Helmut Welz

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Helmut Welz (born August 20, 1911 in Schkeuditz near Leipzig ; † October 29, 1979 ) was a German officer , author and later deputy mayor of Dresden .

Career

Helmut Welz studied chemistry between 1930 and 1934 at the University of Breslau and the Technical University of Vienna, graduating as a chemist, and joined the SA in 1933/34 . In 1934 he began training as a career officer at the Hanover War School, which he finished on April 1, 1937 with promotion to lieutenant . He was then transferred to the 2nd Company of Pioneer Battalion 34 in Koblenz . During the Second World War , Welz commanded the 79th Infantry Division's 179th Infantry Division on the Eastern Front with the rank of captain .

His unit fought from late October 1942 to early 1943 in the “Red October” steelworks in Stalingrad and took part in Operation Hubertus . Captain Welz was instructed to work with the PiBtl on November 11, 1942. 179 to finally knock down the Martinsofenhalle. Welz initially resisted this order because, in his estimation, the battalion had already suffered too great losses in the previous battles. A successful attack on the hall therefore did not seem feasible to him, which, however, did not interest his commander:

“ I do not need your advice and refuse to give myself these teachings. If you understand it better otherwise: Divisional order, you will attack Hall Four on November 11th and push through to the Volga, understand? "

- Lieutenant General Richard Graf von Schwerin

Vasily Chuikov later noted that the division commander could not have judged the feasibility of such an undertaking from a position 10 km away.

During the time of the encirclement, Welz was promoted to major . On January 30, 1943, shortly before the 6th Army surrendered in Stalingrad, he was taken prisoner by the Soviets . During this time he became a staunch communist , anti- fascist student and member of the National Committee for Free Germany (NKFD).

Welz learned on April 29, 1945 that he was going to work as a member of the Ackermann group in Saxony. The group reached Dresden on May 9, 1945. Rudolf Friedrichs , appointed by the Soviet city commandant as Lord Mayor, appointed Welz to the city council for construction and municipal operations. In July 1945 he became Deputy Mayor of Dresden. When he started working in Dresden, Welz was also employed as General Director of DREWAG , the Dresden utility company. He held this office until May 1949. In the course of the establishment of armed organs in the Soviet Zone , Welz was committed to training administration (VfS) because of his experience as an active Wehrmacht officer . At first he ran a military training facility in Klietz with the rank of VP inspector . In 1951 he was transferred to Leipzig, where he now commanded a mixed readiness of the HVA / KVP with the rank of colonel . At the same time he was city commandant of Leipzig. In 1953, Welz left the KVP in order to manage a nationalized company of the German Solvay works in Westeregeln as director until 1958. He then worked as director of the Staßfurter Soda-Werke until 1962 . Then Welz retired at the age of 51 and devoted himself to his writing.

Welz was a member of the working group of former officers that existed from 1958 to 1971 , which was an organization founded on the SED initiative and which served political instrumentalisation.

Autobiography "Grenadiers Betrayed"

In his autobiography "Betrayed Grenadiers" Welz processed his war experiences on the Eastern Front. He reported on the first pioneer operations at Kalatsch up to the final phase of the German attack in Stalingrad in autumn 1942. He also reported on the use of his battalion in the battles around the Martinsofenhalle in November 1942 to the Soviet operation Uranus and the encirclement of Stalingrad by the Red Army.

Much of the book is devoted to the description of the fate of soldiers during the Kesselschlacht, Welz describes the last hours of the German generals and the hopeless situation before the surrender in the department store Uniwermag. The last chapter is about his experiences during the Soviet captivity. Welz and a few other officers were brought from the Krasnoarmeisk prison camp to Krasnogorsk near Moscow , where they received food and medical care.

In doing so, he reflected on the irresponsible chain of command and blamed himself for the many soldiers killed:

“ I cannot absolve myself of the guilt of leading an entire battalion to its doom. Despite all my reservations, yes, despite better knowledge, in the end I always said “yes” when it came to carrying out unrealistic orders and throwing the companies into loss-making battles. Of course, I was there every time it got queasy, I turned my head just like everyone else. But that's not enough. In doing so, I have given only one example that was fatal to seven hundred pioneers. "

- Major Helmut Welz, Pioneer Battalion 179, January 1943

According to his own account, he would have died with his original unit , but since the pioneers were placed under "foreign" command and were sacrificed by "foreign" division commanders in senseless ascension orders, Welz, who had meanwhile been promoted to major, was in the last weeks of the battle in such a strange unit, which according to his descriptions would have consisted of fanatical National Socialists, for whose conviction Welz did not want to die. Welz saw it as his future task to warn the next generation of the futility and cruelty of war. He and his fellow prisoners gained the conviction that the war of conquest in Russia could no longer be won and that National Socialism in Berlin had to be smashed, that all troops would still have to return to the imperial borders and begin immediate peace negotiations with the Allies.

This new attitude led to the National Committee "Free Germany" in 1943 and built on the old German-Russian relations. The NKFD movement arose after conflicts with National Socialist traditionalists in POW camp 97 on the Kama River near Moscow and gradually gained prominent followers such as B. Major General Lattmann, commander of the 14th Panzer Division . In the closing remarks, Welz warns of the imperialism prevailing in the Federal Republic of Germany, a reactionary officer corps and that no one there has drawn lessons from the battle of Stalingrad.

Works

  • Betrayed grenadiers. German Military publishing house, Berlin 1967.
  • The city that should die. On the difficult new beginning in Dresden after the end of the Second World War, Military Publishing House of the GDR, Berlin 1975.
  • In the last hour. Biography based on extensive notes by Arno von Lenskis, Verlag der Nation, Berlin 1978.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ German Literature Lexicon Volume 30: Weiss-Werdum. De Gruyter, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-11-023159-5 , p. 484.
  2. ↑ Helmut Welz, Betrayed Grenadiers, Berlin, 1967, p. 56.
  3. ↑ Wassili Tschuikow, The Battle of the Century, Berlin 1988, p. 281.
  4. ↑ Helmut Welz: The city that should die. Military Publishing House of the GDR, Berlin, 1975, p. 27
  5. ↑ Helmut Welz: The city that should die. Military Publishing House of the GDR, Berlin, 1975, pp. 48–54.
  6. ^ Jeanette Michelmann: The activists of the first hour. P. 153
  7. ^ Andreas Thüsing (Ed.): The Presidium of the State Administration of Saxony. The minutes of the meetings from July 9, 1945 to December 10, 1946 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2010, passim. P. 548
  8. ↑ Helmut Welz: Betrayed Grenadiers, Dt. Military Publishing House Berlin, 1967, p. 314.
  9. ↑ Helmut Welz: Betrayed Grenadiers, Dt. Military Publishing House Berlin, 1967, p. 316.
personal data
SURNAME Welz, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer
DATE OF BIRTH August 20, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Schkeuditz near Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH October 29, 1979