Richard Stump

Richard Stumpf (born  February 20, 1892 - according to another source February 21, 1892 - in Graefenberg (Bavaria) ; †  July 23, 1958 in Heiligenstadt (Eichsfeld) ) Catholic, was a tin caster and member of a Christian trade union . From 1912 to 1918 he served in the high seas of the Imperial Navy. From shortly before the beginning of the First World War until the end of it, he kept a personal war diary. Because the diary comprehensively presented the internal conditions in the fleet from the point of view of a simple sailor, the investigative committee of the German Reichstag documented it in full in its investigation report.

Training, Imperial Navy Service, Memberships, and War Diary

Stumpf had the elementary school education of a worker. But he was well-read and had a wide range of interests, had come to the Veneto and South Tyrol as a hiker , and was constantly educating himself.

He served in the German Imperial Navy from 1912 to November 1918 . Most of that time, namely from shortly before the outbreak of war until March 1918, he was employed on the SMS Helgoland by the 1st Squadron as a seaman and later as a senior seaman. In an entry in 1916 he noted that he had still not made it to the senior seaman because he had always been open about his opinion. In March 1918 he described himself as a senior seaman, presumably due to his transfer to the SMS Wittelsbach .

Liner SMS Helgoland, commissioned in August 1911, crew 1113 men

Stumpf was a member of a Christian trade union and had joined the right-wing German Fatherland Party during the war .

His war diary contained six booklets. The Committee of Inquiry into the War Guilt Issue found it so important to shed light on the internal conditions and in particular the superiors' relationships in the high seas that it was included in its full length (albeit with various names anonymized) in its investigation report. Huck, Pieken and Rogg note in their catalog for the Wilhelmshaven exhibition “The fleet falls asleep in the harbor”, in which, in addition to another diary, Stumpf's notes are vividly presented: They are not diaries in the narrower sense, but the six booklets contain written records that were drawn up on the basis of unreceived diary entries. The transcripts contained numerous corrections in someone else's handwriting, which can be added to the editing for publication in 1927 (see below). Stumpf was also appointed by the committee on April 29, 1926 as a special expert on naval operations.

Content of the diary

Stumpf recorded his experiences, observations and assessments in his war diary almost every day. He read various books, was a reader of various newspapers and discussed political and military developments in detail with those around him, which is reflected in the corresponding thoughts and comments in his diary.

At the beginning of the war, Stumpf was conservative, identified himself with the war aims of the Central Powers and repeatedly described the enthusiastic mood he shared at the beginning of the war. However, he soon felt that he had been treated unfairly by the officers and began to see the war with different eyes. He repeatedly described that the "officer caste" would receive a high war allowance in addition to their good salary, that they lived in luxury even during the war, while the sailors had to suffer great hardship. In addition, the crews would be humiliated by the officers, subjected to a pointless drill and harassed by constant harassment of the officers.

Only during skirmishes, such as the Battle of the Skagerrak , did the sailors and stokers feel that the officers took them seriously and treated them sensibly. But there were only a few such disputes because the navy's strategy was based on a misjudgment of the British approach.

This catastrophic military-strategic faulty planning, which saw a great naval battle against England off Heligoland as decisive for the naval war, was reflected in Stumpf's diary: He wrote: “We all gradually had to realize that even a victorious sea battle for Germany would not give us access to the open sea will guarantee. ”The experienced arrogance with simultaneous strategic inability brings Stumpf to the desire to be able to force the officer caste one day to take up a respectable profession and perform a useful job. The sailors wished to be able to repay the officers for the constant humiliation and harassment that they could inflict under the protection of strict military discipline.

Ultimately, only the officers would have an interest in the continuation of the war, whereby soldiers and workers would give their lives for the interests of the Junkers , safes and the military aristocracy (he sees the priests as civil servants) and endure great privations. The fact that these people were then also denied a democratic right to vote aroused Stumpf's particular bitterness. Around mid-1917, Stumpf wrote that the sailors wanted peace as soon as possible and the prevailing opinion was that only the officers and the war profiteers wanted to continue the war. Elsewhere he wrote that the officer caste drove Germany to war.

When a USPD leaflet appeared on board one morning in February 1917, it caused great excitement. Stumpf wrote that, along with a great deal of truth, this sheet contained a variegated mixture of silly platitudes and phrases. According to Stumpf's account, many sheets appear to have been delivered to the superiors.

