See the mention of Sudholt and Grabert-Verlag in the chapter “Right-wing extremism” in the Verfassungsschutz Report 2005, pp. 128–130.
  4. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3adg-8eyY6w
  5. ^ Andreas Speit: The notorious major general . In: the daily newspaper . February 17, 2007, p. 26.
  6. ↑ anti-censur.info
  7. ↑ The War That Had Many Fathers . P. 443.
  8. ↑ The War That Had Many Fathers . P. 564.
  9. ↑ The War That Had Many Fathers . P. 11.
  10. ↑ The War That Had Many Fathers . P. 11 f.
  11. ↑ The War That Had Many Fathers , p. 13.
  12. ↑ Cf. Dirk Mellies: From charlatans and history revisionists . In: Luise Güth u. a. (Ed.): Where's the Enlightenment? Enlightenment Discourses in Postmodernism . Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2013 (= historical messages - supplements, vol. 84), ISBN 978-3-515-10423-4 , pp. 241-253.
  13. ↑ In the end it remains a Nazi source! ( Memento of September 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), in: Recherche Nord, accessed on September 10, 2009.
  14. ↑ www.vorkriegsgeschichte.de
  15. ↑ Secession No. 17, edition 5/2007, p. 17.
  16. ^ Adolf the loyalty to the contract . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 6, 2009, No. 104, p. 8.
  17. ↑ Stefan Scheil: Differentiated considerations. Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof asks the still explosive question about the causes of the Second World War . In: Junge Freiheit , No. 35, August 22, 2003.
  18. ↑ Stefan Scheil: Dramatic escalation on the Vltava. Seventy years ago, with the creation of the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”, the first Czechoslovak state was eliminated . In: Junge Freiheit , No. 12, March 13, 2009.
  19. ↑ Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung , No. 45/2012 of November 10, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Schultze-Rhonhof, Gerd
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German major general in the Bundeswehr and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 26, 1939
PLACE OF BIRTH Weimar