Heinrich von Vietinghoff

Heinrich von Vietinghoff

Heinrich Gottfried Otto Richard von Vietinghoff called Scheel (born December 6, 1887 in Mainz , † February 23, 1952 in Pfronten -Ried, Allgäu ) was a German colonel general in World War II .

Life

family

Heinrich von Vietinghoff called Scheel came from the old Westphalian noble family von Vietinghoff . He was the eldest son of the Prussian lieutenant general of the artillery Heinrich von Vietinghoff called Scheel (1857-1917) and his wife Leona, nee Countess von Schmettow (1861-1942).

Vietinghoff married on January 6, 1920 in Berlin Elfriede Wagner (1892-1989), the daughter of Colonel Ludwig Wagner and Marie Schwarzmann. His wife was first married to the factory director Adolf Schwarzmann, who died just 16 months after the wedding on August 5, 1912 in Stuttgart .

Military career

Italy - Vietinghoff inspects camouflaged tanks

After he was promoted to lieutenant on January 27, 1907 (patent from June 14, 1905), he took part in World War I and was promoted to captain until the end of July 1915 . For his work during the war, in addition to both classes of the Iron Cross, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords, the Knight's Cross II. Class of the Albrecht Order with Swords, the Mecklenburg Military Merit Cross II. Class, the Saxony-Meiningian Cross for Merit in war and awarded the wound badge in black. The allies awarded Vietinghoff the Order of the Iron Crown and the Austrian Military Merit Cross III. Class with the war decoration, the Iron Crescent and the Officer's Cross of the Bulgarian Order of Military Merit .

After the war he was accepted into the Reichswehr , worked in the Reichswehr Ministry and from 1924 on the staff of Group Command 1. He found his next employment as chief of the 1st company in the 9th (Prussian) Infantry Regiment in Potsdam . On March 1, 1926, he was promoted to major . From 1929 to 1931 Vietinghoff was again active in the Reichswehr Ministry, on February 1, 1931 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and transferred to the 14th (Baden) Infantry Regiment as a battalion commander. April 1, 1933 brought the promotion to colonel and in 1935 the transfer as commander to the newly formed Rifle Brigade 1 of the 1st Panzer Division.

On April 1, 1936, Vietinghoff became major general and from October 1, 1937 inspector of armored troops and army motorization, where on March 1, 1938 the next promotion to lieutenant general took place.

On November 24, 1938, he took command of the Silesian 5th Panzer Division . With this he took part in the attack on Poland in 1939 , where he received the clasps for his Iron Crosses. On October 26, 1939, Vietinghoff became a leader and on June 1, 1940, the commanding general of the XIII. Army Corps . On June 1, 1940 he was promoted to General of the Armored Force and received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on June 24, 1940 .

From November 1, 1940, he was Commanding General of the new XXXXVI. Army Corps (motorized). With this corps Vietinghoff fought in April 1941 in the Balkans and from June 22, 1941 on the Eastern Front . He received the German Cross in Gold on April 22, 1942 .

On June 10, 1942, he became Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the 9th Army for the wounded Colonel General Walter Model and passed the heavy defensive battles at Rshew and Vyasma. Then he took over on December 1, 1942 for the seriously ill Colonel General Curt Haase, the leadership of the 15th Army on the Channel coast in the west, from February 9, 1943 as Commander in Chief.

On August 15, 1943, Vietinghoff was replaced in the west by Colonel General Salmuth and took over the newly formed 10th Army in southern Italy, where he was promoted to Colonel General on September 1, 1943.

On April 16, 1944 he was awarded the Oak Leaves for the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross (456th award). Between October 23, 1944 and January 15, 1945 he represented General Field Marshal Albert Kesselring after his serious accident as Commander-in-Chief Southwest and Commander-in-Chief of Army Group C. At the end of January 1945, Vietinghoff was temporarily appointed Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Courland, but then returned in early March 1945 back to Italy, where he took over Army Group C again on March 10, 1945. At the same time he was also Commander in Chief Southwest. At the end of April 1945 he contacted the Allies and signed the surrender of his troops on April 29, 1945 in Caserta . When General Field Marshal Kesselring found out about this, he had him arrested. He was replaced by General of the Infantry Friedrich Schulz . After the events could no longer be stopped, he released him on May 2, 1945.

