Helmuth Wilberg

Helmuth Wilberg

Helmuth Wilberg (* 1. June 1880 in Berlin , † 20th November 1941 in Dresden ) was a German Luftwaffe General of the Air Force during the Second World War .

family

According to the Nazi racial laws, Wilberg was a " half-Jew ", but in 1935 the regime declared him an " Aryan ".

Military background

Wilberg joined the Fusilier Regiment "von Gersdorff" (Kurhessisches) No. 80 on April 18, 1899 and was promoted to lieutenant on January 27, 1900 . From 1906 he worked as a trainer at the Naumburg and Groß-Lichterfelde cadet institutions . On October 18, 1909, he was promoted to first lieutenant . In 1911 he wrote the elaboration: The "Air reconnaissance in the imperial maneuver 1911, their value and influence on the leadership compared to the cavalry reconnaissance". In 1913 he signed up for the air force and became one of the first German military pilots. At the beginning of the First World War he was captain and leader of the field aviation division 11. Later he served as commander of the aviators (Kofl) of the 4th Army . 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 Bavarian Military Merit Order IV Class with Swords, the Mecklenburg Military Merit Cross and the Cross for War II Class and from the Allies the Austrian Military Merit Cross III. Class with the war decoration, the Iron Crescent and the Knight's Cross IV. Class, II. Level of the Bulgarian Military Order awarded for bravery . After the war he was accepted into the Reichswehr . There he was employed in the Reichswehr Ministry and in the Army Office until 1927 , most recently as head of the air raid protection department . In 1923 he took part in the inauguration of the aviator memorial on the Wasserkuppe . Then he came to the 18th Infantry Regiment , in which he led a battalion as a lieutenant colonel . From 1929 to 1932 he was site commander of Wroclaw until he was retired as major general .

In the period that followed, he secretly helped build the air force. Air forces were banned from the German Reich due to the provisions of the Versailles Treaty . In 1934 he joined the Air Force. Wilberg was initially employed as a department head in the Reich Ministry of Aviation . In 1935 he took over the construction of the Air War School in Werder an der Havel , and later the Higher Air Force School in Berlin. He is considered one of the strategists of the Blitzkrieg and significantly influenced the German air war doctrine. In 1937 he set up the "Sonderstab W", which acted as the management group for the operation of the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War . In March 1938 he was awarded the character as Luftwaffe General adopted. During the mobilization for the attack on Poland , Wilberg was reactivated and installed as the head of the Higher Air Training Command 4. He was killed in a plane crash on November 20, 1941 - on the way to Ernst Udet's funeral  - near Dresden.

literature

• Bryan Mark Rigg : Hitler's Jewish Soldiers. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence Kan. 2002, ISBN 0-7006-1178-9 , ( Modern War Studies ), [1]
• Bryan Mark Rigg: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers. Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 2003, ISBN 3-506-70115-0 .

Web links

• Helmut Wilberg's aviator grave

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Reichswehr Ministry (Ed.): Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres. Mittler & Sohn Verlag, Berlin 1930, p. 111.