Paul Hausser

This article describes the officer Paul Hausser. For the Baden administrative officer of the same name, see Paul Haußer

SS General Paul Hausser (1941)

Paul Hausser , also "Papa Hausser", (* October 7, 1880 in Brandenburg an der Havel ; † December 21, 1972 in Ludwigsburg ) was Lieutenant General of the Reichswehr and later SS Colonel Group Leader and Colonel General of the Waffen SS . Hausser was next to Sepp Dietrich the highest ranking officer in the Waffen SS . Units under his command were responsible for war crimes , particularly against the Soviet and Italian civilian populations, for which he was never charged. After the Second World War , Hausser developed a wide range of lobbying activities for the veterans of the Waffen SS.

Life

Origin and military career

Hausser was the son of the Prussian major Kurt Hausser and his wife Anna Hausser (née Otto). In 1892, at the age of twelve, he joined the Prussian Cadet Institute in Köslin , then the Prussian Principal Cadet Institute in Lichterfelde, and in 1899 was accepted into the army when he joined the 7th West Prussian Infantry Regiment No. 155 . In March of the same year he was promoted to lieutenant and after serving as a battalion and regimental adjutant and attending the war academy in August 1909, he was promoted to first lieutenant . After being assigned to the Imperial Navy , he was transferred to the General Staff in 1912 . On November 9, 1912, he married Elisabeth Gerard (born July 18, 1891 in Berlin; † October 16, 1979 in Munich ). He was promoted to captain on March 22, 1913.

During the First World War , Hausser was alternately deployed in front and general staff assignments and received several awards. From 1916 to 1918 he was mostly used in the 109th Division . At the end of the war he was Major i. G. After the armistice he took part in the " Border Guard East ", which was used against Polish territorial efforts . With the signing of the Versailles Treaty , its associations had to be dissolved. Hausser was then accepted into the Reichswehr as a career officer in 1920, where he was initially employed as first general staff officer (Ia) in Reichswehr Brigade 5, and since 1922 in the staff of military district command II.

In 1923 he became a lieutenant colonel in command of the III. Battalion in the 4th (Prussian) Infantry Regiment and was then Chief of Staff of the 2nd Division in Stettin from 1925 . In July 1927 he was commander of the 10th (Saxon) Infantry Regiment and in this position was promoted to colonel in November of the same year . In 1930 he was transferred to Magdeburg as Infantry Leader IV , then in 1931 appointed Major General. 1932 arbitration Hausser at the age of 51 years old due to the character of a lieutenant general from out of the army. After his discharge from the Reichswehr, Hausser joined the anti-democratic, paramilitary steel helmet in early 1933 , in which he held the position of regional leader “Berlin-Brandenburg”.

National Socialism

Pre-war period

At the beginning of March 1933, the Stahlhelm was taken over by the Sturmabteilung (SA) and incorporated. In the new SA Reserve II , which was formed from the former steel helmet, he now had the rank and post of standard leader . After an event by the Reiter-SA in Braunschweig , he joined the General SS in November 1934 . From the end of 1934 Hausser was the commander of an SS Junker School in Braunschweig and inspector of the SS Junker Schools in Braunschweig and Tölz , from 1936 also head of Office I (leadership position) in the SS main office and inspector of the SS auxiliary force . There he took over the military training of all armed SS units (with the exception of the SS-Totenkopfverband ), namely the SS standards “Germany”, “Germania” and “Der Führer” as motorized units. There was a constant exchange of personnel between the SS troops and the skull and crossbones associations. He rose rapidly in the SS hierarchy. In 1935 he became SS-Oberführer , in May 1936 SS-Brigadführer and in June 1939 SS-Gruppenführer . As head of training for the SS emergency forces , Hausser introduced camouflage uniforms for their soldiers .

The NSDAP accepted him in May 1937 after the four-year admission ban for new aspirants (“ those who fell in March ”) had expired . He had submitted his membership application by 1935 at the latest. As the SS was a political division of the NSDAP, as head of the SS leadership school in Braunschweig, he stated that he considered “party membership necessary”. He was already “attracted” to the NSDAP before 1933 - as he himself looked back in 1951 - that it intended the revision of Versailles, fought the left and advocated a “ national community ”. He saw himself in a continuity of a "considerable part of the officer corps" of the Reichswehr with National Socialism. According to Mark Gingerich, Hausser was "in no way caught up in the National Socialist ideology as such" and therefore later joined the NSDAP for professional reasons.

