Hellmuth von Mücke

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Hellmuth von Mücke (1912)

Hellmuth von Mücke (born June 25, 1881 in Zwickau , † July 30, 1957 in Ahrensburg ) was an officer in the Imperial Navy and became known as the leader of a small group of German sailors who fought their way from the Indian Ocean to Germany during the First World War . During the Weimar Republic , he worked as a politician and writer. After he was ostracized for his journalistic activities during the Nazi era , he vehemently opposed the in the young Federal RepublicRearm one.

Life

Training and First World War

Mücke, who came from the impoverished aristocracy - the family majorate Rittergut Niederrennersdorf in Upper Lusatia had fallen to a sideline two generations earlier - joined the Imperial Navy on April 7, 1900 as a midshipman . When the First World War broke out, he was a lieutenant captain (since April 20, 1910) and first officer on board the small cruiser SMS Emden in the German East Asia squadron . The Emden was stationed with the rest of the squadron in Tsingtau . The commander Maximilian von Spee realized that the German base in Tsingtau could not be held and therefore decided to sail towards South America to go to Germany. The Emden was supposed to cover this withdrawal by disrupting British supplies through trade wars and attracting British combat units.

By the end of 1914, the pirate trips were successful. A meeting with the supply ship Buresk was planned for November 9, 1914, to take place at Direction Island ( Cocos Islands ). A radio station on the island should be switched off. For this purpose, von Mücke landed with a landing platoon of a total of 50 men armed with rifles, pistols and four machine guns. The operation went without incident, but the station was still able to make an emergency call. This was intercepted by an Australian troop transport convoy, which then sent the light cruiser HMAS Sydney to investigate. The Sydney was sighted by the Emden , but the crew initially assumed that it was the Buresk . In the ensuing battle, the Sydney won with her superior armament. The range of the Sydney's guns made it possible to defeat the Emden . Von Muecke's command was stuck on Direction Island. He was determined not to let his men go into captivity and therefore confiscated the three-masted schooner Ayesha , which happened to be off the island , in order to return to the German lines.

Command of the Emden landing train

After the Ayesha was confiscated , the English crew of the radio station supplied him with food, but were able to remove the seals from the sailor's sea valves unnoticed, so that the ship kept watering up and the bilge pumps did not work properly. He initially headed for Sumatra , but after a few days it seemed as if the company was doomed to failure. The Ayesha had already been decommissioned and scrapped because of her poor condition. The ship was leaking and the four drinking water tanks could not be cleaned, so that three of them rotted and were therefore unusable. The slack at sea made matters worse . Despite everything, von Muecke's group reached Padang on December 13 or 14, 1914 . Since Indonesia was a colonial property of the Netherlands , which was neutral during the war, von Mücke had to leave the country within 24 hours. He managed to arrange a meeting with the German freighter Choising through the German consul . On December 14th, the crew transferred to the freighter and sank the Ayesha .

In Padang, von Mücke had learned that Germany was allied with the Ottoman Empire and therefore tried to return to Germany via Arabia and Turkey. Since the Red Sea was controlled by Allied warships, they called at Hodeidah (now in Yemen ) and went ashore there unnoticed.

Muecke's destination was the Hejaz Railway , which was built at the beginning of the 20th century and was supposed to connect Arabia from north to south. However, when he arrived in Houdaidah, he learned that the completion of the last section had been canceled in the turmoil of the Arab uprisings in the Ottoman Empire. He therefore decided to march overland to Sanaa . Once there, however, he received little support from the Turkish governors. The Turkish military governor hoped the German soldiers would help against the rebellious Arabs and blocked the journey for two months. After von Mücke had repeatedly rejected the Turkish governor's insistence, his team returned to Hodeidah.

March of the Emden landing train from Hodeida to El-Ula (January 9 to May 6, 1915)

There, von Mücke organized two dhows with which they sailed the Red Sea northwards. To avoid encounters with enemy combat ships, the two boats drove through coral reefs along the coast. The larger and heavier of the two dhows hit one of the reefs and sank. The entire crew was rescued on the smaller boat, which, manned by 70 men, reached the region of Jeddah on March 18, 1915 , where von Mücke went ashore. He got to know a former Turkish general who feared for his property in the face of the Arab uprisings and who joined the march of the German sailors. Camels and drivers were organized, and finally the caravan set out for Mecca .

