Hubert von Wangenheim

Hubert von Wangenheim as a flotilla admiral

Hubert Freiherr von Wangenheim (born November 4, 1904 in Charlottenburg near Berlin , † September 3, 1973 in Kiel ) was a German naval officer and most recently a flotilla admiral of the German Navy .

Life

Wangenheim was a son of the officer of the same name Hubert von Wangenheim (1872–1915), who came from an estate in Pomerania, served as a captain in the Guard Grenadier Regiment No. 3 and died in the First World War . As a war widow, the mother only had a small pension and therefore moved with her four children from Berlin to the cheaper Naumburg in 1919. However, there were not enough financial means for further education for all children, and so only the oldest sister could study medicine. The three sons went to the military after graduating from high school. The son Hubert Wangenheim joined the Imperial Navy in 1922 as a midshipman . He was the only one of the sons who survived World War II .

In 1935 Wangenheim married Irene von Egidy (1909–1991), the daughter of the naval officer Moritz von Egidy . They had four children together. Irene brought the small Langfeld farm in Schleswig-Holstein into the marriage , where the family moved when their apartment in Berlin was bombed in 1942.

Military service in the "Third Reich"

v. Wangenheim and v. Blomberg (1937)

Wangenheim took on the first war mission in the rank of lieutenant captain as commander of the torpedo boat Albatros from October 1935 to September 1936 in Spanish waters. The boat was part of the so-called "neutrality patrol", which called at Spanish ports of both civil war parties to evacuate German and other refugees to France. He was then called to Berlin and appointed naval adjutant to General Field Marshal and Minister of War Werner von Blomberg , both of whom had already met on the training ship Horst Wessel of the Reichsmarine.

→ Main article : Blomberg-Fritsch crisis

In 1938, however, there was a break between Wangenheim and the National Socialist leadership. After the death of his first wife, Blomberg had married a second wife, 35 years his junior, with a dubious reputation; she has been linked to pornographic photos and even prostitution. When Adolf Hitler found out about this, Blomberg was dismissed because the marriage violated the code of honor and a decree for marriages of officers. Blomberg traveled to Italy with his new wife. Hitler used the opportunity, together with the dismissal of Colonel General Werner von Fritsch for alleged homosexuality, to fill the leadership of the Wehrmacht with officers loyal to the line and to set himself up as the Wehrmacht High Command. Before his departure, Blomberg had even given Hitler a list of the leading officers who did not want to cooperate with National Socialism and were therefore exchanged. Colonel-General Wilhelm Keitel was also one of those loyal to the line ; because of his devotion to Hitler, the traditional officers of the former Reichswehr ridiculed him as "Lakeitel", referring to "Lakai". The violation of the code of honor by Blomberg and the handing over of the armed forces leadership to the political leadership was difficult to bear for these traditional officers.

Thereupon Wangenheim drove after his former superior Blomberg, looked him up at the hotel in Rome, confronted him with the past of his wife, whom Blomberg might not know fully, and demanded that he part with her and thus the honor of the officer corps restore. When Blomberg refused and said that Wangenheim was " putting the pistol on his chest ", Wangenheim actually put a pistol he had brought with him on the table and asked him to commit suicide, which he also refused, citing reasons of state. Back in Berlin, Hermann Göring Wangenheim called over and shouted at him loudly about what he had done there, whereupon Wangenheim replied that he was a lieutenant captain in the Navy and would not allow himself to be talked about, alluding to the fact that Göring was Commander-in-Chief of the Air Force but not the whole Wehrmacht was. Goering is said to have caught himself and explained that he had to understand that a dead Field Marshal General was not needed in difficult political times.

Since Wangenheim's understanding of honor corresponded to that of the traditional officer corps, his direct superior, Admiral Erich Raeder , had secretly approved the trip beforehand. When Göring then proceeded to dismiss Wangenheim from the Wehrmacht, Raeder is said to have prevented this by threatening his own resignation, except that, at Keitel's refusal, Wangenheim was no longer assigned to the War Ministry, but was transferred to sea.

What was piquant about the incident was that Wangenheim had been appointed to the Honorary Council of the Navy as early as 1931 to decide whether to exclude Reinhard Heydrich from the Navy as a trainer . The latter had failed to keep a marriage promise, had condescendingly spoken in front of the Honorary Council about the former fiancé and was therefore dishonorably discharged from the Navy. The repeated appearance in questions of honor could have been the reason that Wangenheim's career did not progress particularly well during the Third Reich, in any case he was not a member of the NSDAP.

As a result, he was transferred to Swindemünde and was deployed at sea throughout the Second World War, first as captain of the destroyer Z 10 Hans Lody , and finally as commander of a destroyer flotilla with the rank of sea ​​captain . He demonstrated his seafaring skills when he moved three destroyers from Northern Norway through the British lines to the Baltic Sea in January 1945. At the end of the war, only two were left of the flotilla, consisting of four ships. Wangenheim led these two ships into the Bay of Danzig until the last day of the war in order to evacuate refugees to Glücksburg , even if his ship received heavy torpedo hits from Soviet ships on the last call on May 8, 1945.