Second World War

Hausser took part in the attack on Poland on the staff of the Kempf Panzer Division (also called the "East Prussia" Panzer Association ), which was subordinate to the SS Regiment "Germany" . In October 1939 he set up the first independent SS task force: the " SS disposal division ", the later division "Das Reich". At the same time, Hausser received the right to bear the military rank of lieutenant general. He and Theodor Eicke , the first commander of the SS Totenkopf Division and previously inspector of the concentration camps and the SS Totenkopf Associations , were the first SS leaders to wear the title and shoulder boards of a general in the Wehrmacht.

He led the disposal division in the western campaign in 1940, in the Balkan campaign in 1941 and in the attack on the Soviet Union . On October 1, 1941, Hausser was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer . After suffering a serious wound in October 1941 during the advance on Moscow and a recovery pause, Hausser was commissioned in June 1942 with the formation of the SS Panzer Corps (later II SS Panzer Corps), which initially remained in the west. In November 1942 he received orders for the troops employed by Operation Lila , the attempted coup against the Vichy fleet anchored in Toulon .

With the SS Panzer Corps and the three subordinate SS Panzer Grenadier divisions, Hausser was transferred to Army Group South on the Eastern Front after the heavy defeat of Stalingrad in early 1943 in order to help stabilize the critical situation there. During the fighting in and around Kharkov , he ignored Hitler's orders to hold Kharkov to the last man and instead ordered the withdrawal from the city in order to protect his troops from the threat of encirclement by the Red Army . Hitler, who usually reacted with different sanctions in such cases, accepted Hausser's disobedience. Hitler had awarded Hausser the NSDAP's golden party badge three weeks earlier and feared a loss of prestige if he punished an officer of the Waffen SS. Instead, he relieved Hausser's immediate superior, Hubert Lanz , of the command, which was also bypassed in later medals. As a punishment for Charkow, however, a proposal to "award Hausser with the oak leaves to the Knight's Cross was not carried out until July 1943". Four weeks later, the city was captured again by German troops under the leadership of Field Marshal von Manstein , in which the SS Panzer Corps under Hausser played a key role. His SS units committed numerous war crimes and serious attacks both against soldiers of the Red Army and against the Soviet civilian population.

After participating in the Citadel operation , Hausser's corps was relocated to Northern Italy with the SS “Leibstandarte” division in the summer of 1943 - the Allies had meanwhile landed in Sicily . Hausser was given the task of disarming the Italian armed forces when the " Axis case " occurred in northern Italy, whose members had to be deported to the Reich as Italian military internees for forced labor , as well as "cleaning up the eastern dream". In terms of implementation, this - until now insufficiently investigated - meant crimes against the Italian civilian population in the context of combating the Italian resistance to the occupation. It is certain that units under Jochen Peiper burned down the Piedmontese villages of Boves and Castellar on September 19, 1943, and committed massacres among the inhabitants. At the time of the massacre, Hausser was in charge of the general command of the II SS Panzer Corps; In a report from the Panzer Corps to Army Group B , it said: "The supply bases for bandits Boves and Castellar were burned down." Von Hausser never gave an explanatory reaction to the massacre at that time or after the end of National Socialism. Rather, he has always denied that these crimes, like other crimes committed by his SS members, even existed.

In anticipation of the Allied invasion of the west, he and his corps were transferred to France in December 1943. After the occurrence of a severe crisis in the Northern Ukraine Army Group (→  Kamenez-Podolski Kesselschlacht ), the corps was then deployed again on the Eastern Front. Only after the Allies landed in Normandy was the corps relocated to the west at the end of June 1944. On June 29, 1944, after the death of his predecessor Friedrich Dollmann , Hausser took over the 7th Army on the invasion front and was promoted to SS Colonel Group Leader and Colonel General of the Waffen SS at the beginning of August 1944 . Next to him, Josef "Sepp" Dietrich, who was notorious for exceeding norms, had this rank.

After the attempt at a counteroffensive at Mortain (→  Liege Company ) had failed, which Hitler interpreted as another case of treason after the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 , he deposed the Commander-in-Chief West and Army Group B , Field Marshal Günther von Kluge . He rightly suspected him of being in league with the assassins. Hitler assessed Hausser as trustworthy, which is why he put him in Kluge's position until his successor Walter Model arrived . Hausser was seriously wounded again when he broke out of the Falaise pocket on August 21, which necessitated a longer recovery period. On August 26, Hitler awarded him the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Swords, after Hausser had already received a large number of high medals by then.

In January 1945 Hausser received the command of the Upper Rhine Army Group , and after a few days that of Army Group G in the southern part of the Western Front. In February he issued an order to hold out in this final phase of the war, which threatened the immediate shooting of his own dispersed soldiers at the time of the foreseeable collapse of the National Socialist regime.

