Kurt Assmann

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Kurt Assmann (born July 13, 1883 in Naumburg (Saale) , † July 26, 1962 in Bad Homburg in front of the height ) was a German vice admiral as well as archivist and author of numerous publications.

Life

Imperial Navy

Assmann occurred on 10 April 1901 as a midshipman in the Imperial Navy and completed his basic training on the cruiser frigate SMS Charlotte . He then went to the naval school and was appointed ensign at sea on April 22, 1902 . From October 1, 1903 to March 11, 1905 Aßmann served on the liner SMS Kaiser Karl der Große ; there he was promoted to lieutenant at sea on September 29, 1904 . On March 12, 1905, Assmann traveled to Panama to take up his duties as an officer on watch on the small cruiser SMS Falke . On March 30, 1906 he was promoted to lieutenant at sea . After the ship returned home, Assmann was reassigned to Emperor Charlemagne . From the middle to the end of September 1909 he was made available to the 1st Sailor Division. He then served in the mine test commission until September 30, 1913, initially as an assistant and later as a consultant. On May 13, 1911 he was promoted to lieutenant captain. From September 30 to December 7, 1911, he acted as a deputy commander of the mine cruiser SMS Nautilus . From October 1, 1913 to June 30, 1914 Aßmann completed the first course at the Naval Academy in Kiel . In July 1914 he spent further training on the large liner SMS Ostfriesland , and with the outbreak of the First World War he became commander of the auxiliary stray steamer A , the former seaside resort ship Odin . On October 26, 1914, Assmann became chief of the mining company in the Flanders Marine Corps . On June 16, 1915, he became head of the Flanders torpedo boat flotilla, which he commanded until the end of the war. For his achievements during the war, Assmann was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross , the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords, the Knight's Cross II Class of the Order of the Zähringer Lion with oak leaves and swords, the Hamburg Hanseatic Cross and the Friedrich August Cross II. And I. Class and the Reussian Cross of Honor III. Class with crown and swords.

Imperial Navy

On November 7, 1918, Assmann was transferred to the Reichsmarineamt as a department head and remained active there after the renaming to Admiralty and later in naval management. On January 21, 1920 he became a corvette captain . From September 28, 1923 to July 15, 1925 he was first officer on the old ship of the line Hanover . He then became head of department in the naval department of the naval command. On November 1, 1925, he was promoted to frigate captain. On March 13, 1927, he was appointed head of the fleet department and on March 1, 1928, he was promoted to captain at sea . From September 23, 1929 to September 23, 1932 he was in command of the liner Silesia . After handing the ship over to his successor Wilhelm Canaris , he was made available to the chief of naval command and promoted to Rear Admiral on October 1, 1932 . On December 31, 1932, he retired from the Navy.

On April 1, 1933, he took over the management of the naval archive within the naval management, initially as a civilian employee . In October 1933 he was given the status of an L officer and in March 1935 that of an E officer .

Navy

After the archive was renamed the War Studies Department on January 22, 1936, Aßmann remained entrusted with its management. On January 25, 1937 he was awarded the character of Vice Admiral. Finally, with his reactivation on January 1, 1941, he received the patent as Vice Admiral. His nephew was employed in the OKW as a consultant and later on the battleship Tirpitz active Heinz Assmann . On June 29, 1943, Assmann was made available to the Commander-in-Chief of the Naval High Command East and finally retired the following day. On July 5, Assmann was commissioned to compile and create an overview of the contributions made by the naval warfare to the planning of the war. In his research he recorded Erich Raeder 's skepticism towards Hitler's plans to attack the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa ).

After the end of the war

During the Nuremberg Trials , Kurt Assmann, as he was very familiar with the files from the former naval archive, helped defender Otto Kranzbühler and his assistant Hans Meckel to find exonerating material for the defense of Karl Dönitz .

After the end of the war, Assmann's Wandlungen der Seekriegführung ( Mittler , Berlin 1943) was placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone .

In the Federal Republic of Germany, Assmann was known, among other things, as a “kind of resuscitator” of the thesis that Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 preempted Stalin's war, the preventive war thesis dealing with the Third Reich is very controversial. The historian Jürgen Förster reported in the book Preventive War? The German attack on the Soviet Union , as Assmann in his book Deutsche Schicksalsjahre / 1950 transported the thesis of a preventive war to the Federal Republic. Aßmann was so convinced by Hitler's speech on June 14, 1941 to the Naval War Command about the necessity of a preventive war against the USSR that he quoted what he had heard in a book in 1950 as proof of the validity of this thesis with the following words:

"The statements were so conclusive and conclusive that after the lecture none of the members of the Naval War Command present doubted the absolute necessity of the campaign as a 'preventive war' ... Even the bitterest Nazi opponent will no longer deny that now [1950] Adolf Hitler judged the situation correctly in the long run. "

In 1950 Aßmann published the above-mentioned book Deutsche Schicksalsjahre . Other theses in the book were also controversial. In his book Deutsche Seestrategie in Zwei Weltkriegen , published in 1957 , Aßmann put forward the thesis that Karl Dönitz could have carried on the submarine war with greater protection of the units under his control, since less forces than the forces actually deployed were needed to bind the enemy would have been. Doenitz made fun of Assmann's views in a letter to Gert Buchheit .

Aßmann lived as a historian in Oberursel until his death .

literature

  • Dermot Bradley (eds.), Hans H. Hildebrand, Ernest Henriot: Germany's Admirals 1849-1945. The military careers of naval, engineering, medical, weapons and administrative officers with admiral rank. Volume 1: A-G. Biblio Verlag, Osnabrück 1988, ISBN 3-7648-2480-8 , pp. 39-40.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reichswehr Ministry (ed.): Ranking list of the German Reichsmarine. ES Mittler & Sohn , Berlin 1929, p. 40.
  2. ^ Michael Salewski : The German Naval Warfare 1939-1945. Volume I: 1935–1941 , Bernard & Graefe Verlag für Wehrwesen, Frankfurt am Main 1970, page 355
  3. Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz Legend and Reality. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn a. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-77027-1 , p. 42.
  4. http://www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit.html
  5. Jürgen Förster: Summary. in Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (Ed.): Preventive War? The German attack on the Soviet Union. Fischer TB, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-596-14497-3 , pp. 209f.
  6. ^ Kurt Assmann: German fateful years. Historical pictures from the Second World War and its prehistory. Brockhaus Verlag, Wiesbaden 1950.
  7. Book review of Spiegel 27/1953 here [1] Retrieved December 14, 2014
  8. Dieter Hartwig: Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz Legend and Reality. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn a. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-77027-1 , page 141