National Socialist command officer
The National Socialist Leadership Officer (NSFO) was an area of activity of officers of the German Wehrmacht during World War II . The Wehrmacht leadership considered it important that both the military leadership and the political and ideological educational task in the National Socialist spirit should be in the hands of the same troop leader. This was where the NSFO differed from the political officer or commissioner of the Red Army (who obviously represented the model, but did not perform regular military leadership tasks, only political ones).
The National Socialist Management Staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) was established on the basis of a Führer decree of December 22, 1943. It was led by General Hermann Reinecke . His officers were supposed to bring the Nazi worldview closer to the soldiers of the Wehrmacht through lectures and discussions . The purpose of this was to strengthen the soldiers' perseverance in view of the now critical situation.
"We must now oppose the revolutionary will of the enemy [...] with the whole revolutionary force of National Socialism, [...] Wehrmacht, party , Volkssturm are the National Socialist revolution. The German soldier is therefore fighting as an armed National Socialist. Waging the war purely militarily is not enough. "
The NSFO were taken from the officer corps of the Wehrmacht, but had to be confirmed beforehand by a staff appointed by the head of the party chancellery of the NSDAP , Martin Bormann . The staff headed by Wilhelm Ruder had to check whether the men were "impeccable" in the National Socialist sense. Head of Department Ruder justified in a speech that from the point of view of the party chancellery there had been failures in the formation of “political soldiers” and “leadership”, which brought about an internal stabilization of the Wehrmacht.
At the end of 1944 there were around 47,000 part-time NSFOs and only around 1,100 full-time employees who took part in central training courses. In the regiments and battalions , officers performed the NSF activities in a secondary role, up to the level of the divisional headquarters , the commanders were assigned to NSFO and placed directly under their command. At the level of the companies of the unit commander took the function of NSFO.
In their training courses, the Nazi command officers indoctrinated hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Wehrmacht members with anti-Semitic propaganda such as the idea that Jews were parasites and should be exterminated.
A well-known National Socialist command officer was, for example, Hans Hellmut Kirst .
literature
- Waldemar Besson: On the history of the National Socialist command officer. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 9 (1961), no. 1, pp. 76–116. ifz archive (PDF)
- Andreas Kunz: Wehrmacht and defeat. The armed power in the final phase of National Socialist rule 1944–1945. Series of publications by the Military History Research Office , Vol. 64, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-57673-9 , pp. 240–248.
- Peter Joachim Lapp: Hitler's Nazi command officers 1944/45. The last propagandists of the final victory, Helios, Aachen 2019, ISBN 978-3-86933-238-3 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Document 289 in: Martin Moll (Ed.): "Führer-Erasse" 1939-1945. Stuttgart 1997, p. 381 f.
- ↑ Quoted from Andreas Kunz 2005, p. 241.
- ^ Sven Keller: Volksgemeinschaft at the end. Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-72570-4 , p. 71 f.
- ↑ Saul Friedländer : The Years of Destruction. The Third Reich and the Jews. First volume. 1933-1939 . CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 799.
- ↑ "ZERO-EIGHT-FIFTEEN - At a higher level"
- ↑ Look inside the book