Shortly before the end of the war, the extraordinary trust that Hitler had always placed in Hausser was significantly clouded by different assessments of military-strategic details. At the beginning of April 1945 Hitler relieved Hausser of his post as Commander-in-Chief of Army Group G. Hausser, who remained unemployed until the end of the war, fled to Austria.

post war period

In May 1945 he surrendered to the US troops in Zell am See and then went through various camps, such as the Dachau internment camp , and finally as SS Colonel Group Leader and Colonel General of the Waffen SS according to the principle of " automatic arrest " in an internment camp to be transferred for victims of National Socialism. In 1949 he was released from prison. Despite his high position in the SS, no charges were brought. The assumption is that this is due to his temporary work in the Oberursel camp for the Operational History (German) Section of the Historical Division , in which, under the leadership of the Army Chief of Staff Franz Halder, high German military for the US secret service studies a story of German operations in World War II. In the context of the bloc confrontation, the aim was to use the German Eastern Front experience for operational problems in a possible war against the Soviet Union.

In the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Hausser was "the most important witness for the discharge of the Waffen SS" (Mitcham). He tried at great expense to present the Waffen-SS as an apolitical force, like the Wehrmacht. He denied the importance of the Führer Decree of August 17, 1938, with which the General SS, disposal troops (VT) and skull and crossbones were separated from one another and from the police and the Wehrmacht. According to this, the available troops and the skull and crossbones associations were “neither part of the Wehrmacht nor the police”, but “sections of the NSDAP” at Hitler's “exclusive disposal” and subject to the ideological and political principles of the SS. According to Hausser, however, "the decree ... could not be given fundamental importance". In fact, at an SS Führer conference in Berlin in January 1939, with a view to the decree, he had openly stated: “The VT is and remains part of the Schutzstaffel. It brings about the unity between the tried and tested political soldiers and the weapon bearer within the party ”. Although, due to his position in the service, he had to know exactly that there were a very high number of orders from the death's head associations to the Waffen SS and vice versa, yes, that guards from the concentration camps, including the extermination camps, were systematically transferred to the Waffen SS in several waves had been convicted, he claimed that the two sub-units of the SS had nothing to do with each other.

According to the British secret service, he made contact with the " Brotherhood " founded in 1949 , an association of former Nazis around the former Gaul leader Karl Kaufmann , who wanted to infiltrate the young Federal Republic of Germany .

From 1951 Hausser was, together with Otto Kumm and Herbert Otto Gille, one of the organizers of the mutual aid community of soldiers of the former Waffen SS (HIAG). The aim of this organization, which was assessed and observed by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution , was to reverse the legally and politically significant definition of the Waffen SS as a “criminal organization” by the International Military Court in Nuremberg and to reverse it as a “normal military formation “To represent. For this purpose, Hausser wrote an autobiographical justification, which was published under various titles and with a large number of copies in right-wing extremist publishers. Hausser's publication “Waffen-SS in Action” was indexed in 1960 by the Federal Testing Office for writings harmful to minors.

Since the establishment of the HIAG, Hausser has carried out a wide range of lobbying work for the benefit of the veterans of the Waffen SS. He justified the formation of the HIAG in a public statement, appeared as a speaker at soldiers' meetings and maintained contacts with politicians, for example in January 1957 with the President of the Bundestag Eugen Gerstenmaier . In 1958 he worked out a memorandum to ensure that the former soldiers of the Waffen-SS were supplied under Article 131 of the Basic Law (so-called 131er ), which had already been granted to Wehrmacht soldiers in 1951. According to the historian Hermann Weiß , it was Hausser's “partially belittling characterization of the Waffen-SS as an elitist but soldierly equivalent to the Wehrmacht 'fourth part of the Wehrmacht” that the German Bundestag passed a corresponding regulation in 1961.

Within the HIAG, Hausser advocated not forming an independent central organization, but instead organizing himself together with former Wehrmacht soldiers in the Association of German Soldiers (VdS), of which he was a member. The background was the fear that an independent organization could be banned as a successor organization to the Waffen-SS, and the claim made by the veterans of the Waffen-SS that they were "soldiers like others". Hausser was unable to assert himself with this position at HIAG. Often referred to internally as “Senior”, Hausser's prominent role at HIAG is assessed as “ Spiritus Rector ”. In January 1958, on Hausser's intervention, his confidante Otto Weidinger was elected HIAG federal spokesman. In 1962, HIAG named its welfare organization after Hausser.

Until his death, Hausser was always ready to “face every member of 'his' former Waffen-SS almost unseen.” In doing so, he “saw to himself” the numerous members of this formation who were involved in crimes under protection. Thousands of former members of the SS came to Hausser's funeral in 1972 in the forest cemetery in Munich. The funeral speech was given by former SS brigade leader Otto Kumm .

Military chronology

Hausser's military ranks

date	rank
1892	Cadet
March 20, 1899	lieutenant
August 19, 1909	First lieutenant
March 1, 1914	Captain i. G. (Officer's license from October 1, 1913)
March 22, 1918	major
April 1, 1923	Lieutenant Colonel (officer's license from November 15, 1922)
November 1, 1927	Colonel
February 1, 1931	Major general
January 31, 1932	Lieutenant General
March 1, 1934	SA standard leader
November 15, 1934	SS standard leader
July 1, 1935	SS-Oberführer
May 22, 1936	SS Brigade Leader
June 1, 1939	SS group leader
November 19, 1939	Lieutenant General of the Waffen SS
October 1, 1941	SS-Obergruppenführer and General of the Waffen SS
August 1, 1944	SS Colonel Group Leader and Colonel General of the Waffen SS

Orders and decorations (selection)

Paul Hausser received several awards during the First and Second World Wars, including the

• Iron Cross (1914) 2nd and 1st class in 1914 and winter 1915/16
• Bavarian Order of Military Merit IV class with swords
• Knight's Cross of the Order of Albrecht, 1st class with swords
• Knight's Cross of the Order of Frederick I. Class with swords
• Anhalt Friedrichs Cross
• Austrian Order of the Iron Crown III. Class with the war decorations on July 11, 1918
• Repeat clasp for the Iron Cross 1939 2nd and 1st class on September 7, 1939 and June 17, 1940, respectively
• Wound Badge (1939) in silver on May 9, 1942
• Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with oak leaves and swords
  • Knight's Cross on August 8, 1941
  • Oak leaves on July 28, 1943 (261st award)
  • Swords on August 26, 1944 (90th award)

as well as some badges and awards of the SS.

See also

• List of generals of the Waffen SS

literature

• Andreas Schulz, Günter Wegmann: Germany's Generals and Admirals: The Generals of the Waffen SS and the Police Volume: 2; Biblio-Verl., 2003 from the series: Deutschlands Generale und Admirale; Edited by Dermot Bradley in conjunction with Markus Rövekamp. Among employees from Ernest Henriot; ISBN 3-7648-2592-8 , pp. 79-90.
• Hellmuth Auerbach: Waffen-SS . In: Wolfgang Benz (Ed.): Legends, Lies, Prejudices. A dictionary on contemporary history . dtv, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-423-03295-2 .
• Heinz Höhne : The order under the skull - The history of the SS , Orbis Verlag 2002, ISBN 3-572-01342-9 .
• Guido Knopp : The SS. A warning of history , Goldmann, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-442-15252-6 . (The Waffen-SS section is from Sönke Neitzel )
• Samuel W. Mitcham jr .: SS Colonel Group Leader and Colonel General of the Waffen SS Paul Hausser ; in: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Hrsg.): Hitler's military elite vol. 1, Primus Verlag, Darmstadt 1998, ISBN 3-89678-083-2 , pages 89-96.
• Wolfgang Schneider: The Waffen SS. Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-87134-387-0 .
• George H. Stein: History of the Waffen-SS. Athenaeum and Droste, Königstein and Düsseldorf 1978. ISBN 3-7610-7215-5 .
• Gerhard Schreiber : German war crimes in Italy. Perpetrator, victim, law enforcement. Beck, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-406-39268-7 .
• Enrico Syring: Paul Hausser - "door opener" and commander of "his" Waffen-SS In: Ronald Smelser / Enrico Syring (ed.): The SS. Elite under the skull. Schöningh, Paderborn 2000, ISBN 3-506-78562-1 , pp. 190-207.
• Bernd Wegner : "My Honor is Loyalty" The SS as a Military Factor in Hitler's Germany. In: Deist, Wilhelm (Ed.): The German Military in the Age of Total War. Berg, Leamington Spa 1985, ISBN 0-907582-14-1 , pp. 220-239.
• Bernd Wegner: Hitler's Political Soldiers. The Waffen-SS 1933–1945. 6th edition, Schöningh. Paderborn 1999, ISBN 3-506-77502-2 .

