Louis Müldner of Mülnheim

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Louis Müldner of Mülnheim 1920

Louis Alfred Carl Oscar Müldner von Mülnheim (born April 1, 1876 in Angermünde , † April 26, 1945 in Potsdam ) was a German officer and court official who was best known as the head of the cabinet and head of the court administration of the last German Crown Prince Wilhelm .

Life

Empire and First World War

Müldner was the second son of a Prussian officer. In the 1920s, circles of the extreme political right spread the assertion - and severe personal hostility tied to this - that Müldner's mother was a Jew and that he himself was a “half-Jew” in the sense of ethnic racial ideas, but he cited it denied that his mother came from a family of lawyers in Hanover.

Like his father and older brother, Müldner pursued a military career in the Prussian Army . On March 14, 1896, he joined the Westphalian Jäger Battalion No. 7 in Bückeburg and graduated from the War Academy in Berlin in 1904/07 . From 1914 on, Müldner took part in the First World War. As early as September 8, 1914, he suffered a severe head injury, so that he had to spend several months in a hospital . After his recovery, he returned to the front as a company commander in Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 261 from 1915. Because his head injury broke out again, he was transferred to the General Staff in autumn 1915. On May 6, 1916, Müldner was appointed personal adjutant to Crown Prince Wilhelm, who commanded the 5th Army on the Western Front and, from November 1916, the German Crown Prince Army Group . He remained in the position of adjutant beyond the end of the war. Müldner reached his highest military rank on January 27, 1917 as a major . During the war he was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross and the Iron Crescent .

Weimar Republic and the time of National Socialism

After the fall of the monarchy as a result of the November Revolution, Müldner accompanied the Crown Prince in 1918, when he went into exile in the Netherlands on the advice of Chief of Staff Hindenburg. After the Dutch government had assigned the Crown Prince the island of Wieringen in the Zuidersee as a permanent place of residence, Müldner accompanied him there.

During the Weimar Republic , Müldner returned to Germany - unlike the Crown Prince, who initially had to stay in the Netherlands. From then on he commuted as Wilhelm's personal liaison between Wieringen and Berlin, where he represented the political and personal interests of his master. In this capacity, Müldner entered into personal negotiations with the Reich government and the Reich President, among other things, because of a permit for the Crown Prince to return to Germany. After Reich Chancellor Gustav Stresemann and Reich President Friedrich Ebert reached an agreement in their talks with Müldner, the Crown Prince was able to leave the Netherlands at the end of 1923 and return to Germany.

After Müldner had already been appointed to the service of the Royal Prussian House Ministry or his successor institution, the general administration of the formerly ruling Prussian royal house, in November 1918, his appointment was renewed on January 1, 1927 by Wilhelm II was left in his employment as personal adjutant to the Crown Prince.

On May 1, 1931, Müldner was relieved of his position as personal adjutant to the Crown Prince and was fully entrusted with the post of advisor in the general administration of the formerly ruling royal family. On September 29, 1938 he was appointed head of the general administration or the head of the court administration. He held this position until December 31, 1941. At the same time, in October 1938, he took over the business of the Crown Prince's court administration as a secondary job.

In all these functions, Müldner was a semi-official figure on the political scene in Berlin until 1945. Probably for this reason he was taken into protective custody for a few weeks on July 1, 1934 in the course of the Röhm affair and held in the Columbiahaus and Lichtenburg concentration camp. In the literature, Müldner's arrest is mostly seen as an attempt by the Nazi leadership clique in the context of the existing crisis of the regime at that time to send out a chilling warning in the direction of the conservative reaction - and in particular of the royalists who were restoring the monarchy - against Hitler's efforts at the time , to rise to the absolute ruler, not to get in the way.

On March 14, 1945 Müldner was commissioned by Oskar Prince of Prussia to take over the general administration and court chamber in place of Kurt von Plettenberg, who died in connection with the assassination of July 20, 1944 .

On the occasion of the occupation of Potsdam by the Red Army in April 1945, Müldner and his partner committed suicide by shooting themselves.

Family and offspring

Louis Müldner came from an originally in Kassel -based family . The great-grandfather Karl Müldner von Mülnheim (1782–1863) was raised to the hereditary nobility on November 27, 1830 as Colonel and Adjutant General of Elector Wilhelm II of Hesse .

His parents were Carl Louis Theodor (1838-1915) and Wilhelmina Mathilde Nathalie, née Wyneken (1842-1921). The father Louis Müldner served as prime lieutenant in royal Hanover and from 1866 as captain in Prussian military service. The mother was a sister of the East Prussian journalist Alexander Wyneken and the Russian banker Georg Freiherr von Wyneken and thus an aunt of the Russian Lieutenant General Alexander Georgiewitsch Baron von Wyneken . Louis' brother Georg Emil Theodor Müldner von Mülnheim (1873-1940), was also a Prussian officer, battalion commander in the Lower Rhine Fusilier Regiment No. 39 on the Western Front during World War I and later an authorized representative of the Prussian War Ministry in Ukraine . Georg left behind a daughter from his 1902 (divorced in 1911) marriage to Alice Friedburg (1883–1968). Louis was the last male representative of his family.

Awards

Pre-war period


Wartime


post war period

  • Commander of the royal house order of Hohenzollern with swords on the ring on January 27, 1928

literature

  • Helmut Ries: Crown Prince Wilhelm. 2001.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Article Imperial. In: (Nürnberger) Völkisches Echo from June 20, 1924. In his reaction to the editors of the newspaper, Müldner evaluated these attacks on himself and his family as evidence of the “perfidy”, “unscrupulousness” and “rawness” of the völkisch circles and the The way they would wage the political battle against their adversaries.
  2. Kurt Koszyk : Gustav Stresemann: The democrat loyal to the emperor. A biography. Kiepenheuer & Witsch , Cologne 1989, p. 266 f .; see. Representation of the process in the files of the Reich Chancellery in the Federal Archives : The return of the Crown Prince .
  3. ^ Royal Prussian State Gazette of July 20, 1903.
  4. Royal Prussian State Gazette of January 3, 1908.
  5. Royal General Order Commission (ed.): Royal Prussian Order List. Addendum VII to the Royal Prussian Order List 1905. Contains the awards from February 01, 1911 to January 31, 1912 . Mittler, Berlin 1912, p. 220
  6. Louis Müldner von Mülnheim: Information about my military activities in the world wars. (unpublished).
  7. ^ Military weekly paper 163/164 of April 5, 1917.
  8. Erhard Roth: Awards of military medals and decorations of the Grand Duchy of Baden in the First World War. (= Statistical elaborations on Germany's phaleristics. Volume. V.) PHV, Offenbach 1997. p. 47.
  9. unpublished order list.
  10. Willi Geile: The Knights of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords in the First World War. (= Statistical elaborations on Germany's phaleristics. Volume IV.) PHV, Offenbach 1997.
  11. ^ Letter in private ownership