Irmingard of Bavaria

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Irmingard Marie Josepha Princess of Bavaria (born May 29, 1923 in Berchtesgaden ; † October 23, 2010 in Leutstetten ) was a family member of the Wittelsbach family , the former ruling family of the Kingdom of Bavaria .

Life

Rupprecht von Bayern with his wife Antonia and their children (1935)

Irmingard was born the second of a total of six children of the last Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria and his second wife Antonia of Luxembourg and was born by the later Pope Pius XII. baptized in the Berchtesgaden collegiate church .

Like her sisters Hilda and Gabriele, Irmingard was born in the family's summer residence in Berchtesgaden. After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and since he also moved into the Berghof in Berchtesgaden , the family changed their habit of spending their summer holidays at their seat there, as Rupprecht wanted to avoid meeting Hitler. Since then, summers have been spent in Hohenschwangau Castle in the Bavarian Alps. Soon the relatives of the Wittelsbach family suffered persecution by the National Socialists. The regime gradually nationalized family wealth. The Wittelsbacher Palais in Munich was confiscated at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship . From October 1933 the Munich headquarters of the Gestapo was set up there, and from 1934/35 it was converted into a Gestapo prison. Leutstetten Castle , the family's summer residence, was also confiscated when the war began. German refugees from the front area on the Saar were now housed there.

From 1936 onwards, Irmingard, then 13, was sent to boarding school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton , England , for a little over two years, together with her sister Editha . Her sisters Hilda and Gabrielle also came the following year. Her brother Henry came to England in 1938 and studied at Oxford University there at the age of 16 . For Irmingard, stays in schools in Belgium and Padua in Italy followed .

exile

However, she spent most of the Second World War in exile in Italy at the invitation of the Italian King Vittorio Emanuele . The king had sent his private saloon car to Munich to enable the family to leave the country. Cut off from her wealth in Germany, she was dependent on the support of friends and relatives there. Her father Rupprecht managed to hide from the National Socialists for years in Florence , where he was accommodated in an apartment in the Palazzo Pecori-Giraldi of the Bavarian Baron Theodor von Fraunberg and his Italian wife Countessa Adriana Pecori-Giraldi.

Concentration camp detention

A few days after the assassination attempt on 20 July 1944 were also Ermengarde and with it many other members of the Wittelsbach family liability arrested and deported as so-called honor prisoners in concentration camps. On July 27, 1944, Irmingard's mother and siblings were arrested by the SS. The only 19-year-old Irmingard had tried to flee alone over the Alps to neutral Switzerland. But she was arrested by the Gestapo on Lake Garda in September 1944, suffering from typhus . Weakened by the illness and an infection as a result of a faulty blood transfusion while in captivity, she experienced the Allied air raids on the city in the hospital in Innsbruck .

After several hospital stays under guard and after interrogation at the Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8 in Berlin , she was taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in January 1945 , where the rest of her family had already been imprisoned. At the end of February 1945, when the Red Army had already almost completely enclosed the capital, Irmgard and her family were transferred to the Flossenbürg concentration camp near Weiden / Opf. spent. In her autobiography, Irmingard describes how, when the family was picked up by the guards for removal, she firmly expected their execution. In Flossenbürg, the Wittelsbachers were housed in a barrack within sight of the crematorium. Irmingard reports:

“Every day you saw columns of half-starved people in striped suits stagger past. (...) They were driven to work in the nearby quarries "

- Irmingard of Bavaria : memories of the youth 1923–1950

On April 8th they were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp and a short time later they were taken to the Ammerwald Hotel near Reutte in Tyrol - this was a branch of the Dachau concentration camp. The American army liberated her and her family in the Ammerwald at the end of the war, after some French military internees had already taken over the subcamps with the special prisoners after the SS guards had fled from the advancing Allied troops.

artist

She dealt with the memories of the persecution by the National Socialists and her concentration camp imprisonment in her artistic work as a painter and in her book Youth Memories 1923-1950. She had particularly bad memories of Flossenbürg. She reports very vividly in her autobiography

"We were housed in a strange barracks. Every day dead people were piled up in front of our window like wood."

- Irmingard of Bavaria : youth memories 1923–1950.

In September 2007 she wrote in a greeting:

"The memories of the many people who were driven to death during the time [of National Socialism] on the one hand and the many who drove to death on the other, have never left me."

