Heinrich von Holleben

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Heinrich Ludwig Friedrich Karl von Holleben (born May 9, 1784 in Rudolstadt , † June 11, 1864 in Koblenz ) was a Prussian infantry general and military writer.

Life

Heinrich von Holleben's parents were the princely Schwarzburg Oberlandjägermeister Ernst Friedrich Ludwig von Holleben (1753-1826) from the noble family von Holleben , which was widespread in Thuringia, and his wife Charlotte Ernestine, née von Nostiz (* 1758). Heinrich had six brothers and six sisters who all reached adulthood. Growing up on the family Udersleben he resigned on March 14, 1798 as a private corporal in Ansbach in the now Prussian until 1792 Princely-Ansbachische Infantry Regiment "Laurens" one. Holleben was promoted to ensign in October 1800 and second lieutenant in 1804 .

The Magdeburg river bridge in 1810: Because it was not passable, Holleben led the king to Wolmirstedt .

Kolberg 1807

Stationed in the Prussian-occupied Electorate of Hanover from February 1806 , Holleben's regiment was relocated to Magdeburg Fortress in the war of 1806/07 in view of the lost battle at Jena and Auerstedt . Here Holleben made the acquaintance of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. When he took him on October 17 during the retreat to the north of the fortress, and was at a loss his baptism of fire . On November 6, 1806, Holleben's regiment disbanded as a result of Magdeburg's surrender.

Holleben was taken prisoner of war, but was released home on the word of honor that he would no longer serve against France in this war. After France began to transport the members of the originally Ansbach infantry regiment to France as a result of taking possession of Ansbach-Bayreuth in January 1807, Holleben no longer felt bound by his word of honor and went on a dangerous seven-week hike through Bohemia , Silesia and with fellow regiments from Thuringia Eastern Poland to the Prussian Army in East Prussia . On April 6, 1807 he was in Königsberg the III. Assigned to the Neumark reserve battalion, which came by sea on May 7th as reinforcement in the besieged Kolberg fortress in Pomerania .

Holleben had led a transport of prisoners by sea from Kolberg to Memel and was at Friedrich Wilhelm's headquarters on June 23, 1807 to report on Kolberg. On that day, the armistice with France was concluded there. The Prussian fortresses were intended to remain with whoever held them when the armistice came into force. The king gave Holleben the order to bring the news to the besieged Kolberg. From the occupied Königsberg he used the French relay system from June 28th with a detour via Stettin . Holleben reached his destination after an 800-kilometer ride on July 2, 1807.

The bombardment and assault by the French on Kolberg had already lasted two days in the afternoon when Holleben approached the fortress in a carriage with a French general and a drum that was beating the drum , which the French commander Louis Henri Loison had assigned him. Shot at by the Prussian side while getting out, the general narrowly escaped death. The companions left Holleben alone. He thought it was pure coincidence that he was not fatally hit on the way to the Prussian positions. So he was able to bring the message of peace to the Prussian commandant Gneisenau . This ended the battle for Kolberg and saved the city for Prussia. Fifty years later Kolberg granted him honorary citizenship for his deed .

After the peace, Holleben came to the "Waldenfels" grenadier battalion in August 1807 and then to the Leib-Infantry Regiment in Berlin . In August 1809 he became a prime lieutenant . In the foreign policy crisis of Prussia in the run-up to Napoleon's Russian campaign , Gneisenau sent him on a fake home leave from December 1811 to February 1812 to Thuringia. Holleben had the task, taking advantage of the family's contacts with local princes, to investigate French and Rhenish Bund intentions and troop movements conspiratorially and to report them to Berlin. Commended and backdated to January 1812, promoted to staff captain, he took part in the Prussian auxiliary corps in the Russian campaign.

Prussian soldiers of the wars of liberation. As a captain and later as a major in the infantry, Holleben wore the uniform of the fourth figure from the right. From Richard Knötel's uniforms , 1883

Leipzig and Ligny 1813 and 1815

A few months after the wars of liberation began , in June 1813, Holleben took over the leadership of a company as captain and chief , soon to replace a battalion . He fought in Corps Yorck in the battle near Königswartha , where he earned the Iron Cross 2nd class, in the Battle of Bautzen and the Battle of Leipzig .