On his orders, Captain Wichard von Alvensleben freed 139 high-ranking political special prisoners from seventeen European nations as well as a group of family prisoners from July 20 (including Alexander von Stauffenberg) from the hands of the SS and SD . One of the prisoners, Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin , had previously made secret contact with Vietinghoff after he and some of the other inmates of the clan had learned that the SS had ordered them to be killed (with a bomb under the prisoner bus to make it look like an accident allow).

After the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Allies. He was released from this in 1948.

After the war, Vietinghoff dealt with the question of German rearmament . He was a member of the group of experts who, on behalf of the Adenauer government ( Adenauer I cabinet ), wrote the Himmeroder memorandum on a West German contribution to European defense in October 1950 . He died on February 23, 1952 in Pfronten, where he is also buried.

Relationship to resistance

The resistance fighter Rudolf Pechel published a pamphlet on the German resistance in Switzerland in 1947, in which he reports on Vietinghoff's contacts with Major Achim Oster , Hans Oster's son , at the turn of the year 1944/1945. According to this, Vietinghoff, Oster, Röttiger (who, together with Vietinghoff, was relieved of his post by Kesselring on April 30th and summoned to court martial) and two colonels had planned to meet Adolf Hitler for a last meeting with Mussolini (none had had since 20. July 1944) and then arrest Hitler in order to surrender him to the Western Allies. After Pechel, the British Field Marshal Harold Alexander was in on the plans, but Hitler had canceled the meeting, which was probably planned for mid-January, shortly before. It is unclear to which source Pechel, who was himself an inmate in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until April 11, refers; it is most likely that he found out about the project after the war through his acquaintance with Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz , a confidante of Osters. That Vietinghoff of the opposition. was not fundamentally averse, z. B. can also be found in a letter he wrote to Theophil Wurm after the war . Wurm had criticized - from Vietinghoff's point of view - that the generals had done nothing against Hitler, and Vietinghoff reacted by referring to 23 executed German generals who, according to Alaric Searle, were connected with the July 20 assassination attempt.

Fonts

with P. Hattenkofer, A. Massignani, M. Dal Lago, G. Trivelli (eds.): La fine della guerra in Italia. End of the war in Italy. 2nd edition, Mediafactory Verlag, 2018 (his war memories in Italian) .

literature

• Genealogical manual of the nobility . Noble houses A Volume XXIV. P. 453. Volume 111 of the complete series, CA Starke Verlag, Limburg (Lahn) 1996, ISSN  0435-2408

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Gottfried von Vietinghoff-Scheel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Reichswehr Ministry (Ed.): Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres. Mittler & Sohn Verlag, Berlin 1924, p. 120.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearers 1939–1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd edition, Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 759.
3. ^ The liberation of special prisoners and clan prisoners in South Tyrol . In: mythoselser.de .
4. ^ Robert Fox: We Were There: An Eyewitness History of the Twentieth Century . Profile Books, 2010, ISBN 978-1-84765-189-1 ( google.de [accessed November 2, 2019]).
5. ↑ Photo of the grave , on i1.wp.com
6. ↑ R. Pechel, German Resistance, Zurich, 1947, p. 247: “A plan was worked out to usurp the person of Hitler in the spring of 1945. A new meeting between Hitler and Mussolini in Bolzano was planned for this time. With the knowledge of Colonel General v. Vietinghoff and the general of the Panzer Röttger wanted to arrest Colonels Moll and Pretzell Hitler while they were in Bolzano and hand him over to the English alive. The inauguration was the son of the executed General Oster, who had been relegated from a major in the General Staff to a rifleman after July 20 and had made his way to the Italian front. Negotiations have taken place with the English general Alexander about Hitler's extradition. Only because Hitler canceled the meeting in Bolzano did the well-prepared plan not come to fruition. "
7. ↑ Helmut R. Hammerich: "Always at the enemy!": The Military Shield Service (MAD) 1956–1990 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019, ISBN 978-3-647-36392-9 ( google.de [accessed on April 23, 2020]).
8. ^ House of History Baden-Württemberg: Traitor? Role models? Criminal? Controversial interpretations of July 20, 1944 since 1945 . Frank & Timme GmbH, 2016, ISBN 978-3-7329-0276-7 ( google.de [accessed on April 23, 2020]).
9. ^ Heinrich von Vietinghoff-Scheel: La fine della guerra in Italia. End of the war in Italy . Mediafactory, 2018, ISBN 978-88-98849-83-3 ( google.de [accessed December 8, 2019]).