The naval riots in the summer of 1917 are also reflected in Stumpf's diary. He describes the events in detail and notes: "I would have declared anyone a fool who would have claimed that in my country, a person can be sentenced to prison and to death without having done anything wrong."

At some points Stumpf mentions the SPD MP Karl Liebknecht , later a USPD and then a KPD member, as "Jews Liebknecht". The claim that Liebknecht was a Jew was made by the conservative and right-wing extremists (to whom many naval officers were ideologically close) in order to instrumentalize anti-Semitism against the left movement. This claim was completely devoid of any truthfulness. The Karl Liebknechts family came from Saxony and had a Christian-Protestant background. Karl Liebknecht was born in Leipzig in 1871 and baptized Protestant in the St. Thomas Church. One of the father's great-uncle was a Protestant pastor. On the occasion of the naval riots in the summer of 1917, Stumpf saw the workers' leader in a different light: “I was gradually seeing a whole arc lamp as to why some people fight the military and its system with such passion. Poor Karl Liebknecht! How sorry for you today. "

Stumpf also once thematizes the commandment of the Bible “You shall not kill” and here has pacifist tones. But he also expresses clearly conservative views again and again when he railed against the “ perfidious Albion ” (England) or against France's thirst for robbery, happy that England had to finally give rivers of blood and that he would bring together the last forces to defend the fatherland would like to. Stumpf's inner turmoil is expressed in the following entry towards the end of the diary: “… why did we have to have such unscrupulous, unscrupulous officers who have stolen all our love for our fatherland, our joy in German nature, our pride in our exemplary facilities! Even today my blood boils when I think of the many humiliations [...]. "

At the end of the war, Stumpf followed, albeit reluctantly, the red flag of the revolution: “... to a thunderous hurray, the huge war flag fell from the barracks mast and the red cloth of freedom, equality and brotherhood rose. The mass suggestion, which I always fought against, took me prisoner too. ”After the ceasefire conditions became known , he exclaimed:“ This is what you get for your goddamn brotherhood of nations ”But when the fleet later has to be delivered, he said Stumpf is relieved that these instruments of destruction are disappearing from German waters.

Testimony before the committee of inquiry

Before the committee of inquiry, Stumpf also discussed with Adolf von Trotha , who at the end of the First World War was Chief of Staff of the High Seas Fleet and who had mainly drafted the planned naval advance against England (operational order No. 19). The advance should be undertaken without the knowledge of the government and against its declared will. These intentions of the naval command had led to the mutiny of the sailors off Wilhelmshaven and the Kiel sailors' uprising .

Trotha tried to present Stumpf's allegations as individual cases. Blunt replied that he still had the feeling that two worlds separated by a Chinese wall were facing each other. He also asked Fritz Betz, who was also serving on the SMS Helgoland at the time. The latter had expressly confirmed to him that the vast majority of the naval officers in the deep-sea fleet had abused and humiliated the sailors and stokers with constant harassment and insulting statements.

Publication of the diary

Book edition by the JHW Dietz Successor publishing house, Berlin, 1927.

Stumpf wrote the diary out of personal interest in order to have a reminder for his war memories.

However, when an intense debate about the stab in the back began in the early 1920s , Stumpf realized that his diaries could help shed light on the role of naval officers, and he passed them on to Joseph Joos of the Center Party, who recognized the value of the records and made sure that they were read before the investigative committee.

In 1927 the USPD deputy Wilhelm Dittmann published a heavily abridged version in Dietz Verlag under the title: "Why the Fleet Broke - War Diary of a Christian Worker". In his foreword, Dittmann wrote that it was not any revolutionary outside influences, but the conditions in the fleet itself that led to the catastrophe. He also added headings and a table of contents.

In 1967 Daniel Horn, then assistant professor of history at Douglas College, Rutgers State University New Brunswick, New Jersey, published the full-length diary in English. He added an introduction, many explanatory notes and an index and restored the anonymized names as far as possible. Horn, born in Vienna, came across the diaries as part of his research on the unrest in the imperial fleet and the November Revolution.

