Otto von Stülpnagel

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Walther von Brauchitsch and Otto von Stülpnagel (right) in Paris in May 1941

Otto Edwin von Stülpnagel (born June 16, 1878 in Berlin , † February 6, 1948 in Paris ) was a German officer , most recently General of the Infantry of the Wehrmacht . From October 1940 to February 1942 he was Military Commander in France (MBF), which was responsible for most of the territories of occupied France .

family

He was the son of the royal Prussian colonel Otto von Stülpnagel (1822–1899) from the Uckermark noble family Stülpnagel and Ida Michaelis (1856–1909). His older brother was Edwin von Stülpnagel (1876–1933), also a general of the infantry.

Stülpnagel married on March 2, 1929 in Potsdam Ilse (divorced) von Seydlitz-Kurzbach (born May 21, 1891 in Berlin; † May 6, 1964 in Berlin), the daughter of the builder Otto Sohre and Anna Haselbach. This marriage was divorced on November 8, 1946 in Berlin-Charlottenburg .

Life

In 1897, Stülpnagel joined the Prussian 2nd Guards Regiment on foot as a flag squire . He attended the war school and the war academy and in 1909 was commanded as first lieutenant to the General Staff . During World War I he served as a general staff officer in various staffs and was promoted to major in 1916 .

Reichswehr (1918–1931)

After the end of the war he was accepted into the Reichswehr and in 1921 was appointed lieutenant colonel head of the international law department of the peace commission. As such, he published numerous writings and essays in which he countered the Allied allegations of German war crimes during the World War (see also the Leipzig Trials ). In 1925 he was transferred to the staff of the 14th (Bad.) Infantry Regiment and promoted to colonel . In the following year he was sent to Geneva as a representative of the Reich Army for the Preparatory Disarmament Conference of the League of Nations . At the beginning of 1927 he came to the 7th (Prussian) Infantry Regiment in Schweidnitz , where he received a briefing as regimental commander and then succeeded Lothar Fritsch . At the beginning of 1929 he was transferred to the staff of Group Command 1 in Berlin and promoted to major general. A little later he was appointed inspector of the transport troops (In 6) in the Reichswehr Ministry. At the end of March 1931 he was retired from the service after he had previously been promoted to lieutenant general.

Air War School (1934–1939)

1934 Stülpnagel, who had graduated as a young officer, a pilot training, from the Ministry of Aviation with the construction of the air war Berlin-Gatow commissioned and the following year with that of the air war academy in the same place. On October 1, 1935, he joined the Air Force as a supplementary officer and was given the character of General of the Aviators , as which he then became the first commander of the Air War Academy . In 1936 he became an active aviator general. From 1938, under his leadership, the Air Technology Academy was incorporated into the Air War Academy. At the end of March 1939 he retired from active service.

Military Commander France

At the beginning of the Second World War, he was made available to the Army, and during the mobilization he was appointed Commanding General of the Deputy General Command XVII and Commander in Military District XVII (Vienna) . On October 25, 1940, Stülpnagel was appointed military commander in France. As a military commander, he did not want to hand over any competences to the SS security service , but he joined the Reich Security Main Office and the German embassy: in mid-May 1941 he barracked 3,700 foreign Jews, in mid and late August at the suggestion of Theodor Dannecker, thousands of Jews (including those of French nationality ) to the Drancy assembly camp , and arrested a large number of people again in December. The majority of those arrested were murdered while still in France or in the eastern extermination camps.

On September 27, 1940, Stülpnagel decreed compulsory registration for Jews and on October 18, 1940 for Jewish companies in occupied France. In November 1940 he informed his military district chiefs that the Aryanization of Jewish property had been ordered by Walther von Brauchitsch . The Aryanization was carried out through the Service du Controle of the Vichy government, with Stülpnagel reserving the right to appoint trustees for Jewish industrial companies in order to be able to favor German buyers. On December 17, 1941, he imposed a "fine" of one billion francs on the Jews in occupied France, to be paid in installments by the Association of Jews in France .

Announcement of the shootings of hostages, October 21, 1941

On August 21, 1941, he was in Berlin when an assassination attempt on the occupation soldier Alfons Moser was carried out in the Barbès-Rochechouart metro station in Paris. After two further attacks against occupiers, field commander Karl Hotz in Nantes and the war administrator Hans Reimers in Bordeaux , Hitler ordered the MBF Stülpnagel to have 100 French hostages shot. Stülpnagel wanted to negotiate the number down because of concerns about possible political consequences. He suggested that as a measure of atonement, a larger number of Jews should be deported to the east instead (a paraphrase for the extermination camps ). Ultimately, a total of 98 hostages in Nantes and Châteaubriant were shot on his orders.

Stülpnagel also had conflicts with the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW). Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary notes in August / September 1941 (which he dictated every morning over the previous day) in several passages that he had criticized the "weaknesses" of the MBF in Paris. In September he claimed that he would give the OKW precise instructions on how to proceed in Paris. The disputes with Berlin led Stülpnagel in February 1942 to ask for his replacement there. Today's historians disagree as to whether this behavior can only be explained with “tactics” and a “sense of pragmatism” or whether the occupation general also had moral reasons. Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel , a distant relative, was his successor in the post of military commander.

post war period

Stülpnagel, who was finally retired from service in August 1942, was arrested by the occupation authorities after the end of the war and extradited to France in 1946. In early February 1948, he committed suicide in Paris prison Cherche-Midi before the start of his trial suicide .

reception

Ulrich Herbert speaks from the military files on the so-called hostage operations: In December 1941, 743 Jewish men, mostly French, were brought to the Compiègne camp, which is under German supervision , with the aim of deportation to the extermination camps in the East. In order to reach the number of 1,000 required by Berlin, another 300 Jews were selected from the Drancy assembly camp . Stülpnagel wanted to get rid of the Jews, on the one hand to satisfy Berlin by reacting hard against the Resistance, but on the other hand not to generate any anti-sentiment among those willing to collaborate if he had murdered non-Jewish hostages. So the Jews simply had the "buck" in the murderous game of who should be murdered in France for German interests. Stülpnagel designated the Jews as victims.

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ War diary of the OKW Volume I p. 128 ( entry October 26, 1940 )
  2. ^ Raul Hilberg : The Destruction of the European Jews , Volume 2, Fischer Taschenbuch 1990, ISBN 3-596-24417-X , p. 650
  3. ↑ Situation report of the military commander in Paris, January 31, 1942 ( Memento of the original of September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed August 14, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ihtp.cnrs.fr
  4. ^ In den Lichtschacht , article from February 14, 1948 on Spiegel Online
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres , Mittler & Sohn Verlag, Berlin, p. 107.
personal data
SURNAME Stülpnagel, Otto von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stülpnagel, Otto Edwin von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German infantry general in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH June 16, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 6, 1948
Place of death Paris