Immediately after the battle, Yorck gave him the task of shadowing the retreating French in order to report to him their intentions, strength and direction of march as well as Napoleon's whereabouts . Holleben put together a patrol of about twenty people from Cossacks and multilingual Prussian volunteer hunters , who appeared like a Russian patrol unit . He led her unrecognizable as a civilian on horseback. He gave routing slips to the Yorck Corps to French deserters who surrendered to his command . Yorck honored Holleben in a special way on October 26th by having him present his final report in person to Commander-in-Chief Blücher and Chief of Staff Gneisenau.

Holleben made the advance to the Rhine and into France. Participation in the blockade of Luxembourg earned him the Russian Order of St. Vladimir IV class. For the battle at La Chaussée-sur-Marne on February 3, 1814, Holleben was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, and was seriously wounded in the Battle of Château-Thierry on February 12. During his convalescence leave he married his cousin Amalie von Holleben on August 28, 1814.

After Napoleon's return , Holleben commanded a battalion of the Leib-Infantry Regiment as a major from April 1815 . Because Holleben's battalion had bayonet attacking cavalry in the fighting at Sombreffe during the Battle of Ligny and the battle of Rocquencourt on July 1st, he was awarded the Order of Pour le Mérite with oak leaves in October 1815 .

The following peacetime Holleben 1829 took over as commander of the 17th Infantry Regiment with location Dusseldorf . In the Rhine Crisis of 1840, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV sent him to Heilbronn , where the VIII Army Corps of the German Confederation was brought together and then appointed him as inspector of the occupation forces of the federal fortresses . Holleben rose in 1843 as commander of the 4th division in Stargard in Pomerania , in 1844 as commander of the 16th division in Trier with an appointment as lieutenant general , to commander of the 5th division in Frankfurt (Oder) on April 13, 1848.

Shortly before Holleben moved into Dresden on May 10, 1849, the revolutionaries burned down the Opera House at the Zwinger and a Zwinger pavilion

Dresden and Baden 1849

After Saxony had requested Prussian support in the imperial constitution campaign to suppress the Dresden May uprising , Holleben put together a division of Landwehr associations in May 1849 . When he arrived in Dresden on May 10 with the railway from Görlitz at the head of his division, which had now grown to eleven battalions and two cavalry regiments, Prussian and Saxon troops under Colonel Waldersee had already ended the barricade fight for several hours and the city was deserted Revolutionaries were hastily abandoned. On the same day, the Saxon War Ministry gave Holleben command of all Prussian and Saxon troops outside Dresden. There were no fighting or mass arrests in Saxony. King Friedrich August II later awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit . On May 25th, Holleben was able to lead his division to the Prussian fortress of Erfurt , from where it was relocated to the Neckar region to fight the Baden Revolution .

To the chagrin of Holleben, the senior Karl von der Groeben was given command of his troops. The commander-in-chief, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, freed Holleben from the embarrassing situation by taking him to his headquarters à la suite . But only once did Holleben have the opportunity to command in the battle near Bischweier . After the campaign ended with the surrender of Rastatt , the Prince of Prussia appointed Holleben as governor of Rastatt. His achievements were honored on July 28, 1849 by awarding the swords to the Order of the Red Eagle First Class with Oak Leaves. On November 1, 1849, Holleben, who had taken over command of the 5th Division again, submitted his resignation to Friedrich Wilhelm IV for health reasons.

Granted the character of General of the Infantry, Holleben was retired on November 3, 1849 with the statutory pension . The background to his departure is unclear. After two years in Berlin, Holleben went to the Rhineland, where he lived with his family and long-term friends, including the family of General Moritz von Hirschfeld . Holleben published his military theoretical contributions well into old age . He dedicated his last work to the memory of Eugen von Hirschfeld . He was buried in Koblenz, where he died at the age of 80.

