Rudolf Kiszling

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rudolf Kiszling (born January 8, 1882 in Groß Becskerek , Banat , Austria-Hungary ; † May 18, 1976 in Purkersdorf , Lower Austria ) was an Austrian officer, military historian and archivist . After his career as an officer in the General Staff , Kiszling worked in the Vienna War Archives from 1920 , where he was the chief editor and authoritative author of the military-historical work of Austria-Hungary's last war 1914–1918was responsible. In 1936 he took over the management of the war archive, which he held until April 1945. In the time of National Socialism he was less active as a writer. He expanded the holdings of the archive, also through his involvement in the robbery of archival material during the Second World War . In his numerous publications, Kiszling represented the official military history of the Austrian General Staff, which did not allow any criticism of the military leadership. He was a member of the Historical Commission for Silesia .

Life

Career as a general staff officer

The son of an imperial-royal major general first attended three classes at the secondary school in Sibiu and Vienna. After spending two years at the military junior high school in Eisenstadt and the military high school in Mährisch Weißkirchen , he graduated from the Theresian Military Academy and joined the 4th Tyrolean Kaiserjäger Regiment in 1902 as a lieutenant. In 1904 he was granted Austrian citizenship . He embarked on the general staff career, attended the kuk war school from 1905 to 1907 and was assigned to the general staff in 1907 . From November 1, 1910, he served in the General Staff Department of the XII. Corps. Promoted to captain in the General Staff on May 1, 1911, he joined the General Staff Department of the Transylvanian Gendarmerie Troop Division , the later 70th Honvéd Infantry Troop Division , on June 8, 1915 . On December 10, 1915 he became their chief of staff. Promoted to major in the General Staff on February 1, 1916, he took over the General Staff of the 71st Infantry Troop Division on August 26, 1916 . On September 6, 1917 he was transferred to the material group at the main group command in Boroević . After his promotion to lieutenant colonel in the general staff on May 1, he became chief of staff at the commander-in-chief for German Bohemia on November 23, 1918 .

Archivist at the Vienna War Archives

On June 18, 1920, Kiszling left active service and came to the Vienna War Archives , where he became an official in the scientific service in 1924 (forbearance of the need for higher education). A new war history department was established there under his direction in 1925/26, in which the presentation of “Austria-Hungary's last war 1914–1918” was drawn up as the last “ general staff work ” of the Vienna War Archives. Kiszling became state archivist in 1926 and senior state archivist in 1928. From 1929 to 1931 he taught strategy at the higher officers' course of the armed forces and on June 13, 1930 he was made Colonel a. D. promoted and appointed court councilor in 1934. When the director of the war archive, Edmund Glaise-Horstenau, joined the Schuschnigg government as a result of the July Agreement in 1936 , he installed Kiszling on September 1, 1936, initially provisionally as head of the war archive.

The historian Peter Broucek announced in 2014 that Kiszling was involved in the National Socialist July coup in 1934, in which Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was shot. The 90-year-old Kiszling said in a conversation in the mid-1970s that he himself had recruited Otto Planetta and Rudolf Prochaska to lead the uprising. Besides Planetta, Prochaska was the second assassin who shot Dollfuss. According to Broucek, the historian Ludwig Jedlicka confirmed that he had received the same information from Kiszling. Brouczek considers Kiszling's information to be truthful.

Director of the Army Archives Vienna

Kiszling was appointed General State Archivist on January 1, 1937. After Austria was "annexed" to the German Reich , the war archive was remilitarized according to the German model and incorporated into the German organization as the "Army Archive Vienna". The servants became uniformed officers of the Wehrmacht . On May 11, 1938, Kiszling applied for membership in the NSDAP , but was judged by the Gaupersonalamt as not being won over to the National Socialist idea . He is "the type of that old Austrian civil service [...] that [!] Knows how to adapt to every ruling regime". As a Banat German, Kiszling was known to have a “national focus”. In 1939 he claimed that in the war archives "the idea of ​​the Anschluss was not only illegal, but upheld". In a brochure by the alleged SA brigad leader Emil Jäger in 1939, he was named as a member of the illegal SA Brigade 6. Such a brigade probably did not exist. But Kiszling received the medal in memory of March 13, 1938 . Corresponding files in the war archive registry could no longer be found in 1946, and the police suspected Kiszling of having removed incriminating files. In 1941 he paid tribute in a publication to “the unsurpassable statecraft of our Führer and Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler ”.

On October 1, 1938, Kiszling finally took over the management of the Army Archives. Nevertheless, Glaise's return to the head of the Army Archives only became unlikely in April 1941, when he was appointed "German General in Agram ". After the "Anschluss" Kiszling was initially classified as Heeresoberarchivrat (Lieutenant Colonel), in April 1939, (with effect from 1 October 1938) higher than Colonel fee entitled "Army Archives Director" and the right to the rank and rank insignia of a major general to to lead.