Assessments of the diary

Daniel Horn assessed the historical significance in his opening remarks by giving the reasons that led the committee of inquiry to include Stumpf's diary as the only personal memory in its report: while the other people who testified before the committee were officers and politicians who endeavored to defend or support their actions or position, Stump was a worker who had served as a common sailor in the Navy and whose notes reflected his feelings and views at the time without being influenced by the discussions that arose later. Stumpf, who actually wanted to keep a private diary, had, however, through his active and intensive involvement in the discussions of the sailors and stokers not only from the SMS Helgoland, but also from many other ships as well as through his keen sense for the moods of his comrades, including the general one Expressed mood and thus the diary represents an invaluable historical source of the individual but also the collective mentality of the lower ranks in the Imperial Navy.

In Horn's opinion, the diary provides a coherent explanation not only of why the drafted Marines mutinied against their officers, but also why Germany lost the war, why the empire collapsed and why it was overthrown by the revolution. Sailors and stokers rebelled because they were starving and deprived, because they were ill-treated by their officers, because they wanted peace and because they were denied democratic rights. The officers ruthlessly tried to delay the war against their subordinates in order to achieve international recognition and annexations. The sailors and stokers saw the continuation of the war as only in the interests of the officers, who showed no sympathy for them, but on the contrary deliberately harassed them.

Horn sees only two other publications that could be compared with Stumpf's diary: On the one hand, Joachim Ringelnatz 's work “Als Mariner im Krieg”, the Horn, however, as not nearly as authentic, exciting and moving (not nearly as authentic, stirring, and poignant). On the other hand, there are the memories of Willy Sachse , which, however, later on contradicting statements e.g. B. would have lost credibility in his work Rust on Man and Ship .

Huck and Rogg see echoes of a classic drama in which the diary portrays hubris (arrogance) and the fall of the German Empire's ambitions for world power as manifested in naval armor. The diary also describes the erosion of the Wilhelmine class society in the Imperial Navy. Indeed, Richard Stumpf shows that the well-educated workers who were starving for education (this was also evident in the young workers of that time) and who continued to educate themselves no longer feel like snobbies with limited intellectual horizons, who sometimes had only got into their officers 'post through their parents' money, wanted to be treated as children or animals.

The time during and after the Weimar Republic

The information from this period comes mainly from Daniel Horn. In an essay from 1978 he describes that he received documents from Richard Stumpf from the Stumpf family (presumably this is the son Hans, who emigrated to America in 1950). He handed them over to the archive of the Rutgers University Library. In the meantime, however, the documents (or part of them) have been found in the archive of the Leo Baeck Institute .

After the First World War, Stumpf was unemployed and lived in Neunkirchen near Nuremberg. In 1919 he joined the Freicorps to combat the Bavarian council government, this would be the wish of the government and the diocese. Without having already come into combat, he witnessed a massacre of members of the Catholic journeymen's association St. Joseph. The Freicorpsler locked them in a cellar and threw hand grenades into it. Thereupon Stumpf left the Freicorps. He concluded that government forces lost about 18 men while killing about 5,000 people, a large number of which were cold-blooded murders.

Stumpf married Anna Birzle in 1921 and initially lived with his sister. From 1922 to 1924 he worked as a polisher in a Nuremberg metal factory. This enabled him to start a household of his own, and their four sons were born.

In 1925, Stumpf attended meetings of the left-liberal German Democratic Party and, through the mediation of Nuremberg Mayor Hermann Luppe, got a job in his old job and an apartment. He began writing and published on marine history and political topics, where he was also critical of the rise of the National Socialists. One of his articles fell on Dr. Joos, who then arranged the contact to the committee of inquiry. A longer stay in Berlin followed on the occasion of his review work. Then Stumpf worked again in his old profession and continued his writing activity. With the rise of National Socialism, Stumpf tried to intensify international understanding with France on the basis of shared religious convictions.

Under the Nazi dictatorship, his diaries were burned and, according to his son Richard, he was not given adequate work. After becoming unemployed as a result of the global economic crisis, Stumpf finally found a job as the host of the Mainz court of the Kolping Society in Heiligenstadt in Thuringia. There he spent the entire time of World War II. Because of his age and severe rheumatism, he was not drafted, but had occasional work and security duties.

After the Second World War he continued to live in Heiligenstadt, which was now part of the Soviet occupation zone. He became a police officer and took part in actions to arrest Nazis and transfer them to the occupying power. He became a member of the Antifa committees and joined the CDU in 1946, the successor party to the Catholic Center , which Stumpf was close to because of his religious affiliation. He knew the chairman Jakob Kaiser from his days as a journeyman in Nuremberg.

