Hans-Viktor von Salviati

Hans-Viktor Graf von Salviati (born August 23, 1897 in Stuttgart , † April 23, 1945 in Berlin ) was a German racing rider, officer , SS leader and resistance fighter against National Socialism.

Life and activity

Life until World War II

Salviati was a son of the chamberlain Alexander von Salviati, his grandfather was Alexander von Salviati , Prussian lieutenant general. He spent his youth in Bonn , where he also attended high school. After passing the Abitur exam in 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, on August 1, 1914, he joined the 7th Hussar Regiment as a flag boy . With this he took part in the war until 1918. In 1915 he was promoted to lieutenant .

In 1919 and 1920 Salviati participated as a member of a voluntary corps in German-Polish border disputes in Upper Silesia . He was then taken over into the Reichswehr , the army of the republic founded after the collapse of the German Empire , to which he belonged until 1925. On the occasion of his departure from the Reichswehr in 1925, he was promoted to first lieutenant.

In the second half of the 1920s, Salviati made a name for himself as a successful tournament rider .

As part of the rearmament that began after the National Socialists took over government in spring 1933, Salviati returned to the military in 1934: From 1934 to 1936 he was employed as a cavalry master at the jumping stables of the cavalry school in Hanover .

Around 1939 Salviati joined the Schutzstaffel (SS), in which he took on the role of head of the SS riding school in Hamburg and finally achieved the rank of SS storm leader . He had been a member of the NSDAP since February 1940.

Second World War, activity in the resistance and death

After the beginning of the Second World War , Salviati was reactivated as a major in the reserve: during the war he was used as an adjutant to Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt .

Since 1940 at the latest, Salviati has been close to the military resistance against National Socialism: In his position as adjutant Rundstedt, one of the highest-ranking and most powerful officers in the Wehrmacht , he repeatedly tried to use this for oppositional actions, up to and including a violent overthrow, against the ruling Nazi regime to win. He argued that the criminal policy and the failed war strategy of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist leadership group would inevitably have to end in a catastrophe for Germany and Europe that could only be averted if the generals of the Wehrmacht would oppose them. Not only as an officer, but also as a person and a Christian, so Salviati, it is Rundstedt's moral duty to take action against Hitler and his followers and to put an end to their rule.

Since Rundstedt, although he admitted to Salviati in 1943 at the latest that the war against the Soviet Union could not be won for the German side, could not bring himself to oppose the ruling system, Salviati finally allowed himself to join the military district riding and Move driving school in Demmin . When, after the attempted coup on July 20, 1944, the police started investigations against some young women who were riding horses at this school on the basis of statements in which they regretted the failure of the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler that day, it also happened Salviati targeted by the police apparatus: During a house search, his personal diary was found, in which, in addition to fundamentally anti-regime thoughts, he also recorded his view that the war was lost and that the continued existence of the Nazi system would have to end in a catastrophe and even about his attempts , Rundstedt to rebel against the ruling regime and his dismay at its refusal to be won over. He was then arrested and taken to the Lehrter Strasse cell prison in Berlin on August 6, 1944 .

In the report on the process, which the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller sent to the SS-Personalhauptamt on September 17, 1944 , it is said, among other things, that the diary shows that Salviati was an "unteachable enemy of National Socialism and the Führer" and that the in Thoughts laid down in the diary were "so vile" that expulsion from the SS was absolutely necessary. Heinrich Himmler , who was also brought to the attention of the matter, wrote to Müller: “What does a man actually have to write down in order to be found guilty? Without a doubt, Mr. Salviati knew about the proposed coup by the conspirators. I declare today: If the people's court does not convict him, I will have Mr. Salviati shot as a faithless SS man. Because it is certain that S. has undoubtedly broken the oath he took on the Führer, which obliged him to be particularly loyal. "

In 1942, Salviati, together with Achim von Oster, is said to have forged plans to assassinate Hitler on the occasion of a visit by the dictator to Paris, to which he was invited on behalf of Rundstedt.

Some of the diaries that were incriminating from the Nazi regime's point of view have been preserved in copies of the SS security service in its SS personnel file. It says in an entry that is reproduced there:

And later, when that [ie the chance to refuse the Nazi government's war course] was missed, when the whole people, indeed the whole world, waited for a general to sweep away this ghost and give all peoples the opportunity to achieve peaceful settlement, there they all sat (including Rundstedt) in their headquarters and no one dared to do so, although everyone knew it! I went away just because I don't want to be there any longer, just as Rundstedt is also a slave to Hitler and because I don't want to see my formerly admired master come to a miserable end one day. After 4 years I give up the fight. I understand that Rundstedt lets everything go, but does not take the consequence out of pathological vanity and says 'I'm too old, I'm going'. Now history will say that Rundest also contributed to the fall of Germany. and since he sees clearly in all these things, his guilt is doubled.

On October 24, 1944, according to Himmler's instructions, Salviati was demoted to a simple SS man and then expelled from the SS. He was no longer charged with the People's Court because of the tumultuous military events. Instead, Salviati, probably on Müller's orders, was taken from his cell in the prison on Lehrter Strasse shortly before the Red Army conquered Berlin on the night of April 22-23, 1945 by the SS-Kommando RSHA and together with four others Inmates ( Ernst Munzinger , Wilhelm Staehle , Albrecht Haushofer ) shot near the prison.

Salvati's body was buried in a mass grave at the Kleiner Tiergarten. In March 1948 she was transferred to the Plötzensee cemetery.

family

A younger sister of Salviati was Dorothea von Salviati , who in June 1933 married Wilhelm Prince of Prussia , the eldest son of the last Prussian and Imperial German Crown Prince Wilhelm (1882-1951). Until this marriage, which was considered a morganatic marriage due to the fact that the bride was not equal in terms of the marriage regulations of the Hohenzollern House Law , Wilhelm was in third place after Wilhelm II and his father in the entitlement to the German imperial throne, which had been orphaned since 1918, and the throne of Prussia. Victor von Salviati acted as best man when his sister was married to the imperial grandson.

literature

• Johannes Tuchel : "... and the rope was waiting for all of you." The cell prison on Lehrter Strasse 3 after July 20, 1944. Lukas Verlag, 2015, pp. 303–306.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Peter Hoffmann: Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and his brothers. 1992, p. 307. An eyewitness report of such an attempt to win Rundstedt for the cause of resistance can be found in the memoirs of Hans-Heinrich Herwarth von Bitterfeld: Against Two Evils , 1981, p. 274 f.