Military service in the Federal Republic

After the surrender in May 1945, Wangenheim had transferred its remaining destroyers from Glücksburg to Kiel as instructed and handed them over to the British occupation there. He himself went into British captivity on Fehmarn . At the beginning of 1946 he was released and then ran the small Langfeld farm together with his wife. In 1956 he joined the newly founded Bundeswehr. The tight economic conditions on the small farm and the sense of duty to protect the new democratic Germany from the threat to the Eastern bloc were the decisive factors.

He became the first commander of the Mürwik naval school from 1956 to 1960 and helped rebuild the navy with a challenging but humorous leadership style. In 1957 he was appointed flotilla admiral and in 1960 he was appointed commander of the naval forces of the North Sea . In 1963, however, he retired early due to illness and died in 1973 in Kiel.

Individual evidence

1. ^ German loss lists, 34th edition, September 21, 1914, p. 273.
2. ↑ Hubert von Wangenheim , on the genealogy.net website .
3. ↑ Alexander Jordis-Lohausen: Central Europe 1658-2008: The Chronicle of a Family. Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-95425-394-4 , p. 181 f.
4. ↑ Alexander Jordis-Lohausen: Central Europe 1658-2008: The Chronicle of a Family. Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-95425-394-4 , p. 182 f.
5. ↑ Alexander Jordis-Lohausen: Central Europe 1658-2008: The Chronicle of a Family. Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-95425-394-4 , p. 182.
6. ^ Crew 1922. In: German U-Boats 1935–1945.
7. ^ Baron Hubert von Wangenheim , on the website www.genealogieonline.nl .
8. ↑ website Ostseehofs Langfeld .
9. ↑ Alexander Jordis-Lohausen: Central Europe 1658-2008: The Chronicle of a Family. Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-95425-394-4 , pp. 207 f.
10. ↑ Harold Deutsch : "Hitler and His Generals:" The Hidden Crisis, January-June 1938. Minnesota 1974, ISBN 978-0-8166-5744-5 , p. 120.
11. ↑ Harold Deutsch: "Hitler and His Generals:" The Hidden Crisis, January-June 1938. Minnesota 1974, ISBN 978-0-8166-5744-5 , p. 130.
12. ↑ ^{a b c} Harold Deutsch: "Hitler and His Generals:" The Hidden Crisis, January-June 1938 , Minnesota 1974, ISBN 978-0-8166-5744-5 , p. 123 f.
13. ↑ The scandal: intrigue or mishap? In: Die Zeit , No. 11 (1988), p. 7.
14. ^ ^{A b} Hans Bernd Gisevius : Until the bitter end: from the Reichstag fire to July 20, 1944. Hamburg 1961, p. 286/287.
15. ↑ Jens Brüggemann: Men of Honor? The Wehrmacht generals in the Nuremberg Trial of 1945/46 , Paderborn 2018, ISBN 978-3-506-79259-4 , p. 189.
16. ↑ Harold Deutsch: "Hitler and His Generals:" The Hidden Crisis, January-June 1938. Minnesota 1974, ISBN 978-0-8166-5744-5 , p. 122.
17. ↑ Jens Brüggemann: Men of Honor? The Wehrmacht generality in the Nuremberg Trial of 1945/46. Paderborn 2018, ISBN 978-3-506-79259-4 , p. 189, note 23.
18. ↑ Alexander Jordis-Lohausen: Central Europe 1658-2008: The Chronicle of a Family. Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-95425-394-4 , p. 191.
19. ↑ Geirr Haarr: The Gathering Storm: The Naval War in Northern Europe September 1939 - April 1940. Barnsley (UK), 2013, ISBN 978-1-4738-3131-5 , S. 467th
20. ↑ Alexander Jordis-Lohausen: Central Europe 1658-2008: The Chronicle of a Family. Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-95425-394-4 , p. 226.
21. ↑ Alexander Jordis-Lohausen: Central Europe 1658-2008: The Chronicle of a Family. Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-95425-394-4 , p. 226 f.
22. ↑ Alexander Jordis-Lohausen: Central Europe 1658–2008: The Chronicle of a Family, Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-95425-394-4 , p. 228.
23. ↑ Alexander Jordis-Lohausen: Central Europe 1658-2008: The Chronicle of a Family. Hamburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-95425-394-4 , p. 231 f.
24. ^ Johannes Sander-Nagashima: The Federal Navy 1955 to 1972: Concept and structure. Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-486-57972-7 , p. 103.
25. ^ Hubert Freiherr von Wangenheim. In: Der Spiegel , No. 11/1958.
26. ↑ Flotilla Admirals of the Federal Navy 1956–1990 , on the website www.deutsches-marinearchiv.de .