Hellmuth Stieff

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Colonel Hellmuth Stieff, 1942
Hellmuth Stieff before the People's Court, 1944
Stumbling stone in front of his former place of residence, Sybelstrasse 66, in Berlin-Charlottenburg

Hellmuth Stieff (born June 6, 1901 in Deutsch Eylau ; † August 8, 1944 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German major general and resistance fighter from July 20, 1944 .

Life

After the First World War , Stieff completed an officer training and in 1938 was a member of the General Staff of the German Wehrmacht , initially in the operations department under Adolf Heusinger , who later became the Bundeswehr Inspector General. From 1942 Stieff became a colonel and head of the organizational department in the Army High Command . In February 1944 he was appointed major general, making him one of the youngest generals in the army. He often expressed himself very critically to employees about the conduct of the war at the time.

During the attack on Poland, Stieff had become an opponent of National Socialism because of the mass murders committed there. Colonel i. G. Henning von Tresckow aroused his interest in active participation in the resistance in the summer of 1943. Among other things, Stieff kept the explosives with which Captain Axel von dem Bussche tried to assassinate Hitler in the Führer headquarters in Wolfsschanze in November 1943 . Even though he had access to Hitler, he had always refused to attack himself. He wrote to his wife that he wanted to “remain immaculate” in this respect. Colonel Graf Stauffenberg had hoped until July 6, 1944 that Stieff would change his mind and still act. Despite the favorable opportunity and the preparations already made on the occasion of a uniform show on July 7, 1944 in Schloss Kleßheim near Salzburg , Stieff did not carry out the assassination attempt on Hitler. Only then did it become clear to Stauffenberg that he would have to carry out the attack himself. In the early morning of July 20, 1944, Stieff flew with Stauffenberg and his adjutant, Oberleutnant Werner von Haeften , in General Eduard Wagner's plane from Berlin to East Prussia to the Fuehrer's headquarters in Wolfsschanze.

He was arrested on the night of July 20 to 21, 1944 in the Führer headquarters in Wolfsschanze near Rastenburg / East Prussia and severely ill-treated. The Gestapo tried unsuccessfully, despite the use of torture, to extract names from him. According to the historian Horst Mühleisen, his silence saved "the brothers Georg and Philipp von Boeselager , Axel von dem Bussche , Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff and others".

In the days of his imprisonment, Stieff wrote a memorandum for Hitler in which, based on his knowledge of the military situation, he “relentlessly settled with the dictator”, knowing full well that this would finally seal his fate. This memorandum was presumably passed on to Heinrich Himmler via SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller ; then the track is lost.

On August 4, the " court of honor " formed two days earlier was followed by the dishonorable expulsion from the Wehrmacht, so that the Reich Court Martial was no longer responsible for the sentencing. Four days later, on August 8, 1944, Stieff was sentenced to death in the first trial by the “ People's Court ” under its President Roland Freisler . Returning to death row, he converted to Catholicism, the faith of his wife, in the presence of a prison chaplain. Just an hour after the trial was over, Stieff was hanged in Plötzensee on the express orders of Hitler .

Hellmuth Stieff had been with Ili Cäcilie, born in 1929. Gaertner (born March 6, 1902 in Ludwigsdorf-Mölke , County Glatz / Silesia , † July 19, 1980 in Thalgau near Salzburg / Austria), a daughter of the mining entrepreneur Adrian Gaertner , married. He lived with her in a villa in Thalgau that still exists today. The marriage remained childless.

Since the judgments of the People's Court in the new Federal Republic of Germany continued to be legally binding, Ili Stieff was supposed to proceed for many years after the war before she received her widow's pension. Only when the Federal Administrative Court ruled in 1960 that Stieff's conviction had been an obvious wrong did Ms. Stieff receive her pension.

Quotes

On November 21, 1939, he wrote to his wife about his stay in Warsaw :

“It's a city and a population that is doomed. It is so cruel that you are not happy for a moment in your life when you stay in this city. [...] The war in this effect is something terrible, and the last war did not have such effects either. [...] You don't move there as a winner, but as a guilty man. I am not the only one - the gentlemen who have to live there feel the same way. In addition there is all the unbelievable what happens on the edge and where we have to watch with crossed arms! The most vigorous imagination of atrocity propaganda is poor against the things that an organized gang of murderers, robbers and looters is spending there with supposedly highest tolerance ... This extermination of whole sexes with women and children is only possible from a sub-humanity that no longer deserves the name German . I am ashamed to be a German. "

From a letter to his wife dated January 10, 1942:

“We all have so much guilt on ourselves - because we are jointly responsible that I see in this breaking criminal court only a just atonement for all the atrocities that we Germans have committed or tolerated in recent years. Basically, I am satisfied to see that there is still a compensatory justice in the world. And if I should fall victim to her myself. I'm tired of this horror without end. "

From his farewell letter to his wife, written on August 8, 1944, after the hearing before the People's Court:

"I am going to my death calmly and composed (...) I will die in your faith and let a clergyman from your church give me as a support. If that doesn't work, it is my last will to convert to the Catholic Church, and I will go into eternity as we stepped in front of the altar in Ludwigsdorf almost 15 years ago. Death is not an end, just a change. I am firmly and faithfully convinced of the immortality of our souls. "

Awards

Honors

  • The Stieffring is named after him near the Plötzensee execution site.
  • On August 9, 2014 , a stumbling block was laid in front of his former home in Berlin-Charlottenburg , Sybelstrasse 66 .
  • In 1999, the Catholic Church accepted Hellmuth Stieff as a witness of faith in the German martyrology of the 20th century .
  • In Düsseldorf a street is named after him (written as "Helmut-Stieff-Straße").

literature

  • Selected letters from Major General Hellmuth Stieff . In: Quarterly books for contemporary history, 2nd vol . No. 3 , 1954, ISSN  0042-5702 , pp. 291–305 ( online , PDF file; 5.0 MB).
  • Annedore Leber (Ed.): The conscience stands up. 64 life pictures from the German resistance 1933–1945. collected and ed. in collaboration with Willy Brandt and Karl Dietrich Bracher . Mosaik-Verlag, Berlin / Frankfurt am Main 1954, DNB 577256807 .
  • Annedore Leber (Ed.): The conscience stands up. Life pictures from the German resistance 1933–1945. collected and ed. in collaboration with Willy Brandt and Karl Dietrich Bracher. Newly published by Karl Dietrich Bracher in conjunction with the Forschungsgemeinschaft 20. Juli e. V. Also includes: Conscience decides . Hase & Koehler, Mainz 1984, ISBN 3-7758-1064-1 , pp. 395-397.
  • Horst Mühleisen: Hellmuth Stieff and the German resistance . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 39th year, no. 3 , 1991, ISSN  0042-5702 , pp. 339–377 ( online , PDF file; 7.9 MB).
  • Joachim C. Fest: Coup. The long way to July 20th . Siedler publishing house, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-88680-539-5 .
  • Helmut Moll (Ed. On behalf of the German Bishops' Conference): Witnesses for Christ. The martyrology of the 20th century. Paderborn u. a. 1999, ISBN 3-506-75778-4 . (7th revised and updated edition. 2019, Volume I, ISBN 978-3-506-78012-6 , pp. 179–182)

Rather critical portrayal of Hellmuth Stieff in these two Stauffenberg biographies:

  • Christian Müller: Colonel i. G. Stauffenberg. A biography . Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1970. (2nd edition. 1985, ISBN 3-7700-0228-8 )
  • Wolfgang Venohr: Stauffenberg. Symbol of German unity. A political biography . Ullstein Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin, 1986, ISBN 3-550-06405-5 .

Web links

Commons : Hellmuth Stieff  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ You wanted to kill Hitler. ( Memento from March 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) 3sat
  2. ↑ Horst Mühleisen: Hellmuth Stieff and the German resistance . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 39th year, no. 3 , 1991, ISSN  0042-5702 , pp. 371 ( online , PDF file; 7.9 MB).
  3. ↑ Horst Mühleisen: Hellmuth Stieff and the German resistance . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 39th year, no. 3 , 1991, ISSN  0042-5702 , pp. 373 ( online , PDF file; 7.9 MB).
  4. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär : The court of honor after the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944. In: Bengt von zur Mühlen (Ed.): The defendants of July 20 before the People's Court. Chronos, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-931054-06-3 , p. 22.
  5. ↑ Horst Mühleisen: Hellmuth Stieff and the German resistance . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 39th year, no. 3 , 1991, ISSN  0042-5702 , pp. 377 ( online , PDF file; 7.9 MB).
  6. ↑ Gerd R. Ueberschär: Stauffenberg. July 20, 1944. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-10-086003-9 , p. 156.
  7. ↑ Peter Gaertner: Ili Cäcilie Stieff. A woman of the German resistance from July 20, 1944. In: AGG-Mitteilungen. Bulletin of the Working Group Grafschaft Glatz - Culture and History. Volume 6, 2007, pp. 53-54.
  8. ↑ Cowards and traitors. In: The time. January 8, 2009, p. 2. (zeit.de)
  9. ↑ Letter to his wife in Germany, here from kokhavivpublications.com ( Memento of August 21, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ Selected letters from Major General Hellmuth Stieff. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Vol. 2, No. 3, 1954, ISSN  0042-5702 , p. 304; also quoted in Horst Mühleisen, p. 377.
  11. ↑ Annedore Leber (ed.): The conscience stands up. Life pictures from the German resistance 1933–1945. collected and ed. in collaboration with Willy Brandt and Karl Dietrich Bracher. Newly published by Karl Dietrich Bracher in conjunction with the Forschungsgemeinschaft 20. Juli e. V. Also includes: Conscience decides . Hase & Koehler, Mainz 1984, ISBN 3-7758-1064-1 , p. 397.
  12. ↑ Stieffring. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
personal data
SURNAME Stieff, Hellmuth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stieff, Helmuth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH June 6, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH German Eylau
DATE OF DEATH August 8, 1944
Place of death Berlin-Plötzensee