Von Mücke still had the Hejaz Railway as his destination in mind. A surprising Bedouin attack could initially be repulsed with the machine guns carried, but three of his people died in the hail of bullets from the Beduins. The attacking Bedouins initially ended their attack. After a further three days in the position, the water ran out and the food supplies were almost at an end. Two negotiators, including one dressed in European clothes, appeared with a white flag. Abdullah , the son of the Emir of Mecca , offered his protection. Von Mücke accepted the offer, but was increasingly seized by the feeling that the Germans were seen more as prisoners than guests. Therefore, he made preparations to escape. When the emir's son stayed in Mecca for a short time, the Emden drivers boarded a dhow and sailed north along the coast.

Crew members of SMS AYESHA in the garden of the Imperial Consulate in Damascus May 11, 1915. Number 2 Kaleu von Mücke

On April 29, 1915, the crew went ashore at the northern end of the Red Sea, still looking for the Hejaz Railway. After a few days of march, belief in the existence of this railway had largely faded, only von Mücke stuck to his goal. On May 7th, the troops actually reached the railway line. Her further journey took her by train through Syria to Constantinople . In the meantime, the landing train had become famous and there were festive receptions with local dignitaries at every train station. On May 23, 1915, the survivors (six men had died or fallen on the way) arrived in Constantinople.

Captain von Mücke, whose first command was the landing party, reported his men to the German naval commander in Constantinople with the words: "Your excellence, report obediently, landing train SMS Emden with 5 officers, 7 noncommissioned officers and 37 men on the spot!" . This enabled him and his soldiers to join their own lines, in contrast to parts of the crew of the SMS Tsingtau under Lieutenant Erwin von Moeller, who were attacked and killed by Arabs north of Jeddah in late May or early June 1916. The men of the landing party were therefore the only members of the East Asia squadron who reached their homeland before the end of the war.

After the obligatory honorary receptions and ceremonies, the members of the landing platoon were distributed on different fronts. About half of them fell in a short period of time, which contributed to von Muecke's later pacifist views. Initially, however, he continued to serve in the military, in 1916 as leader of the river department on the Euphrates , in 1917 as head of the German Danube semi-flotilla. At the end of the war he retired from the Navy with the rank of corvette captain .

Weimar Republic

Von Mücke married and the marriage had six children (three sons: Kurt Helmut (* 1918), Dirk (* 1930) and Björn (* 1938) as well as three daughters: Ursula (* 1920), Ortrud (* 1922) and Helga (* 1925)). He earned his living through journalism and lecture tours. His books Emden (1915) and Ayesha (1915) had the names of his ships as titles. In addition, he was also politically active. First he joined the DNVP , but switched to the DAP in 1919 (from 1920 NSDAP ). In 1922 the family moved to Dresden, where Hellmuth von Mücke was doing development work for the NSDAP. For this he was elected to the Saxon state parliament in 1926 together with Fritz Tittmann . But in 1927 he resigned his seat in the state parliament. He resigned from the NSDAP in 1929 because he recognized the criminal character of the Nazi leadership and, above all, Hitler. He moved with his family to Wyk on the North Sea island of Föhr . At the end of the Weimar Republic, at the instigation of the democratic Prussian ministerial official Arnold Brecht , von Mücke worked for the Deutschlandbund , an organization that was active against National Socialist propaganda. Von Mücke spoke at the first major event of the Deutschlandsbund in the Berlin Sportpalast on December 18, 1930. In his memoirs, Arnold Brecht wrote: "Lieutenant von Mücke gave the main speech with such passion and conviction that the meeting met with a strong response. In the following For two months he spoke under the aegis of the Deutschlandbund in Hanover, Hamburg, Kiel, Flensburg, Rostock, Stettin, Wroclaw, Dresden, Leipzig and other cities with similar success. His popularity thwarted attempts at demolition. Later the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot took over in place of the Deutschlandbund -Gold sponsored Mücke's appearance in other places and took care of the hall protection. "

Third Reich

In the Third Reich, von Muecke's writings were considered "national Bolsheviks". In 1937 and 1939 he was briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp twice . In 1933 he was banned from writing and speaking. The house and the property on the island of Föhr could no longer be held and were foreclosed in 1934. So the family moved to Ahrensburg near Hamburg. Mücke devoted himself to manuals on dyke building and coastal protection. His attempt to emigrate to Chile was rejected on the grounds that his work abroad was undesirable. His voluntary report for combat deployment in the Navy was rejected because he was considered politically unreliable.