Scientific activity in the Army Archives largely came to a standstill after 1938. The Army Archives were instructed to only support official external research by the German Army Research Institute for War History . Kiszling developed a latent aversion to the "Altreich" and its representatives in Austria. He opposed the Prussian-German filing plan and the introduction of the corresponding archive terminology. Contributions to a lecture series on the nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (“The People's Image of the Former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy”, December 1944) could no longer be printed, only hectographed . A project on “Croatian soldiery” failed, and out of consideration for the allied Italy , an essay by Kiszling on breakthrough battles on the Italian front during World War I did not appear in the magazine Militärwissenschaftliche Rundschau . In 1944 Kiszling was co-opted into the Commission for the Modern History of Former Austria . A proposed honorary doctorate was no longer achieved.

Kiszling tried during the Second World War to k. u. k. Military records to be won for the Vienna Army Archives. The Army Archives took an active part in the German robbery of archive materials. Already after the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia , Kiszling proposed in March 1939 the establishment of an "Army Archives Prague" under his authority. From August to November 1940 he then set up a branch of the Army Archives in Prague . The files of the Austro-Hungarian army remained in Prague; But Kiszling was able to bring Prague archives to Wallenstein in Vienna and, for example, took over the files of the XI from Poland . Corps commands (Galician General Command, Lemberg ) and the Lublin Military General Government . In the State Archives Zagreb , much of the filing of the Army Group Command was at the Isonzofront assured and with the consent of Ante Pavelić brought in 1941 to Vienna. Additions came from the War History Department of the Yugoslav Army and Navy Ministry in Belgrade .

After the Second World War

After the end of the Battle of Vienna on April 13, 1945, Kiszling was imprisoned by the Red Army from April 17 to 26, 1945 . During this time, Oskar Regele made himself the acting head of the Army Archives. Kiszling's previous deputy Josef Mündl took over the management on May 8, 1945. The indignant Kiszling, who had hoped to continue serving as director, occupied the office until July 1945 and was suspended with retroactive effect from April 27, 1945. In June 1946 he was retired with effect from May 1, 1945. Oskar Regele, who in the meantime had succeeded in replacing Mündl as director of the war archive, had fallen out with Kiszling and forbade the employees to have any contact with Kiszling. Nevertheless, Kiszling managed to be largely rehabilitated in the new republic. On his 90th birthday in 1972, Kiszling received the professional title of Professor and the Cross of Honor for Science and Art and became an honorary member of the “ Association of Austrian Archivists ” (VÖA). Kiszling advised students and young researchers into old age.

plant

As chief editor, Kiszling was largely responsible for the official Austrian work on the First World War, Austria-Hungary's last war . He himself contributed about a quarter of the contributions. He wrote volumes about battles on the Eastern Front for the series Battles of the World War of the German Reich Archives. His portrayal, which was strictly oriented towards the history of war and operations, was characterized by efforts to maintain tradition and preservation of prestige and ignored criticism of the military leadership. Kiszling followed the official interpretation, which Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf stylized as the last great military leader of the Habsburg Monarchy and concealed his strategic misjudgments, which had led Austria-Hungary into a military disaster on both fronts at the beginning of the First World War. Kiszling's first essay on Austro-Hungarian mobilization in 1914 was only published in 1921 after Conrad had personally accepted it. In publications after the Second World War, too, Kiszling made technical difficulties with the railroad responsible for the problems of the Austro-Hungarian mobilization in 1914. Only in his last book, published posthumously in 1984, The High Command of the Habsburgs in World War I , did Kiszling admit that Conrad had also made mistakes.

As an extremely productive author, Kiszling dealt in a number of other historical monographs and essays with the period from the second half of the 19th century to the outbreak of the First World War. Although Kiszling's account of the events of 1914 was deliberately misleading, it was generally accepted and found its way into other biographical and military-historical accounts. Kiszling also suppressed the unpleasant in the archives. For example, he withheld a collective file on the Colonel Redl affair from research by having it incorrectly filed in a sealed envelope. It was not until 1994 that the files, which had been missing for a long time, were found by chance.