- Irmingard von Bayern : letter dated September 1, 2007

Her experiences in the National Socialist camps and the constant fear of death in which she was floating is omnipresent in her pictures. They find expression in works such as Fear of Death and The Train of Prisoners . Exhibitions found u. a. in Germany and Italy.

Right up to old age Irmingard von Bayern was a member of the board of trustees of the “Brücke 7” cultural association for the memory of the Holocaust , which awarded her the “World Day of Peace Memorial Prize” in 2008 for her work.

family

On July 19, 1950, she married her cousin Ludwig Karl Maria Prince of Bavaria . In 1951 the only surviving child of the marriage was born, Luitpold Prince of Bavaria . In 1955 she acquired the Kaltenberg Castle Brewery and continued it as the Kaltenberg Irmingard Princess of Bavaria GmbH Castle Brewery . The company has since changed its name, but is still run by her family to this day. In 1976 Irmingard's son Luitpold took over the management of the brewery.

Irmingard died in 2010 at the age of 87 at her Leutstetten Castle and was buried in the Wittelsbach family cemetery in Andechs Monastery.

progeny

Fonts

literature

  • Christiane Funke: Walking straight through dark times. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of April 26, 2004, p. R2.
  • Volker Koop : In Hitler's hands. Special prisoners and honorary prisoners of the SS. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20580-5 , 295 pages.
  • Elke Reichert: “You feel like slaughter cattle.” Princess Irmhild shared the lot of many Wittelsbachers during the Nazi era: she was one of the hostages that Hitler was holding. In: Ernst Fischer (Ed.): Under the Crown. The Kingdom of Bavaria and its inheritance; 1806 to 1918 . Verlag der SZ, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-86615-331-8 , pp. 156–158.
  • Susanne Stübinger: Irmingard's Princess of Bavaria's youth memories. In: Journal for Bavarian State History , Volume 64, 2001, Issue 3, pp. 833–834.
  • Werner Vitzthum: Irmingard Princess of Bavaria. Youth memories. In: Heimat-Blätter , 16 (1/2002), p. 2.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b jacobite.ca
  2. ^ Dieter J. Weiss: Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria (1869–1955). A political biography . Regensburg 2007, p. 182 f.
  3. ↑ See with illustrations jacobite.ca
  4. ↑ James Donohoe: Hitler's conservative opponents in Bavaria . Leiden 1961, p. 312.
  5. ↑ Wittelsbachers mourn their "resting pole" . Munich Mercury , October 27, 2010
  6. ↑ Irmingard of Bavaria: Youth memories 1923–1950 . P. 313.
  7. ↑ p. 316
  8. ^ Hans-Günter Richardi: SS hostages in the Alpine fortress. The deportation of prominent concentration camp prisoners from Germany to South Tyrol . Bozen 2005, p. 90 ff.
  9. ↑ With a foreword by Andreas Kraus. St. Ottilien 2000. ISBN 3-8306-7041-9
  10. ↑ bruecke-7.de. (No longer available online.) July 21, 2012, archived from the original on July 21, 2012 ; Retrieved April 24, 2016 .
  11. ^ Irmingard of Bavaria: Youth memories: 1923-1950.
  12. ^ A b Christiane Funke: An upright Wittelsbach woman . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 27, 2010, p. 46.
  13. ↑ Representative here exhibitions in Berlin and Meran (Italy) See: Bauen & Wohnen , Volume 15, supplement of the Südtiroler Illustrierte (1994). bruecke-7.de ( Memento from July 22, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  14. ↑ ( page no longer available , search in web archives: bruecke-7.de )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.bruecke-7.de
  15. ↑ bruecke-7.de ( Memento from July 22, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) the board of trustees of the association, which is committed to tolerance and against violence, includes Björn Engholm , Joachim Gauck , Stefan Heym and Siegfried Scheffler .
  16. ↑ Irmingard Princess of Bavaria died ( Memento from November 8, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  17. ↑ More links with obituaries on the talk page
personal data
SURNAME Bavaria, Irmingard von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bavaria, Irmingard Marie Josepha Princess of
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German members of the Wittelsbach family
DATE OF BIRTH May 29, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Berchtesgaden
DATE OF DEATH October 23, 2010
Place of death Leutstetten