Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff

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Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff (1944)

Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff (born March 27, 1905 in Lüben , Lower Silesia ; † January 27, 1980 in Munich ) was a German major general and a member of the military resistance against Adolf Hitler and National Socialism. He was the founding president of Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe .

Life

Familys

Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff came from the ancient noble Gersdorff family and was the second son of the Prussian Rittmeister and later Major General Ernst Freiherr von Gersdorff (1864-1926) and his wife Christine, née Countess and Countess of Dohna-Schlodien (1880-1944). In 1934 he married Renata Kracker von Schwarzenfeld (1913–1942), a co-heir of the Silesian industrial dynasty of Kramsta . The marriage produced a daughter. After the death of his wife in 1953, he married Marie-Eva Alexandra Brigitte Hertha von Waldenburg (1925–1986), a descendant of Prince August of Prussia . This marriage remained childless.

Military career

Gersdorff attended schools in Lüben until he graduated from high school and joined the Reichswehr as an officer candidate in 1923 . He received his basic military training in Breslau in the Kleinburg barracks, where his ancestors had served in the 1st Silesian body cuirassier regiment "Great Elector" for generations . He was promoted to lieutenant in 1926 and Rittmeister in 1938 . From 1938 to 1939 he was assigned to the War Academy in Berlin in order to receive training as a general staff officer .

Second World War

When the attack on Poland began , Gersdorff was Third General Staff Officer (Ic) in the 14th Army . With this, now renamed the 12th Army, he was relocated to the western border after the campaign was over. After the stopover at the XII. Army Corps Gersdorff was assigned to the Army High Command (OKH). During the campaign in the west , he headed the command department of the 86th Infantry Division as Ia , which was part of the 12th Army in the advance through the Ardennes .

For Operation Barbarossa , he was transferred to Army Group B in May 1941 , renamed Army Group Center on June 22, 1941 . There he was Liaison  Officer of Abwehr Ic and headed the military reconnaissance . The main aim of this transfer was to give him access to the circle of conspirators around Henning von Tresckow .

By April 1943, Wehrmacht soldiers subordinate to Freiherr von Gersdorff discovered the mass graves of over 4,000 Polish officers, ensigns and civil servants who murdered units of the Soviet NKVD in a forest not far from the Russian village of Katyn in 1940 (see Katyn massacre ). Gersdorff supervised the exhumations . He was also responsible for organizing sightseeing trips by foreign observers who were brought to Katyn on the orders of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels . This included an international medical commission , journalists and writers, and Polish, American and British prisoner-of-war officers.

On February 1, 1944 Gersdorff entered his service as Chief of Staff of the LXXXII. Army Corps, whose three infantry divisions were supposed to repel an Allied landing expected on the French north coast. On July 28, 1944, he became Chief of Staff of the 7th Army , which was shortly afterwards trapped in the Falaise pocket . For planning the successful outbreak of the army, he received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on August 26, 1944 . He remained - promoted to major general in March 1945 - with the 7th Army until the German surrender .

Member of the military resistance against National Socialism

Shortly after the failed attempt by Colonel Henning von Tresckow and his cousin Fabian von Schlabrendorff to kill Hitler on March 13, 1943 with a bomb smuggled into his plane in Smolensk, Gersdorff declared himself ready to carry out a suicide attack on Hitler.

On March 21, 1943, Hitler opened an exhibition of Soviet looted weapons in the Berlin armory for Heroes' Remembrance Day . Gersdorff was assigned as an expert to explain the exhibition. During the tour he wanted to blow up Hitler and the top management present, including Hermann Göring , Heinrich Himmler , Wilhelm Keitel and Karl Dönitz , with two British fragmentation mines that he carried in his coat pockets and sacrificed his life in the process. After Gersdorff had already activated the acid detonator, Hitler hurried through the exhibition without stopping in front of the exhibits and left the building after just two minutes, while the detonator had a minimum time of 10 minutes. Gersdorff was able to defuse the detonator in a toilet in the armory just in time. After the failed operation, he was immediately ordered back to the Eastern Front.

In 1944, Gersdorff kept explosives and detonators for the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 , which his co-conspirator, Colonel General Wessel Freytag von Loringhoven , had previously obtained unnoticed from the Abwehr's holdings . The secrecy of his imprisoned colleagues - often under torture - saved him from arrest and execution . As one of the few members of the Wehrmacht, he survived the Nazi regime in active resistance against the National Socialist dictatorship .

After the Second World War

As an American prisoner of war, Gersdorff was in a privileged position: He belonged to a group of high Wehrmacht officers who were supposed to help American military historians write a history of the Second World War. This group was interned first in Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, then in Camp King in Oberursel , Hesse .

Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was an advisor to the American delegation in the background of the first Nuremberg trial in autumn 1945, recommended Gersdorff as a witness for the Katyn charge brought forward by the Soviets. Gersdorff then wrote a report on his findings from 1943. However, this report was not discussed in Nuremberg, nor was Gersdorff summoned as a witness. The existence of the report was concealed; it was only discovered in 2012 in an English translation in the American National Archives. The investigative commission of the US congress into the massacre of Katyn ( Madden commission ), which came to Frankfurt in 1952 to question German witnesses, interrogated him.

After the Bundestag resolution on rearmament, all attempts by Freiherr von Gersdorff to join the Bundeswehr failed . In his memoirs, he blamed State Secretary Hans Globke and those circles of former Wehrmacht officers who would not tolerate any “traitor” in the Bundeswehr.

Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, paraplegic from a riding accident since 1967, dedicated himself to charity in the Order of St. John , of which he was commander of honor. He was the founding president of Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe (chairman of the board 1952–1963). In 1979 he was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit for his exceptional services . His grave is in the Munich Ostfriedhof (grave site 152-1-12a).

Afterlife

The Major General Freiherr von Gersdorff barracks in Euskirchen was named after him.

Fonts

  • Soldier in decline. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Main, Berlin, Vienna 1977, ISBN 3-550-07349-6 .

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Thomas Urban : Katyn 1940. History of a crime. Munich 2015, pp. 70, 93, 105, 112.
  2. 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. 333.
  3. ^ Henning von Tresckow. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG ) entry for 1943.
  4. a b Bodo von Scheurig: Henning von Tresckow. A biography. Frankfurt / M. 1980, p. 146 ff.
  5. Short biography of the German Resistance Memorial Center
  6. Rudolf-Christoph Frhr. von Gersdorff: Soldier in decline . Frankfurt / M. 1977, pp. 194-195.
  7. ^ How the Katyn massacre disappeared from the prosecution sueddeutsche.de, May 14, 2015.
  8. The Katyn Forest Massacre . Commission of Inquiry of the US Congress, pp. 1303 ff. (English)
  9. Rudolf-Christoph Frhr. von Gersdorff: Soldier in decline . Frankfurt / M. 1977, p. 211.
  10. a b Short biography Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe