Deputy General Command

Seal mark XIV.

The Deputy General Command was an organizational unit of the German Army and later the Army of the Wehrmacht . As long as a general command was mobilized , the deputy general command took over all its functions as a fixed (immobile) command and administrative authority for an army corps area and the troops stationed there. The Deputy General Command was in command of the Deputy Commanding General . The Bavarian , Prussian , Saxon and Württemberg armies before and during the First World War as well as the army of the Wehrmacht at the time of National Socialism knew Deputy General Commandos.

Competencies and tasks in the First World War

In their territories, the military commanders were the holders of the executive power. Until they were placed under the War Ministry in matters of war economics on December 8, 1916, they had an immediate position as Kaiser . They had an extensive right to issue ordinances and the authority to issue instructions to the civil administration in the relevant administrative districts .

The immediate relationship with the emperor means that the deputy general commanders and the fortress commanders who were equivalent to them were deprived of any civilian control. They exercised de facto independent rulership functions that also restricted constitutional rights.

Their tasks were not limited to replenishment matters ( Intendantur ), i.e. the replacement of teams and horses, supplying the army corps with war material, or commanding the troops that remained and the border guards . Their area of ​​responsibility also included counter-espionage , surveillance of public life, for example through press censorship , postal surveillance, restriction of freedom of assembly and the use of prisoners of war. From 1916, in particular, they were increasingly used to control the war economy. In the last years of the war they were also responsible for deploying the stage helpers .

The civil authorities were subordinate to these military authorities. In the context of the state of siege , the deputy general commands were allowed to issue military protective custody orders without the intervention of a civil court.

The large range of tasks during the war led to the fact that the number of staff in the Deputy General Command increased sharply. While only seven officers and 14 sub-civil servants were active in the eighth Württemberg Deputy General Command in 1914, there were already 134 officers in 1917.

In the course of the war, various areas were centralized. This was the case with the establishment of the War Press Office in 1915 or the War Office in 1916.

Due to the air raid on Potsdam on April 18, 1945, in which the Reichsarchiv was badly hit, a large part of the files of the Prussian Deputy General Command archived there were lost, including the files of the X Army Corps in Hanover , which reconstructs the north-west German military history from 1867 to 1919 posed considerable research problems.

See also : General Command , Military District and Territorial Army

literature

• Wolf-Rüdiger shrink: Territorial Command violence and civil administration expertise in WW1. Consensus, cooperation, conflict. A study on the activities of the Deputy General Command of the VII Army Corps and the central authorities of the Province of Westphalia in supplying the civilian population , Münster 1995 (Phil. Diss. Of the University of Münster).
• Jörn Leonhard: Pandora's box. History of the first world war. Munich, 2013 p. 207f.
• City of Oldenburg (ed.): Oldenburg 1914-1918. A source volume on the everyday, social, military and mental history of the city of Oldenburg in the First World War . (Publications of the Oldenburg City Archives, Vol. 7), Oldenburg (Isensee) 2014. ISBN 978-3-7308-1080-4 .

Web links

• Christoph Nübel: Deputy General Command , on: encyclopedia . 1914-1918-online.net , International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson, Freie Universität Berlin, 2015, doi : 10.15463 / ie1418.10767 (English).
• Deputy General Command, 1914–1918 / 1939–1945 in the Bavarian Historical Lexicon
• The Deputy General Command XIII. (KW) Army Corps on the website of the Baden-Württemberg State Archives

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wilhelm Deist: Requirements for domestic political action of the military in the First World War . In: Wilhelm Deist: Military, State and Society. Munich: Oldenburg, 1991, pp. 127–128.
2. ↑ Gerhard Granier, Josef Henke, Klaus Oldenhage: The Federal Archives and Its Holdings (1977)
3. ↑ Ute Daniel (2011)
4. ↑ Peter Mertens, Saxony (2004)
5. ^ Diary Carl Schmitt 1915 (2005)
6. ^ Business division, internal service and budget of the Deputy General Command: Budget Stuttgart  in the German Digital Library