II. Flak Corps

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The II. Flak Corps was a major combat unit of the German Air Force in World War II .

Lineup

The General Staff of Flak-Corps II (only from the end of 1940 did Flak-Corps II become II. Flak-Corps) on October 3, 1939, from the permanent staff of the 6th Flieger-Division in Frankfurt am Main under its first general commander later General der Flieger Otto Deßloch set up under the command of Luftflotte 2 . At this point in time, he was subordinate to the following associations, which took care of the Reich air defense:

and the

  • Flak Regiment 202
  • I./Flak Regiment 23
  • I./Flak Regiment 37
  • I./Flak-Regiment 61 and the
  • light anti-aircraft division 77.

as well as that

After the successful conclusion of the attack on Poland , the aforementioned Army Group North under the command of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock was set up in the west under its new name Army Group B in October 1939 . There, the Flak Corps II with its subordinate units was supposed to take over the (air) security of the 6th Army in the event of a German attack and then also support them in ground combat. The German attack did not take place for the time being and finally ended in the seated war .

Western campaign

With the beginning of the Red Case , the western campaign , the Flak Corps II units were heavily involved in it. The Flak Regiment 201 should be mentioned here, which was involved in the army units deployed at Maubeuge fortress and in the Battle of Dunkirk , in particular in the defense of the German Abbeville bridgehead . The Flak Regiment 103, which was also subordinated at this time (the name was just a code name for the General Göring regiment actually operating behind this name ) fought, among other things, on the successful crossing of the Maas and the Albert Canal and was then also part of the occupation Brussels involved. This was followed by heavy fighting in Flanders and, as part of the 6th Army, the capture of the city of Liège and the battle of Hannut , the largest tank battle of the western campaign. After that it was again subordinated to the I. Flak Corps after it had been withdrawn there for a short time.

After the capitulation of France, the units of the II. Flak Corps, with command post in Le fort Mahon , were able to show 214 aircraft kills and 204 tank kills. There were also 17 forts and 7 transport ships. Their associations were subsequently u. a. deployed in Ostend ( Netherlands ) and Boulogne as well as in Calais , among other things to ensure the protection of the ports there.

With regard to the Seelöwe company , structural measures were also taken in Flak Corps II, but reversed when the company was rejected. Until mid-December 1940, the subordinate units of the corps were therefore also exposed to a more or less severe fluctuation. It was only when the General Command was transferred to Tours on December 16, 1940 that the corps came under:

The General Command remained there until the beginning of March 1941 and was then relocated to Grünau without its units as part of the preparations for Operation Barbarossa and initially remained there without use.

Eastern campaign

1941 to 1942

It was not until two weeks after the start of the eastern campaign that the General Command of the II. Flak Corps was transferred to the area of Air Fleet 4 in the southern section of the eastern front as part of Army Group South . However, only the Flak Regiment Göring and Flak Regiment 103 belonged to the corps at this time . As early as September 1941, the corps was transferred to Luftflotte 2 as part of Army Group Center . There his units were involved in the double battle near Vyazma and Brjansk , where the units near Vyazma were able to distinguish themselves through high numbers of kills on both aircraft and tanks. In October 1941 the command post of the General Staff Corps was in Gshatsk until February 1942 . In the meantime General Goring's regiment had also left the corps. Thus the corps continued to be divided into only two regiments,

For this reason, the II. Flak Corps was disbanded on April 10, 1942. Their units were distributed to other corps and their general staff became the division command of the 18th Flak Division , which was set up.

1943 reorganization

It was not until the beginning of November 1943 that a new General Staff was set up for a II. Flak Corps, the command of which was the General of the Flak Cartillery, Job Wilhelm Odebrecht . Odebrecht himself then managed the corps until the end of the war. The reorganization of the corps took place as before the dissolution within the framework of Army Group Center in the area of Air Fleet 6 . The corps was structured as follows:

There the associations were involved in tough defensive battles, mainly in ground combat, until the end of 1943.

1944

After the lost battle for Kursk the year before, Army Group Center and with it the II. Flak Corps had to retreat almost to the old Soviet border of 1939 in tough retreat battles . The completely weakened German armies were able to bring the front to a halt again with a tremendous effort, but the Soviet Operation Bagration , which began on June 22, 1944, led to the total collapse of Army Group Center. The units of the 2nd Flak Corps got into this vortex. Although their units were again able to show considerable numbers of tank combat vehicles being shot down, this did not change the decline of the units. So that was the 18th anti-aircraft division in the boiler of Vitebsk trapped and suffered had high losses of men and material. In the course of the Warsaw Uprising from August 1944, individual anti-aircraft units of the II. Flak Corps were also involved, but not in house-to-house fighting, but to secure the Warsaw airfields. Individual anti-aircraft combat groups, their exact assignment is not yet known, but were also deployed in downtown Warsaw in the first days of the uprising. By the end of 1944, the subordinate units of the II. Flak Corps were also involved in violent defensive battles in East Prussia .

1945 and end of the war

Before the start of the last Soviet winter offensive and the Battle of East Prussia in mid-January 1945, the II. Flak Corps was structured as follows:

At the beginning of February 1945 the command post of the II. Flak Corps was located in Boitzenburg. Just a few weeks later, on January 25, 1945, a new regrouping took place:

In the course of the dramatically deteriorating situation on the Oder front, the II. Flak Corps was placed under the Northeast Air Force Command at the beginning of April 1945 . The last complete structure of the corps has been preserved, dated April 16, 1945. The following associations were subordinate to him:

From April 27, 1945, all connections between the General Staff Corps of the II. Flak Corps and the units subordinate to it were completely severed due to the war. A coordination of the forces was therefore no longer given. Their units fought their last days of the war without corps command in the ranks of the army units of the Wehrmacht in their area. The General Command itself resigned from its previous command post and then fell into Allied captivity on May 5, 1945 in Heide ( Schleswig-Holstein ).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karl-Heinz Hummel: The German flak cartillery 1935-1945. Your major formations and regiments. VDM, Zweibrücken 2010, ISBN 978-3-86619-048-1 , pp. 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28.