Hans-Helmut Klose
Hans-Helmut Klose (born September 9, 1916 in Ostseebad Wustrow on the Fischland ; † October 19, 2003 ) was a German naval officer and commander of the fleet .
Service in the Navy
He joined the Navy on April 3, 1936 and served on destroyers and torpedo boats before and at the beginning of World War II . From October 1941 to April 1944 he was in command of speedboats and participated in a number of skirmishes in the English Channel . From April 1944 until the end of the war he was employed as head of the 2nd Schnellboot-Schulflotille in the Schnellboot-Lehrdivision in the Baltic Sea and took part in the fighting in the Gulf of Finland and the Gulf of Riga . At the end of the war, Klose was a lieutenant captain .
Service in various maritime associations between 1946 and 1956
After being captured by the British as a prisoner of war, he joined the German mine clearance service in 1946 and was in command of a minesweeper that was involved in clearing the World War II mines in the Skagerrak and in Danish waters. After the dissolution of the German Mine Clearance Service, Klose served in its successor organization, the Cuxhaven Mine Clearance Association (MRVC), on whose staff he was responsible, among other things, for contacts with the Gehlen organization .
In 1948, Klose received a special order from the Royal Navy , which oversaw the MRVC. She had been asked by the British secret service MI6 to help her smuggle in agents in the Baltic States . Klose initially took on this task in addition to his work for the MRVC with speedboats of the former Navy that were additionally equipped for long-haul use and optimized for crawling, later with new boats. For camouflage they were subject to the British Baltic Fishery Protection Service (BBFPS), an association of the Royal Navy that was officially responsible for fisheries protection in the Baltic Sea. In April 1949, the first operation to dismiss six agents in the Baltic region began near Ventspils .
Although the Schnellbootgruppe Klose , the common but unofficial name, was able to successfully carry out all smuggling jobs up to 1955, agents were then caught by the KGB due to treason and these operations were therefore discontinued. After that, the main task of the boats was telecommunication-electronic reconnaissance . They were equipped with appropriate antennas and were able to obtain important information about the armed forces of the Soviet bloc.
Service in the German Navy
On April 1, 1956, the boats were handed over to the new German Navy for the Schnellbootlehrgeschwader in Kiel. With the special thanks of the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Royal Navy, Lord Louis Mountbatten , Klose was bid farewell. In fact, he continued to lead his association, now as a corvette captain and commander of the Schnellbootlehrgeschwader (later 1st Schnellbootgeschwader) of the German Navy. The reconnaissance personnel formed the basis for the reconnaissance organization of the German Navy.
He then served at NATO headquarters in Fontainebleau , as commander of destroyer 4 (1962–1963), in the operations department of the Fleet Command (1963–1964), as a naval attaché in Washington (1964–1968) and as commander of the speedboat flotilla (1968–1970 ). He was then promoted to Flotilla Admiral Commander of the Naval Forces of the North Sea (1970–1971), Deputy Commander of the Fleet (1971–1974, as Rear Admiral ) and finally their Commander (as Vice Admiral ) until his retirement on September 30, 1978 Klose volunteers for a shipyard.
Awards
- Iron Cross (1939) 2nd and 1st class
- War badge for minesweeping, submarine hunting and security associations
- German cross in gold on January 31, 1944
- Kurland cuff
- 1973: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
- 1978: Great Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany
literature
- Armin Müller: Wave War. Agent radio and radio reconnaissance of the Federal Intelligence Service 1945–1968 . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-86153-947-6 .
Web links
- The Schnellbootgruppe Klose and the British Baltic Fishery Protection Service ( Memento of August 4, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
Movie
- In 1971, GDR film director Frank Beyer dealt critically with Klose's activities between 1945 and 1956 in the docudrama Rottenknechte, which was shot with the support of the Volksmarine . Here took Dietmar Richter-Reinick the role Klose.
Individual evidence
- ^ Association of Klose on a private website
- ^ Klaus D. Patzwall , Veit Scherzer : Das Deutsche Kreuz 1941–1945, History and Proprietor Volume II , Verlag Klaus D. Patzwall, Norderstedt 2001, ISBN 3-931533-45-X , p. 235
- ↑ Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette . Vol. 25, No. 190, October 9, 1973.
- ↑ Announcement of awards of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. In: Federal Gazette . Vol. 30, No. 194, October 13, 1978.
Jens Matzen (until 1958) | Friedrich Kemnade (1958–1960) | Carl-Heinz Birnbacher (1960–1962) | Bernd Klug (1962–1964) | Jens Matzen (1964–1968) | Hans-Helmut Klose (1968–1970) | Hans-Otto Rieve (1970–1973) | Klaus-Jürgen Thäter (1973–1975) | Gustav Carl Liebig (1975–1978) | Hans-Jochen Meyer-Höper (1978–1981) | Heinrich Schuur (1981–1985) | Jürgen-Friedrich Geier (1986–1987) | Hans Frank (1987-1989) | Klaus Hecker (1989–1993) | Hubert Haß (1993–1996) Jens-Volker Kronisch (1996–1999) | Henning Hoops (1999-2004) | Heinrich Lange (2004–2005) | Matthias Kähler (2005-2006)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Klose, Hans-Helmut |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | German naval officer, most recently admiral and commander of the fleet |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 9, 1916 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Wustrow on the Fischland |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 19, 2003 |