When the Soviet troops marched into Heiligenstadt, Stumpf hid his service pistol, which he owned as the hostel father. It was discovered later, and a tenant of a restaurant belonging to the Kolping House was arrested. When Stump found out about it, he reported himself, although the death penalty was possible for such offenses. He was ill-treated but was released in March 1946.

After the uprising of June 17, 1953, he was arrested under the GDR regime for anti-democratic activities, he had established relationships with Jakob Kaiser, who lived in West Berlin, and had given the bishop in Fulda information about the occupying power and other organizations. During his imprisonment, he wrote another diary about the last phase of his life, which is presumably also kept in the aforementioned archive of Rutgers University in New Jersey (USA). The case was dropped and Stump was released without conviction. At the instigation of his eldest son Lothar, Stumpf was rehabilitated in 1993.

In November 1953, upon request, Stumpf received permission to decorate the war memorial in Heinrich-Heine Park in memory of the fallen. When the graves of Soviet fallen soldiers were desecrated the following year, Stumpf was suspected and arrested for anti-Soviet activities. However, after lengthy interrogations, he was released for proven innocence.

Stumpf died on July 23, 1958.

Reception of the diary in post-war Germany

His diary was not mentioned in the official GDR historiography. It was only described in the work of military journalist Robert Rosentreter at the end of the 1970s .

Historians recognized it relatively late in the FRG as well: Wilhelm Deist cited the diary at various points in his historical work, for the first time in 1966 in his work “The Politics of the Naval War Command and the Rebellion of the Fleet at the End of October 1918”. In a later lecture Deist describes the profound influence that the evacuation of Flanders would have had on the sailors at the beginning of October 1918, which would have been clearly expressed in Stumpf's diary: Because an important basis for the submarine war had now ceased to exist , the sailors and stokers finally realized that the war was lost. In 1992 the Freiburg historian and peace researcher Wolfram Wette published articles on the history of everyday war life in the German military since the early modern period and included excerpts from Stumpf's diary.

Since the early 1990s, the Stumpf diary has also been shown in the teaching exhibition at the Mürwik Naval School (brought in by naval historian Dieter Hartwig as a color copy of the original) and mentioned in the naval history class there.

In 2014, the German Naval Museum in Wilhelmshaven dedicated a large exhibition to Stumpf (The fleet falls asleep in the harbor - everyday life in the war 1914–1918 in sailors' diaries), in which Stumpf's statements were brought to life by means of impressively constructed exhibits. Stumpf's notes were juxtaposed with a memory typescript by Carl Richard Linke , who was also on duty on the SMS Helgoland, which was only discovered in 2013 .

Publications

• Richard Stumpf: Why the Fleet Broke: War Diary of a Christian Worker. Edited by Wilhelm Dittmann. Verlag JHW Dietz Successor, Berlin 1927, DNB 577485938 . (abridged edition)
• Diary of the sailor Richard Stumpf. "Memories" from the German-English naval wars on SMS Helgoland. (The work of the investigative committee of the German Reichstag, fourth row, tenth volume, second half volume). German Publishing Society for Politics and History, Berlin 1928, DNB 368526399 . (unabridged edition).
• Daniel Horn (Ed.): War, Mutiny and Revolution in the German Navy - The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey (USA) 1967, DNB 578170930 .
• Richard Stumpf: Reichpietsch and Köbis admonish! In: Illustrierte Reichsbanner-Zeitung. 40, 1928, pp. 626-627.

literature

• Stephan Huck : "A true picture of my experiences and observations". About the memories of the sailors Stumpf and Linke and their authors , in: Jürgen Elvert / Lutz Adam / Heinrich Walle (eds.): The Imperial Navy at War: A Trace Search , Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag) 2017, pp. 201-218. ISBN 978-3515118248
• Paul Lauerwald: Richard Stumpf (1892–1958) and his work on the Eichsfeld. In: Eichsfeld-Jahrbuch 26/2018, Duderstadt 2018, pp. 285-300. ISBN 978-3-86944-190-0

