Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski (General, 1899)

Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski in France , June 1944

Hermann Leopold August von Oppeln-Bronikowski (born January 2, 1899 in Berlin , † September 19, 1966 in Gaißach ) was a German major general in World War II and gold medalist in team dressage at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

Life

family

He came from the old noble family of Oppeln-Bronikowski from Lausitz with the parent company of the same name near Löbau in Upper Lusatia , which was first mentioned in 1261. Hermann was the son of the Prussian infantry general of the same name, Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski (1857–1925) and his wife Marianne, née Boehmer (1878–1971).

Oppeln-Bronikowski married on June 17, 1931 in Züllichau Edelgard von Kleist (born April 20, 1911 in Hanover ), the daughter of the German Lieutenant General Adolf von Kleist and Gertrud von Sydow .

Career

Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski (left) at the horse show in the Deutschlandhalle , 1936

After the outbreak of the First World War in 1917, Oppeln-Bronikowski served as a front-line officer in France and was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross and the Hessian Medal of Bravery . After the war, he was a cavalry officer in the Reichswehr in 1920 .

At the Summer Olympics in Berlin in 1936 he won the gold medal in dressage with the German team .

At the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 he was commander of the reconnaissance division of an infantry division during the invasion of Poland and served as a tank commander on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1945 . After a war injury (1943) and a subsequent stay in a hospital, Oppeln-Bronikowski was in 1944 commander of Panzer Regiment 100 of the 21st Panzer Division in Normandy and in 1945 commander of the 20th Panzer Division in the fighting in Silesia . He was promoted to major general on January 30th. In April 1945 he and his units started a successful relief offensive at the Battle of Bautzen to completely recapture the partially occupied city of Bautzen . After the surrender on May 8, 1945, he was first taken into American captivity and then into British captivity, some of which he spent in the Staumühle internment camp and from which he was released on July 4, 1947.

Oppeln-Bronikowski was involved in building up the German armed forces as a civil advisor . He later acted as a trainer for the Canadian dressage equipe for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo .

Awards

• Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with oak leaves and swords
  • Knight's Cross on January 1, 1943
  • Oak leaves on July 28, 1944 (536th award)
  • Swords on April 17, 1945 (142nd award)
• German cross in gold on August 7, 1943

literature

• Genealogical manual of the nobility . Noble houses A Volume XXVI, p. 380, Volume 126 of the complete series, CA Starke Verlag, Limburg an der Lahn 2001, ISSN  0435-2408

Web links

Commons : Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Reichswehr Ministry (Ed.): Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres. Mittler & Sohn Verlag, Berlin 1930, p. 163.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearer 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. 578.