After the Second World War

Gravestone Hellmuth von Mücke

Mücke was recognized as a persecuted person by the Nazi regime in 1948. However, he was not awarded any compensation. He joined the association of those persecuted by the Nazi regime . After the end of the war, Mücke represented pro-communist and pacifist views and campaigned against the rearmament of the Federal Republic. In 1950 he became politically active again and wrote political pamphlets against the rearmament of Germany. On November 14, 1950, he took part in the 6th session of the National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany in East Berlin , where he appeared as a panelist. He saw the population of the Federal Republic and the GDR as "cannon fodder" in the event of an armed conflict between the USA and the USSR and thus anticipated positions of the later peace movement. As a result, he came under political pressure again. In early 1957, von Mücke was summoned by the 6th criminal division of the Federal Court of Justice . Disciplinary proceedings were initiated in order to have him retired from Korvettenkapitän. D. to withdraw. He was also obliged to consult a psychiatrist. However, Mücke spared this spectacle: He died on July 30, 1957 at the age of 76 of heart failure. Hellmuth von Mücke found his final resting place in the cemetery in Ahrensburg.

Works

  • Emden. Verlag August Scherl, Berlin 1915 (digitized version of a German-language edition published in the USA in 1917: archive.org )
  • Ayesha. Verlag August Scherl, Berlin 1915. (digitized: archive.org ), revised and expanded by Scherl, Berlin 1926, English translation, Ritter and Flebbe, Boston, Massachusetts 1917
  • Line. Personal and political retrospectives on the last decade of the republic. Volume 1: Revolution, National Socialism and the Bourgeoisie. Edelgarten-Verlag Horst Posern, Beuern / Hessen 1931.
  • The Emden-Ayesha Adventure: German Raiders in the South Seas and Beyond 1915. Translated by JH Klein. Naval Institute Press, Annapolis , Maryland 2000, ISBN 1-55750-873-9 .

literature

  • Uwe Schulte-Varendorff: Hellmuth von Mücke - the man of the "Emden". From war hero to pacifist? Bod - Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2016, ISBN 978-3-8391-8472-1
  • Stephan Dehn: Hellmuth von Mücke (1881–1957) and Manfred von Killinger (1886–1944) - two noble top politicians of the Saxon NSDAP. In: Sächsische Heimatblätter. 61 (2015) 1, pp. 6-14.
  • Hans-Heinrich Fleischer:  Mücke, Hellmuth von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , p. 262 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Andreas Hofer: Lieutenant Captain Hellmuth von Mücke. Naval officer - politician - resistance fighter. A life between the fronts . Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 2003, ISBN 3-8288-8564-0 (also: Vienna, Univ., Master's thesis, 2002).
  • Andreas Peschel: Hellmuth von Mücke (1881–1957). A Saxon naval war hero between the political fronts , in: Dannenberg, Lars-Arne / Donath, Matthias (Hrsg.): Lebensbilder des Sächsischen Adels III (Adel in Sachsen, Volume 11), Königsbrück 2018, pp. 99-132, ISBN 978 -3-944104-21-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hellmuth von Mücke .. In:  Badener Zeitung , September 26, 1924, p. 3, bottom right. (Online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / bzt
  2. ^ Andreas Peschel: The development of the Dresden NSDAP until 1933 . In: Dresdner Geschichtsbuch 18, 2013, pp. 152–156.
  3. ↑ Arnold Brecht: With the power of the spirit: Life memories . 2nd half: 1927–1967 . DVA, Stuttgart 1967, pp. 145 f.
  4. ↑ Helmut [sic!] Von Mücke: We don't want anything to do with it! In: Against remilitarization - for the All-German Constituent Council (= National Front of Democratic Germany - Information Service , 3rd volume number 16/17). Kongreß-Verlag, Berlin 1950, p. 9.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Mücke, Hellmuth von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German naval officer, writer and politician
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Zwickau
DATE OF DEATH July 30, 1957
Place of death Ahrensburg