Horst von Petersdorff

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Horst Bernhard Kurt von Petersdorff (born December 30, 1892 in Posen , † July 12, 1962 in Prien am Chiemsee ) was a German officer and SA leader.

Life

Youth and education

Horst was the son of the first lieutenant and regimental adjutant in the grenadier regiment "Graf Kleist von Nollendorf" (1st West Prussian) No. 6 Axel von Petersdorff and his wife Elisabeth, née Fehlan. In his childhood he attended preschool in Koburg and the humanistic high school in Steglitz near Berlin, Celle, Hanover and then again in Steglitz.

In June 1911, Petersdorff joined the 2nd Guards Regiment on foot in the Prussian Army as a flag junior . After attending the Danzig War School , he was promoted to lieutenant in his regular regiment in November 1912 .

First World War and Revolutionary Period

When the First World War broke out , Petersdorff was initially deployed with the same regiment on the Western Front as the platoon leader of the 8th Company and later as the adjutant of the 2nd Battalion. On October 3, 1914, he was seriously wounded near Cambrai when he suffered a ricochet in his right upper arm. After a long waiting period, he returned to the front in May 1915. In the winter of 1917/1918, as an officer in the Guard Corps in Flanders , Peterdorf was wounded in heavy fighting on the coast and lost his right arm. After a brief treatment in Wiesbaden , he went with the Pascha II expedition to Syria , where he was deployed as a detachment leader of German troops. He was slightly wounded in the 2nd Jordan Battle before returning to the 2nd Guards Regiment on foot on the Western Front in September 1918, a few weeks before the end of the war.

During the war, Petersdorff was awarded the Iron Cross II. Class (1914), the Honor Cross III. Awarded the first class of the Princely House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords (1915), the Iron Cross First Class (1916 on the Somme ) and the Iron Crescent . For storming the Hurtebise Ferme in April 1917, he received the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords.

After the end of the war, Petersdorff joined the Freikorps movement that emerged as a reaction to the November Revolution: in December 1918, he formed the Freikorps Petersdorff named after him from the MG companies of the 2nd Guards Regiment on foot and volunteers from the Guard Corps , which was initially used in Berlin to fight socialist revolutionaries and was later involved in the border battles in Upper Silesia and the Baltic States .

In the Baltic States, Petersdorff's Freikorps belonged to the Iron Division , with which it was involved in the liberation of Mitau and Riga , among other things . In the summer of 1919 he joined the Baltic State Army . In the autumn of 1919 the Freikorps was part of the German Legion .

Weimar Republic

In 1922, Petersdorff left the army with the rank of captain . He then earned his living as a merchant.

At the beginning of the 1920s, Petersdorff settled in Berchtesgaden, where he met Dietrich Eckart , on whose mediation he joined the NSDAP in his home district of Pomerania in October 1922 . He first became a member of the SA in June 1923 when he joined the SA in Berchtesgaden.

After the NSDAP was temporarily banned, Petersdorff rejoined it on October 1, 1925 ( membership number 20.736). He also became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA). In his private life he settled in Berchtesgaden, where he had a property (the Dürrecklehen) at the opening act, which he expanded into a youth home for the working youth.

In 1931 Petersdorff can be verified as an employee in the Supreme SA leadership , in which he held the rank of Oberführer at that time. At the beginning of the year he was involved in the suppression of the Stennes revolt in Berlin. In May 1931, Petersdorff was appointed leader of the Berlin Gausturm as the successor to Edmund Heines with the rank of SA-Oberführer. He lost this position after a few weeks - apparently as a result of intrigues in the SA leadership against him: in his place, Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorff was appointed the new head of the Berlin SA in August 1931 .

time of the nationalsocialism

In the first years of the Nazi regime , Petersdorff did not stand out: after he left the NSDAP and the SA in 1932, he resumed his work in both organizations from 1936. In 1934 he briefly emigrated to Austria, only to have lived again in Berlin-Halensee and Berchtesgaden by 1936 at the latest. Since 29 March 1935 he was married to Irene Countess von Bismarck (1888-1982), his stepson was in this way the later PDS - parliamentary deputy Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel (1921-2007). The marriage was divorced on September 7, 1944.

On the occasion of the outbreak of the Second World War , Petersdorff was called up for military service as a captain zV in 1939 : he was initially appointed as the commander of the III. Battalion used in the 189 Infantry Regiment, with which he took part in the French campaign. Due to his achievements in this company - as the commander of an advance division of a division , he is said to have made a decisive contribution to the success of his army corps - he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross by Hitler on June 29, 1940 at the suggestion of Walther von Brauchitsch .

In 1942 Petersdorff was promoted to lieutenant colonel and commissioned with the command of the Reserve Mountain Infantry Regiment 1. Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring rejected one of Petersdorff's leading activities in his East Ministry , suggested by Alfred Rosenberg after the start of the Russian campaign in 1941, on the grounds that Petersdorff was "undoubtedly insane," a claim for which, according to Herbert Michaelis , there was "no evidence".

After several wounds in the east, he was assigned to the Ministry of Armaments . In 1943 he was sent to these countries as head of the German industrial commission in Slovakia and Hungary .

In July 1944, Petersdorff was arrested in connection with the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt . On September 15, 1944, he was dismissed from the Wehrmacht with the rank of lieutenant colonel , which was the prerequisite for being able to indict him before the People's Court . Petersdorff's expulsion from the party took place on October 3, 1944. The People's Court acquitted him in December 1944. Nevertheless, he was taken into protective custody and then as a special prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp . On April 30, 1945 he was liberated together with over 140 clan and special prisoners in South Tyrol .

Archival material

literature

  • Christian Herrmann (Ed.): Adolf Hitler. Speeches, writings, orders. February 1925 to January 1933 , Saur 1992, p. 46.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Goebbels diaries entry from April 29, 1931.
  2. ↑ Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearers 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. 589.
  3. ^ Herbert Michaelis: causes and consequence. From the German collapse in 1918 and 1945 to the state reorganization of Germany in the present. A collection of certificates and documents on contemporary history , Vol. 17, 1979, p. 315.
  4. ↑ Peter Koblank: The Liberation of Special Prisoners and Kinship Prisoners in South Tyrol , online edition Mythos Elser 2006
personal data
SURNAME Petersdorff, Horst von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer and SA leader
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Poses
DATE OF DEATH July 12, 1962
Place of death Prien am Chiemsee