Mölders letter

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The Möldersbrief is a forged document that was circulated during the Second World War by the British Secret Intelligence Service from January 1942, immediately after the accidental death of the popular German Air Force Colonel Werner Mölders as part of the psychological warfare , and which spread within a very short time. In the alleged letter to a Catholic provost from Szczecin named Johst, the bearer of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and in Nazi propaganda as a "war hero", Mölders, shortly before his death, apparently identified himself as a devout Catholic with a deep religious conviction, the distance to National Socialism held.

This document appeared in countless copies throughout the German Reich and at the front. The letter was mainly taken up by Catholic and Protestant sections of the population and interpreted as an "impressive document of Catholic resistance against the Nazi regime ". It was also the basis for the rumor that Mölders had been shot down on behalf of Himmler during the anti-Christian campaign of the NSDAP because of his Catholic sentiments . Since the 1960s at the latest, it has been certain that Mölders was the victim of two engine failures in the aircraft in which he was a passenger.

The effect of the Möldersbrief was enormous and could not be stopped by the fact that the National Socialists immediately exposed the letter as a forgery by proving that there was no Provost Johst in Stettin. The British secret service had come up with this name to direct the regime's suspicions against the relatives of Hanns Johst , the National Socialist President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer . The letter became a legend and was widely publicized, especially in Catholic and Protestant circles. The letter aroused great nervousness even in the highest parts of the regime. A bounty of RM 100,000 was offered for the capture of the author. The letter was imprisoned and sent to a concentration camp in order to be copied and distributed .

In 1962 the British secret service admitted that they had launched the forged “Möldersbrief” at the time.

Nevertheless, the authenticity of the Möldersbrief was still believed in Germany for a long time after the Second World War. Years after the actual facts became known, on November 9, 1972, the barracks of the 2nd Department of Telecommunications Regiment 34 of the German Air Force in Visselhövede were named after Werner Mölders. It was not until 2005 that Mölders, as the namesake for this Bundeswehr barracks and a fighter squadron of today's German Air Force, was deleted by the then acting Federal Defense Minister Peter Struck .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut Witetschek: The fake and the real Mölders letter. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte , volume 16, issue 1 (January 1968), p. 63 ( online )
  2. ^ So the SIS employee Sefton Delmer in his memoir: The Germans and I , Nannen Verlag GmbH, Hamburg 1963. P. 547ff. The English edition appeared in 1961 with Part 1 under the title Trail Sinister , Part 2 in 1962 as Blackboomerang .
  3. ^ NS-Flieger Mölders is retired ; Article by Sonja Ernst on Spiegel online from January 28, 2005