Fonts

  • Edmund von Glaise-Horstenau et al. : Austria-Hungary's last war 1914–1918. Verlag der Militärwissenschaftlichen Mitteilungen, Vienna 1930–1938.
  • 1914. The military problems of our beginning of the war: ideas, reasons and connections. Vienna; Self-published by the author (IS), Pitreich, Max, [Sl] 1934.
  • The conquest of Ofen 1686. By Rudolf Kiszling. With 1 side dish. Military science Communications, Vienna 1936.
  • with Friedrich Ernst Eduard Arnold von Cochenhausen (Hrsg.): Austrian generals and their relations to Germans. Verl. Military Science Communications, Vienna 1941.
  • (Ed.): The revolution in the Austrian Empire 1848–1849. Universum-Verl.-Ges, Vienna 1948.
  • Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg. The political teacher of Emperor Franz Joseph. Böhlau, Graz 1952.
  • Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este. Life, plans and work on the path of fate of the Danube Monarchy. Böhlau, Graz a. a. 1953.
  • The Croatians. The fate of a southern Slav people. Böhlau, Graz, Cologne 1956.
  • Géza Freiherr Fejérváry de Komlos-Keresztes, 1833–1914. In: New Austrian Biography from 1815. 12 (1957) 1957, pp. 89–97.
  • Feldzeugmeister Gabriel Freiherr von Rodich, 1812–1890. In: New Austrian Biography from 1815. 11 (1957) 1957, pp. 127-136.
  • Austria-Hungary's share in the First World War. Stiasny, Graz 1958.
  • Two thousand years of warfare on the Danube. In: The Danube Region: Journal of the Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe. 3, No. 4, 1958, pp. 208-221.
  • The military agreements of the Little Entente 1929–1937. Oldenbourg, Munich 1959.
  • Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, 1800–1852. In: Shaper of the fortunes of Austria. 1962, pp. 357-370.
  • Prince Eugene of Savoy as a general. Inst. F. Austrian studies, Graz 1963.
  • The high command of the Habsburg armies in the First World War. Federal Ministry for National Defense, Office for Defense Policy, Vienna 1977.

literature

  • Peter Broucek , Kurt Peball : History of the Austrian military historiography. Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2000, ISBN 3-412-05700-2 .
  • Kiszling, Rudolf. In: Fritz Fellner , Doris A. Corradini (Ed.): Austrian History in the 20th Century. A biographical-bibliographical lexicon (= publications of the Commission for Modern History of Austria. Vol. 99). Böhlau, Vienna et al. 2006, ISBN 3-205-77476-0 , p. 219.
  • Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945. In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), pp. 221-284. ( PDF , accessed September 18, 2016).
  • Graydon A. Tunstall: The Habsburg Command Conspiracy: The Austrian Falsification of Historiography on the Outbreak of World War I. In: Austrian History Yearbook. 27 (1996), pp. 181-98.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fifty Years of the Historical Commission for Silesia . In: Yearbook of the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau, Volume 17, 1972, list of members p. 414.
  2. ↑ Peter Broucek , Kurt Peball : History of Austrian Military Historiography . Böhlau, Cologne 2000, p. 484.
  3. ↑ Peter Broucek (ed.): A general in the twilight: The memories of Edmund Glaises von Horstenaus . Vol. 1. K. uk General Staff Officer and Historian . Böhlau, Vienna 1980, p. 168.
  4. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), pp. 281, 227.
  5. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 233.
  6. ↑ Georg Markus : Dollfuss murder. The second assassin . In: Der Kurier , December 21, 2014 (accessed: September 17, 2016).
  7. ↑ a b Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 236.
  8. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 230.
  9. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 266.
  10. ↑ a b Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 248.
  11. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 241.
  12. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 238.
  13. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 246.
  14. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 232.
  15. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 258.
  16. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 253.
  17. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 255.
  18. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 264.
  19. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 265.
  20. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 277.
  21. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), p. 278.
  22. ^ Oswald Übergger: Wars of memory. The First World War, Austria and the Tyrolean war memory in the interwar period . Universitätsverlag Wagner, Innsbruck 2011, p. 71 f.
  23. ↑ Graydon A. Tunstall: The Habsburg Command Conspiracy: The Austrian Falsification of Historiography on the Outbreak of World War I . In: Austrian History Yearbook . 27 (1996), p. 182 f.
  24. ↑ a b Graydon A. Tunstall: The Habsburg Command Conspiracy: The Austrian Falsification of Historiography on the Outbreak of World War I . In: Austrian History Yearbook . 27 (1996), p. 188.
  25. ↑ Graydon A. Tunstall: The Habsburg Command Conspiracy: The Austrian Falsification of Historiography on the Outbreak of World War I . In: Austrian History Yearbook . 27 (1996), pp. 190 f.
  26. ↑ Graydon A. Tunstall: The Habsburg Command Conspiracy: The Austrian Falsification of Historiography on the Outbreak of World War I . In: Austrian History Yearbook . 27 (1996), p. 189.
  27. ↑ Michael Hochedlinger: Double-headed eagle or swastika? The "Army Archives Vienna" 1938–1945 . In: Communications from the Austrian State Archives. 54 (2010), pp. 227-229.
personal data
SURNAME Kiszling, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian officer, archivist and military historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH Great Becskerek
DATE OF DEATH May 18, 1976
Place of death Purkersdorf