swell

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} S. Huck, G. Pieken, M. Rogg (eds.): The fleet falls asleep in the harbor - everyday life in the war 1914–1918 in sailors' diaries. Military History Museum, Deutsches Marinemuseum Wilhelmshaven, Sandstein Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-95498-095-6 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} D. Horn: The Diarist revisited: The Papers of Seaman Stumpf. In: The Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries. 40, No. 1, 1978, pp. 32-48. (online at: researchgate.net )
3. ^ The work of the committee of inquiry of the German constitutional assembly and the German Reichstag 1919–1928. Fourth row: The causes of the German collapse. Second section: the internal breakdown. 12 Vol., Volume X, Part 2. (WUA)
4. ^ W. Rahn (Ed.): German Marines in Transition. R. Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2005.
5. ^ D. Horn (ed.): War, Mutiny and Revolution in the German Navy - The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey (USA), 1967, p. 163.
6. ↑ R. Stumpf: Why the fleet broke up - war diary of a Christian worker. Edited by W. Dittmann. Verlag JHW Dietz Successor, Berlin 1927, p. 167.
7. ^ G. Mehnert: Evangelical Church and Politics 1917-19. Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 1959.
8. ^ K. Kuhl: The role of the German naval officers during the events in October / November 1918. Literature study. 2013, p. 12. Retrieved November 17, 2014, from: http://www.kurkuhl.de/docs/flottenbefehl-und-seeoffiziere.pdf
9. ↑ R. Stumpf: Why the fleet broke up - war diary of a Christian worker. Edited by W. Dittmann. Verlag JHW Dietz Successor, Berlin 1927, p. 167.
10. ↑ R. Stumpf: Why the fleet broke up - war diary of a Christian worker. Edited by W. Dittmann, Verlag JHW Dietz Successor, Berlin 1927, p. 208.
11. ↑ R. Stumpf: Why the fleet broke up - war diary of a Christian worker. Edited by W. Dittmann. Verlag JHW Dietz Successor, Berlin 1927, p. 213.
12. ^ D. Horn (ed.): War, Mutiny and Revolution in the German Navy - The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey (USA) 1967, p. 428.
13. ↑ WUA, series 4, volume 10.1: Expert opinion from the experts Alboldt, Stumpf, v. Trotha on the naval operations in 1917 and 1918, 1928.
14. ↑ ^{a b} R. Stumpf: Why the fleet broke up - war diary of a Christian worker. Edited by W. Dittmann. JHW Dietz successor publisher, Berlin 1927.
15. ↑ ^{a b c d e} D. Horn (Ed.): War, Mutiny and Revolution in the German Navy - The World War I Diary of Seaman Richard Stumpf. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey (USA) 1967.
16. ^ D. Horn: German Naval Mutinies of World War I. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey (USA) 1969.
17. ↑ Joachim Ringelnatz (H. Bötticher): As a Mariner in the war. Karl H. Hensel Verlag, 1955.
18. ↑ W. axis (Antinautikus): Germany's revolutionary sailors. Karl Schulzke publishing house, Hamburg 1925.
19. ↑ Richard Stumpf's diary. In: Sunday Post. August 31, 1974 (Swabian Post)
20. ^ Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute (2009). Guide to the Daniel Horn Collection, 1881-1976. AR 6411. Retrieved 24 February 2015, from: http://digifindingaids.cjh.org/?pID=475721
21. ^ Statement by his son Richard Stumpf in a letter to the marine historian Dieter Hartwig, Oberkochen, 2004.
22. ↑ Richard Stumpf's diary. In: Sunday Post. August 31, 1974 (Swabian Post)
23. ^ Statement by his son Richard Stumpf in a letter to the marine historian Dieter Hartwig, Oberkochen, 2004.
24. ↑ Richard Stumpf's diary. In: Sunday Post. August 31, 1974 (Swabian Post)
25. ↑ Among other things in: R. Rosentreter: Blaujacken im Novembersturm - Rote Sailor 1918/1919. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1988.
26. ^ W. Deist: The politics of the naval warfare and the rebellion of the fleet at the end of October 1918. In: H. Rothfels, T. Eschenburg (ed.): Quarterly books for contemporary history. 4th issue, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt Stuttgart, 1966. (online)
27. ^ W. Deist: The causes of the revolution of 1918/19 from a military-historical perspective. In: Wilhelmshaven Museum Talks, texts on the history of the city. Volume 2:. The revolution 1918/19 - 70 years later, lecture event by the city of Wilhelmshaven on October 28 and 29, 1988. edited and edited by Norbert Credé on behalf of the city of Wilhelmshaven. City of Wilhelmshaven, Coastal Museum 1991.
28. ^ W. Wette (Ed.): The Little Man's War - Military History from Below. Munich / Zurich 1992.