Kurt Dittmar

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Kurt Dittmar (born January 5, 1891 in Magdeburg , † April 26, 1959 in Holzminden ) was a German officer, most recently lieutenant general and radio commentator during World War II .

Life

Dittmar came on March 6, 1909 as a cadet into the 4th (Prussian) Engineer Battalion in Magdeburg, was there on December 21, 1909. Ensign appointed and on August 22, 1910 Lieutenant promoted. From October 1, 1912 to August 5, 1914 he was assigned to the United Artillery and Engineering School in Berlin-Charlottenburg for further training.

When the First World War broke out , he returned to his battalion and was initially employed as an adjutant and platoon leader . As such, he became first lieutenant on February 25, 1915 . On January 8, 1916 he was appointed company commander and in December 1917 he briefly took over the command of the 1st battalion of the 5th Hanoverian Infantry Regiment No. 165 . There he was promoted to captain on December 17 , before returning to his company on January 9, 1918. Dittmar gave up this command on June 22, 1918. He was with the leadership of the III. Battalion of the 165 Infantry Regiment and finally appointed their commander on August 25, 1918.

In 1920 Dittmar was a liaison officer to the Allied Military Commission, which worked out the treaties for the German surrender . In the Reichswehr he was used as a pioneer officer in the troops and staff service. From October 1927 to September 1931 he was an instructor at the Infantry School in Dresden , where he was promoted to major on February 1, 1931 . After this activity he moved to the Reichswehr Ministry in Berlin to be the inspector of the pioneers and fortresses (In 5). On January 1, 1934, he took over the 1st Pioneer Battalion in Königsberg and was promoted to lieutenant colonel on June 1, 1934 . As a colonel (since April 1, 1936), he became the commander of the pioneer school in Berlin-Karlshorst on April 6, 1937 .

At the beginning of the Second World War he was the commander of the Pioneer School II. On March 15, 1940, he was appointed pioneer leader of the 1st Army and promoted to major general on April 1, 1940 . From February 20, 1941 he was commander of the 169th Infantry Division . At the front in Finland as part of Operation Arctic Fox, Dittmar fell so seriously ill that he was no longer fit for front use and had to be replaced by Lieutenant General Hermann Tittel at the end of September 1941 . The OKW transferred Dittmar in April 1942 as General z. b. V. (for special use) to the Reichsender Berlin , where he stood out from the other commentators, especially towards the end of the war, with unusually realistic radio commentary on the military situation.

Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels thought he was a clever man who had made a name for himself both at home and abroad through his good comments. In July 1944, Goebbels spoke, as can be seen in his diaries, "a very serious word" with Dittmar, since he spoke very pessimistically in his last comment and was in love with the truth.

Kurt Dittmar (center) and his son Berend (2nd from left) after their handover in captivity, commander of the 30th Infantry Division General Hobbs (right), Magdeburg, April 25, 1945

In April 1945, Dittmar no longer appeared on duty, so that the rumor arose that he had committed suicide. In fact, however, he had escaped from Berlin to safety. Without the knowledge of the responsible General Adolf Raegener , he sat in the narrow strip near Magdeburg, which was still held by German troops, on April 25, 1945, together with his then sixteen-year-old son, who was displaying a Red Cross flag, and with two officers in a rowing boat of the 30th US Infantry Division to the west side of the Elbe. There he first tried to get the evacuation of German wounded to the west across the Elbe under the jurisdiction of the American forces. This failed because of the demand that the German side first stop the fighting: Dittmar had not had any troops of his own for years and at that time certainly had no mandate from General Raegener. Major Werner Pluskat accompanying Dittmar , a D-Day veteran known in Germany and among the Americans , sent a message to the neighboring German troops to surrender to the Americans on the western side of the Elbe.

After the failure of the negotiations, General Dittmar and his companions accepted the offer of their interlocutors to surrender. Given that Dittmar was well known among the Allies as the Voice of the German High Command (Voice of the OKW), his voluntary prisoner of war received a lot of attention in their media, as reported by US magazines such as Time and Life . On the evening of April 25, 1945, the commander of the 30th US Infantry Division, General Leland Hobbs, hosted a dinner with his prominent prisoners, which took place in Magdeburg, the western part of which had been taken by US troops a few days ago. The American secret service officer Saul Kussiel Padover interviewed Dittmar there and described the interview in his autobiographical work Experiment in Germany in 1946 .

On May 18, 1945 Dittmar was sent to the Trent Park general camp near London . Since January 1946 he has been to the British camp for high-ranking German prisoners of war, Special Camp XI . Dittmar's conversations were among the prisoners' secretly recorded conversations.

In September 1947 Dittmar appeared as a witness in the appeal proceedings against the head of the intelligence department in the press department of the Reich Propaganda Ministry, Hans Fritzsche in Nuremberg. In mid-May 1948 he was released and left for the Federal Republic of Germany.

Awards

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Janusz Piekałkiewicz: Secret Agents, Spies & Saboteurs: Secret Missions of the Second World War. David and Charles Verlag, 1974, ISBN 9780715366844 , p. 519
  2. ↑ Description of the handover of General Dittmar and his companions on the traditional website of the 30th US Infantry Division
  3. ↑ Cornelius Ryan: The Last Battle: The Classic History of the Battle for Berlin. Verlag Simon and Schuster, 2010, ISBN 9781439127018
  4. ↑ 117th Infantry Division Secret Unit Journal of April 25, 1945, excerpts in: Report on the surrender of Gen. Kurt Dittmar and party. online (PDF; 4.8 MB)
  5. ↑ a b biography of Kurt Dittmar as one of the prisoners of war in the British Special Camp XI [1]
  6. ^ Photo series from Getty Images on the handover of General Dittmar to the Americans
  7. ^ New York 1946. German under the title "Liegendetektor", interrogations in defeated Germany 1944/45 , Eichborn, Frankfurt / M. 1999, pp. 304-313
  8. ↑ a b c Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres , Ed .: Reichswehrministerium , Mittler & Sohn Verlag, Berlin 1930, p. 130
personal data
SURNAME Dittmar, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer and lieutenant general in World War II, radio commentator
DATE OF BIRTH January 5, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 1959
Place of death Holzminden