The Prussian infantry attacking in close columns suffered heavy losses in the Franco-German War . Illustration of a scene from the battle of Gravelotte in the journal Die Gartenlaube by Christian Sell , 1871

Military writer

Holleben, who always received the best ratings from his superiors, had already experimented with tactical variants for dismantling the clumsy battalion column during the wars of liberation. For the first time his battalion moved in individual company columns on February 2, 1814 , taking advantage of the possibilities of the battlefield at Vitry-le-François . Holleben later propagated his tactical innovations as a military writer in magazine articles and individual publications. When the commission for the revision of the drill regulations for the infantry was appointed in autumn 1841 , he was there. Holleben acquired the reputation of the "father of the company column", which was incorporated into the new regulations of 1847, but without being consistently enforced. It was not until the use of fast-firing breech-loaders, such as the French Chassepot rifle in the war of 1870/71, that column tactics were abandoned.

family

Holleben married Amalie von Holleben (1782–1878) in Udersleben on August 24, 1814. The marriage had the following children:

  • Ernst Albert Ludwig (1815–1908), lawyer and chancellor in the Kingdom of Prussia ⚭ Hermine Kühle (1822–1883)
  • Heinrich Carl Ludwig (born April 15, 1817 - † February 27, 1833), buried in the Golzheim cemetery
  • Charlotte (1819–1852) ⚭ 1847 Franz von Frobel (1802–1886), Prussian lieutenant general
  • Amalie (1820–1905) ⚭ 1854 Franz von Frobel (1802–1886), Prussian lieutenant general
  • Friedrich Ludwig (1823–1870), Lieutenant Colonel, died in Koblenz from the injuries he received at St.Privat
⚭ October 8, 1853 Betha von Löper († 1854)
⚭ December 1855 Aline von Hirschfeld (* 1836) (probably identical with Ida Albine Viktoria von Hirschfeld)
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ludwig (* 1824) ⚭ June 2, 1856 Ida Albine Viktoria von Hirschfeld, a daughter of the Prussian infantry general Moritz von Hirschfeld

Publications

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On the surrender see Wilfried Lübeck: November 8, 1807 - the surrender of Magdeburg, the cowardly act of the governor v. Kleist. in Mathias Tullner , Sascha Möbius (Ed.): 1806. Jena, Auerstedt and the surrender of Magdeburg. Shame or chance? Landesheimatbund Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle (Saale) 2007, ISBN 3-928-46699-2 , pp. 140–153.
  2. ^ Albert Hermann Ludwig von Holleben: From the papers left behind. P. 27f.
  3. ↑ In 1843 Holleben had given the Prussian War Archives (later the War Archives of the Great General Staff ) "communications" about his mission [destroyed in 1945]; see also Great General Staff, War History Department II (Ed.): Documentary contributions and research on the history of the Prussian Army. Volume 4: Kolberg 1806/07. Berlin 1912, p. 175f.
  4. ↑ For the following see also: Friedrich von Waldersee : The fight in Dresden in May 1849. ES Mittler & Sohn , Berlin 1849. [1] , pp. 5, 74, 77f., 80.
  5. ↑ Priesdorff (lit.), p. 347, writes, "the political events had not left an impression on him". Holleben himself mentions a year-long, confidential, correspondence exchange of ideas with Friedrich Wilhelm IV on the “internal political and ecclesiastical situation”, which broke off in the year of the revolution. In: Albert Hermann Ludwig von Holleben: From the papers left by the General of the Infantry v. Holleben. Mittler, Berlin 1867, p. 154.
  6. ↑ So Ferdinand von Meerheimb in the ADB (see lit.)
  7. ↑ On Prussian infantry tactics in the 19th century, see: Volkmar Regling: Basic features of land warfare at the time of absolutism and in the 19th century. In: Friedrich Forstmeier (ed.), Hans Meier-Welcker (first): German military history in six volumes, 1648–1939. Published by the Military History Research Office . Manfred Pawlak Verlag, Munich 1983, ISBN 3881991123 , Volume 6, pp. 11-421, here pp. 331-337.
  8. ^ Yearbook of the German Nobility . Second volume, 1898, [2] parents
personal data
SURNAME Holleben, Heinrich von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Holleben, Heinrich Ludwig Friedrich Karl von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Prussian infantry general and military writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1784
PLACE OF BIRTH Rudolstadt
DATE OF DEATH June 11, 1864
Place of death Koblenz