Web links

Commons : Paul Hausser  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Paul Hausser in the catalog of the German National Library
• Hannes Haschke: Paul Hausser and the Waffen SS - soldiers like others too? Diploma thesis at the Faculty of History and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna , 2009

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Samuel W. Mitcham , Jr., SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer and Generaloberst of the Waffen-SS Paul Hausser, in: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.), Hitler's military elite, Vol. 1, From the beginnings of the regime to the beginning of the war, Darmstadt 1998, pp. 89-101.
2. ↑ George H. Stein, History of the Waffen-SS, Düsseldorf 1978 (first edition New York 1966), p. 235 ff.
3. ↑ Bernd Wegner, Hitler's Political Soldiers: Die Waffen-SS 1933-1945, Paderborn, 1982, p. 249.
4. ↑ Bernd Wegner, Hitler's Political Soldiers: Die Waffen-SS 1933-1945, Paderborn, 1982, p. 255.
5. ↑ Mark Gingerich: Paul Hausser - The senior of the Waffen SS . In: Ronald Smelser , Enrico Syring (ed.): The military elite of the Third Reich. 27 biographical sketches . Ullstein, Berlin-Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-548-33220-X .
6. ^ Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., p. 91.
7. ^ Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., p. 91.
8. ↑ Enrico Syring: Paul Hausser- "door opener" and commander of "his" Waffen-SS In: Ronald Smelser / Enrico Syring (ed.): The SS. Elite under the skull. Paderborn 2000, pp. 190–207, here: p. 199.
9. ↑ Syring, p. 199.
10. ^ Message quoted in Schreiber, War Crimes , p. 129 f.
11. ↑ Syring, p. 199; Gerhard Schreiber, German war crimes in Italy. Perpetrator, victim, criminal prosecution, Munich 1996, p. 129 ff.
12. ↑ Syring, p. 202.
13. ↑ Boeselager, Philipp von; "We wanted to kill Hitler"; C. Hanser Verlag, 2008.
14. ↑ Stein, p. 201 .; on Kluge: Gene Mueller, Generalfeldmarschall Günther von Kluge, in: Gerd R. Ueberschär, pp. 130-137, here: pp. 133 f.
15. ↑ Mitcham, p. 94.
16. ↑ Ibid.
17. ↑ See: Wolfgang Benz / Hermann Graml / Hermann Weiß, Enzyklopädie des Nationalsozialismus, Munich 1997, p. 844; Mitcham reports 1948 as the year of discharge.
18. ↑ Syring, p. 203; Charles B. Burdick: From sword to pen. German prisoners of war in the service of preparing American war historiography on World War II. The organizational development of the Operational History (German) Section . In: Military history messages . Edited by Military History Research Office . Volume 10 (1971), Volume 2, pp. 69-80.
19. ↑ Wegner, p. 114 f.
20. ↑ Heinz Höhne: The order under the skull - the history of the SS , Weltbild-Verlag, p. 415 .; see also: Paul Hausser, soldiers like others too. The path of the Waffen-SS, Osnabrück 1966, p. 22 ff.
21. ↑ Syring, p. 203.
22. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 233, source BA N 1080/272.
23. ↑ Paul Hausser, Waffen-SS in action, Göttingen 1953, or soldiers like others. The way of the Waffen-SS, Osnabrück 1966, or Riesa 2006 (Verlag Deutsche Demokratie, ie the publishing house of the NPD ).
24. ↑ Karsten Wilke: The "Aid Community on Mutuality" (HIAG). Veterans of the Waffen SS in the Federal Republic. Schöningh, Paderborn 2011, ISBN 978-3-506-77235-0 , p. 84.
25. ↑ Wilke, Hilfsgemeinschaft , p. 39, 112. For the meeting with Gerstenmaier see also: Exchanged thoughts . In: Der Spiegel . No. 6 , 1957, pp. 21-22 ( online ).
26. ^ Wilke, Aid Community , p. 63.
27. ^ Hermann Weiß : Biographisches Lexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main, 1998, ISBN 3-10-091052-4 , p. 189.
28. ^ Wilke, Aid Community , p. 41 f.
29. ↑ This assessment in Wilke, Hilfsgemeinschaft , p. 61.
30. ^ Wilke, Aid Community , p. 60.
31. ↑ Syring, p. 204.
32. ↑ Mitcham, p. 95.
33. ↑ Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres , Mittler & Sohn Verlag, Berlin, p. 109.
34. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres , Mittler & Sohn Verlag, Berlin, p. 140.
35. ↑ 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. 371.
36. ↑ Andreas Schulz, Günter Wegmann, Dietrich Zinke: The generals of the Waffen-SS and the police: The military careers of the generals, as well as the doctors, veterinarians, intendants, judges and ministerial officials in the generals rank, Volume 2. in the series: Deutschlands Generale and Admirals; Edited by Dermot Bradley, Bissendorf Biblio-Verlag 2005, ISBN 3-7648-2592-8 , p. 79 f.