Karl Michel (officer)

Karl Michel (born March 28, 1904 in Wiesbaden ; † January 14, 1945 near Kuldīga , Latvian SSR ) was a German officer in the Wehrmacht who was involved as a marginal figure in the preparation of the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 and under circumstances that have not yet been clarified came to death. Karl Michel left several children, u. a. his daughter, the painter Ellinor Michel , who later worked in Berlin-Charlottenburg .

Life

Karl Michel joined the Prussian police in the province of Hanover as a police candidate in 1925 and was accepted into the Wehrmacht in 1935 with the rank of first lieutenant . Due to exceptionally good assessments by his respective superiors, who attested him, among other things, above-average assertiveness and bravado, he rose steadily in the military hierarchy and in 1943 was personally promoted to lieutenant colonel in the general staff by Adolf Hitler .

Michel worked under General Friedrich Olbricht , one of the central figures in the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, as a liaison officer to the Chief of the Army General Staff . In this function, Michel often traveled with Count von Stauffenberg in the special train that connected Berlin and Lötzen to the Fuehrer's headquarters in Wolfsschanze . The representation of Jürgen Thorwald , Michel was an intelligence officer Lieutenant General Heinz Hellmich (1890-1944), the "Inspector of the Eastern troops" at the Army High Command , been, is wrong and based on a confusion with the eponymous former Lieutenant Charles Michel .

In December 1943 Michel was hospitalized in Berlin for several weeks for meniscus surgery and was frequently visited by Stauffenberg during this time; what the two men talked about during these visits is not known. Carl Zuckmayer assigned Michel to the Kreisau Circle in a report for the American War Department in 1946 . However, no further evidence is known for this. It is also not clear to what extent Michel was informed about the preparations for July 20th and how he was involved in the conspiracy. In the post-war literature about the assassination, however, he appears several times in the list of conspiracy victims.

At the time of the assassination attempt on July 20, Michel was in Italy , where he had been First General Staff Officer (Ia) of the 19th Field Division (L) since June 1944 . There the division was almost completely destroyed in heavy fighting over the next few weeks and was therefore officially disbanded in mid-August. On August 8, 1944, Michel was arrested, taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin by SS officers , interrogated and mistreated. He was released three weeks later without being charged with the people's court like many other arrested officers . However, he remained under constant surveillance by the Gestapo. Michel came to the so-called " Führerreserve " of the OKH and from there at the beginning of September 1944 as battalion commander to the 87th Infantry Division , which fought on the eastern front near Riga and surrendered in 1945 in the Kurland pocket. On December 25th, 1944, Michel had to go to Triberg on the orders of Heinrich Himmler and appear there before a court martial of the SS .

Karl Michel died on January 14, 1945 at the main dressing station 563 near Ozoli (a homestead near Kuldīga ) in what is now Latvia. In post-war lists of the perished conspirators of July 20, 1944, he is listed as "killed (on a death squad)".

The circumstances of his death are still unclear. The message his wife received said that Michel was shot in the head while advancing his unit in battle and was buried with military honors. In February, however, the family received a letter from Michel's driver, Oscar Nötzel, indicating that the actual circumstances of death were different and that he was not allowed to write anything about it, but wanted to personally reveal the truth to the widow. It was not until the 1950s that Nötzel returned home from a Soviet captivity and reported that Michel had been shot by an SS sniper. During the reburial of the anonymous mass grave in which Karl Michel is said to have been buried, neither his bones nor his identification tag were found , so that to this day it has not been proven whether he was actually murdered by a shot on his own side as claimed by Nötzel or in the Fight fell.

Karl Michel was the father of the painter Ellinor "Ello" Michel (1939–2007), the temporary lover of Andreas Baader and mother of Baader's daughter Suse (* 1965).

literature

• Klaus Stern, Jörg Herrmann: Andreas Baader - The life of an enemy of the state . Munich: dtv, 2007. ISBN 978-3-423-24584-5 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Stern, Jörg Herrmann: Andreas Baader - The life of a public enemy . Munich 2007, pp. 57-60.
2. ^ Bernhard Kroener: The strong man in the homeland war area. Colonel General Friedrich Fromm. Paderborn 2005, p. 637.
3. ↑ Jürgen Thorwald: Who they want to spoil. Stuttgart 1952, pp. 128, 259; s. a. Gerald Reitlinger : A house built on sand. Hitler's policy of violence in Russia 1941–1944. Hamburg 1962, p. 384; Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt: Against Stalin and Hitler. Mainz 1970, pp. 170-182.
4. ^ Carl Zuckmayer: Germany report for the War Department of the United States of America (first 1946). Göttingen 2005, p. 250, mixes Michel's life with that of a general staff officer of the same name, the then Lieutenant Karl Michel .
5. ↑ ^{a b} Federal Center for Homeland Service (Ed.): July 20, 1944. 3. revised. Bonn 1961, p. 185.
6. ↑ cf. Georg Tessin : Associations and troops of the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS in World War II 1939–1945. First volume: The branches of arms - complete overview. Osnabrück 1977, pp. 89, 112.
7. ↑ cf. Hermann Oehmichen, Martin Mann: The path of the 87th Infantry Division from 1939–1945. o. O. 1969.
8. ^ Entry in the war graves database of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge .