Otto Deßloch

Otto Deßloch

Otto Deßloch (born June 11, 1889 in Bamberg , † May 13, 1977 in Munich ) was a German officer , most recently Colonel General of the Air Force in World War II .

Life

origin

He was the son of the chief forester Heinrich Deßloch and his wife Babette, née Wagner. His brother Friedrich (1882–1952) also embarked on a military career and was raised to the personal nobility when he was awarded the Military Max Joseph Order .

Military career

After graduating from high school, Deßloch joined the 5th Chevaulegers Regiment "Archduke Friedrich of Austria" of the Bavarian Army in Saargemünd on July 20, 1910 as a flag junior . His promotion to lieutenant took place on October 23, 1912.

Already in the first weeks of the First World War he was seriously wounded on a scouting ride. After his recovery at the end of 1914, he volunteered for the air force , was trained as an aircraft observer and as such took part in numerous enemy flights during 1915. In the following winter he was retrained to become a pilot at the Schleissheim pilot replacement department . In February 1915 he was transferred to Feldfliegerabteilung 8, and from 1916 he was employed with Jagdstaffel 16 in the west . Since Deßloch lost several front teeth in a fall in early 1916, his facial expression usually looks a bit pinched in later photos.

On October 13th of the same year he had to make an emergency landing in his Fokker D.II 536/16 after an aerial battle in neutral Switzerland and was interned for several months . After his repatriation in 1917, he was first squadron leader of Jagdstaffel 17 on the Western Front before he became commander of Aviation School V in Gersthofen in the last year of the war .

In 1919, Deßloch initially supported the Freikorps Epp with the voluntary aviation division "Deßloch" in the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic . Military flight operations continued until the victorious powers finally forced the Treaty of Versailles to cease.

As a result, Deßloch was initially retrained as an intelligence officer and in 1921 was employed in the Reichswehr as Rittmeister and squadron chief in the 17th (Bavarian) cavalry regiment and temporarily as a senior officer in Ansbach . In 1925, Deßloch and his regiment team were victorious in the great army patrol ride in Berlin. As part of the covert rearmament of the Reichswehr, Deßloch took part in secret flight training in Lipetsk in the Soviet Union in 1926/27 . Also in 1927 he was assigned to the staff of the 7th (Bavarian) Division and in 1932 promoted to major in the staff of the 18th Cavalry Regiment .

When, after the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, as part of the armament of the Wehrmacht , the reconstruction of a German air force began, Deßloch joined the air force and on December 1, 1934, became the commander of the Cottbus pilot school . From 1935 to 1938 he was successively commodore of two combat squadrons , from March 1, 1936 as colonel and commodore of Kampfgeschwader 155. On December 1, 1939, he was appointed major general and commander of the 6th Flieger Division .

Second World War

After the beginning of the Second World War , Deßloch received on October 3, 1939, despite his comparatively low rank, the appointment as commanding general of the II. Flak Corps . With this association he supported Army Group B during the western campaign in 1940 . The flak was able to achieve great success, especially in ground combat against enemy tanks. For this he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross at the end of June and promoted to Lieutenant General on July 19 .

From 1941 to 1942, Deßloch's corps took part in the war against the Soviet Union in the central section of the Eastern Front . Promoted to General der Flieger on January 1, 1942 , he commanded the I. Flak Corps on the southern Eastern Front from May 12, 1942 to June 10, 1943 as Commanding General . During the winter of 1942/43 he was also the commander of the Caucasus Air Force Command (later renamed Kuban Air Force Command ). On June 11, 1943, Deßloch succeeded Wolfram von Richthofen, who had been transferred to Italy, as Commander in Chief of Air Fleet 4 and was promoted to Colonel General .

When the German Western Front collapsed in France in the summer of 1944 and General Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle was replaced as Commander in Chief of Air Fleet 3 , Hermann Göring appointed Deßloch as his successor. The new commander-in-chief had only been in office for a few days when he received the order from Hitler personally to carry out a bomb attack on Paris, which had just been liberated, with all the machines still available . After only one month in the west, Deßloch returned to his old command of Air Fleet 4 on the Eastern Front in September 1944, which he retained until a few days before the end of the war. At the end of April 1945 he changed as the successor to Ritter von Greim at the helm of Luftflotte 6 , to which almost all still operational air force units in the Reich were subordinate. After he had been an Allied prisoner of war until 1948 , Deßloch devoted himself mainly to equestrian sports in the remaining years of his life .

Awards

• Iron Cross (1914) 2nd and 1st class
• Bavarian Order of Military Merit IV class with swords and crown
• Wound badge (1918) in black
• Clasp for the Iron Cross, 2nd and 1st class
• Honor goblet for the winner in the dogfight
• Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with oak leaves
  • Knight's Cross on June 24, 1940 (74th award)
  • Oak leaves on May 10, 1944 (470th award)

literature

• Dermot Bradley (ed.), Karl-Friedrich Hildebrand: The Generals of the German Air Force 1935-1945. The military careers of the aviator, anti-aircraft cartillery, paratrooper, air intelligence and engineer officers, including doctors, judges, intendants and ministerial officials with the rank of general. Volume 1: Abernetty – v. Gyldenfeldt. Biblio Publishing House. Osnabrück 1990. ISBN 3-7648-1701-1 .
• Janusz Piekalkiewicz: Citadel company. Pawlak Publishing House. Herrsching 1989. ISBN 3-88199-579-X .

See also

• Air War in World War II

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Othmar Hackl : The Bavarian War Academy (1867-1914). CH Beck´sche publishing house bookstore. Munich 1989. ISBN 3-406-10490-8 . P. 421.
2. ↑ Peter M. Grosz : Fokker Fighters DI - D.IV . Albatros Production Ltd. 1999. ISBN 1-902207-11-4 . P. 17.
3. ↑ Le bombardement du 26 août. (The article in liberation-de-paris quotes several contemporary reports of deaths from bombing, in the range of 50 to 100 civilians, some uniformed French and a German pilot who died on landing.)
4. ^ Samuel W. Mitcham : Defenders of fortress Europe. The untold story of the German officers during the Allied invasion . Potomac Books, Washington, DC 2009, ISBN 978-1-59797-274-1 , p. XV.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} Ranking list of the German Imperial Army. Mittler & Sohn publishing house. Berlin 1930. p. 134.
6. ↑ Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearers 1939-1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd Edition. Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 270.