Rudolf Petersen (naval officer)

Rudolf Jesper Petersen (born June 15, 1905 in Atzerballig , † January 2, 1983 in Flensburg ) was a German naval officer , most recently a commodore , in World War II .

Life

Petersen, son of a minister, entered on 16 November 1925 as a midshipman in the Imperial Navy , and in 1929 to lieutenant , and on July 1, 1931 Lieutenant promoted. On September 1, 1935 to lieutenant commander promoted, he was given command of the in on January 22, 1934 on September 6, 1934 Lürssen -Werft in Vegesack from the stack overflowed speedboat S9 . On August 1, 1938, Petersen became head of the newly established 2nd Schnellbootsflotille of the Kriegsmarine in Wilhelmshaven .

At the beginning of the war in 1939, the flotilla with the boats S 9 , S 10 , S 14 , S 15 , S 16 and S 17 and the speedboat companion Tanga was in the submarine port of Helgoland . During a reconnaissance attempt on September 4, 1939, the boat S 17 suffered so severe damage in the storm that it had to be retired. The flotilla undertook training trips in the Baltic Sea. In the course of securing the submarines for the heavy cruisers Admiral Hipper and Blücher , the search for Polish submarines in the western Baltic Sea, the Great and Little Belt and in the Öresund was in vain. When the Baltic Sea began to freeze, the boats moved back to the North Sea.

On January 1, 1940 Petersen was promoted to corvette captain. From October 20, 1941, he was preparing as Admiralstabsoffizier with the leader of the torpedo boats for his upcoming task as leader of the Schnellboot (FdS), which he took over on April 20, 1942 and held until the end of the war. On April 1, 1944 he was promoted to sea captain and on September 23, 1944 to commodore. On August 4, 1940, Petersen received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and on June 13, 1944, the Oak Leaves. However, he was repeatedly reprimanded by his superiors for alleged failure.

When the last imperial government under Karl Dönitz withdrew to Flensburg - Mürwik at the end of the war , Rudolf Petersen, together with the office of the leader of the speedboats, finally also settled in the local special area Mürwik .

Court martial in May 1945

Petersen gathered his speedboats in early May 1945 in the Geltinger Bay off Flensburg . On May 9, 1945, he was the court lord of the desertion process of a military court against four young soldiers, namely against the 26-year-old sailor Fritz Wehrmann from Leipzig , the 20-year-old radio operator Alfred Gail from Kassel , and the 22-year-old corporal Martin Schilling from East Frisia and a fourth soldier. The three soldiers named here have been sentenced to death , and on May 10, 1945 speedboat escort ship Buea shot ; The court only recognized grounds for mitigation in the case of the soldier Kurt Schwalenberg, who was sentenced to three years in prison. The execution of the three soldiers took place two days after the German total surrender . This happened even though Petersen had the naval flag drawn down on the ships under his command on May 8 and, as the judge at the trial, could have exercised his right to pardon. The four young soldiers had tried - trusting the partial surrender of May 4, 1945 - to get from their accommodation in Svendborg on the island of Funen to mainland Germany on May 6 . They were picked up by a Danish auxiliary police officer and transferred to the local commandant of the German troops .

At his express request, Wehrmann's mother did not receive her son's farewell letter until a year later, because he hoped that his mother would no longer expect his survival anyway. In this letter he gave the names of all those responsible.

Aftermath

In three trials, Petersen and the members of the court martial were acquitted of the charge of manslaughter and perversion of justice by the Hamburg district court in 1953 (after the Federal Court of Justice had been revised ) . However, at an earlier hearing in the Supreme Court for the British Zone in 1948, the judges came to a completely different verdict:

“ If, at a time when violence and arbitrariness dominated public life, judges, out of the spirit or order of this system, misused their office to commit inhuman acts, it was one of the most dangerous and intolerable forms of this type of crime. It would be completely incomprehensible to exclude such judges from being labeled and punished as inhuman criminals because they were judges and should have judged independently. "

After the acquittal, Alfred Gail's mother took her own life using gas. Anna Wehrmann spent 20 years in a home.

Post War and Death

Petersen later worked as a sales representative and in the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) of the Bundeswehr . From June 1, 1953 to the beginning of 1958, he was director of the Hanseatic Yacht School of the German High Seas Sports Association HANSA e. V. in Glücksburg .

He suffered a severe shock and a cerebral haemorrhage when teenagers threw firecrackers in his face when opening the apartment door on New Year's Eve 1982 , and died of the consequences on January 2, 1983.

literature

• Dermot Bradley (eds.), Hans H. Hildebrand, Ernest Henriot: Germany's Admirals 1849-1945. The military careers of naval, engineering, medical, weapons and administrative officers with admiral rank. Volume 3: P-Z. Biblio Verlag, Osnabrück 1990, ISBN 3-7648-1700-3 , pp. 25-26.

Web links

• Newspaper article about Rudolf Petersen in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In the night of May 4th to 5th, 1945, 47 German submarines were sunk by their crews as a result of the rainbow order from Grand Admiral and last Reich President Karl Dönitz , who had withdrawn to the neighboring special area of ​​Mürwik .
2. ↑ stolpersteine-leipzig.de accessed on August 13, 2017
3. ↑ ^{a b} Gerhard Paul : The shootings in the Geltinger bay. in: Society for Politics and Education Schleswig-Holstein (Hrsg.): Democratic history: Yearbook for Schleswig-Holstein. Neuer Malik-Verlag, Volume 9, Kiel 1995, ISBN 3-89029-966-0 online
4. ↑ The memorial stone from Norgaardholz: History ( Memento of the original from April 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved August 3, 2011. 
5. ^ LG Hamburg, February 27, 1953. In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966. Volume X, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . University Press, Amsterdam 1973, No. 345, pp. 445-511. Military court verdicts against 4 marines. The men had left their unit on May 5, 1945, were apprehended and sentenced to one prison sentence and three death sentences each. The death sentences were carried out after the capitulation on May 10, 1945. ( Memento of the original from December 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ Revision order of the Supreme Court of the British Zone of December 7, 1948, in: Justice and Nazi Crimes. Collection of German criminal convictions for Nazi homicide crimes 1945-1966. Volume 5, Amsterdam 1970, p. 264.