Udo von Mohrenschildt

Udo von Mohrenschildt (born November 3, 1908 in Dresden , † June 22, 1984 in Ottmanach near Klagenfurt in Carinthia / Austria) was a German journalist.

Live and act

Youth and education

Mohrenschildt was born in 1908 as the son of the farmer and landlord Walter Constantin von Mohrenschildt. His younger brother was the future SA leader Walter von Mohrenschildt . After completing his studies, Udo von Mohrenschildt began working as a journalist in Berlin .

Mohrenschildt came into contact with the National Socialist movement while he was still a student. On January 1, 1931, he joined the NSDAP ( membership number 391.185) and the Schutzstaffel (SS). On April 7, 1931, Mohrenschildt, who was then living at Grolmannstrasse 19, was expelled from the NSDAP for unknown reasons. After his membership of the SS had been established, this decision was withdrawn by a decision of the Supreme Party Court on July 7, 1931. At that time, however, Mohrenschildt claims to have rejected Reinhard Heydrich's offer to join his staff.

time of the nationalsocialism

In 1931 Mohrenschildt received a position as editor in the Wolff Telegraph Bureau (WTB) . After the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Mohrenschildt was accepted as editor of the newly founded German News Office (DNB), the then state news agency of the German Reich, in which the WTB was absorbed.

According to his own statements, Mohrenschildt was scheduled to be murdered in June / July 1934 in the course of the Röhm affair , which among other things fell victim to his younger brother Walter. He survived, however, as he was staying in Rome as a correspondent for the DNB at the time. On July 1, 1934, he was released without notice from the DNB on the instructions of the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda . During this time he was in close contact with the Bockelmann family of landowners in Ottmanach in Carinthia, with whom he was temporarily accepted. Rudolf Bockelmann, the father of the future singer Udo Jürgens, was mayor there from 1938 to 1945.

After his rehabilitation, Mohrenschildt worked again as a journalist for the DNB from the turn of the year 1934/35.

post war period

In 1948 Mohrenschildt was to be employed as a news editor for the Hamburger Abendblatt . This appointment did not come about because Mohrenschildt was not yet denazified at the time .

In the 1970s, the research group around Walther Hofer , Pierre Grégoire and Edouard Calic appealed to Mohrenschildt as key witnesses for their thesis that the National Socialists were responsible for the burning of the Reichstag building on the night of February 28, 1933. In the publications of the research group was repeated on A report by Mohrenschildt allegedly available to Hofer in May 1976, in which he reported that his brother Walter, 1933 to 1934 adjutant of the SA group leader in Berlin, Karl Ernst , had told him in confidence that Ernst had set the Reichstag on fire. The advocates of the so-called single perpetrator thesis such as Hans Mommsen , Fritz Tobias and Uwe Backes , who assume that the Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe was the sole perpetrator of the Reichstag fire , criticized the fact that Hofer had not submitted the alleged Mohrenschildt records to anyone outside his research group for examination, and also noted critically that these records were noticeably used by the Hofer group in their publications on the Reichstag fire only after Mohrenschildt's death.

Private

Mohrenschildt was in his second marriage to the actress, broadcaster and children's book author Annelie (se) von Mohrenschildt, geb. Mielentz, married and lived with her in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg before they settled in Carinthia in the 1970s.

Archival material

• Party correspondence on Mohrenschildt (Federal Archives: holdings PK, Film I 123 "Mohr, Wilhelm - Moitzi, Josef", pictures 499-510).
• Documents on Mohrenschildt at the Supreme Party Court of the NSDAP (Federal Archives: OPG holdings, film G 88 "Mohr, Johann, Molks, Fritz", photos 1301–1312).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.sandammeer.at/rezensions/juergens-mannfagott.htm , accessed on May 20, 2020.
2. ↑ Christiane Sonntag: Medienkareen: biographical studies of post-war journalists in Hamburg , 2006, p. 172.
3. ↑ See u. a .: Pierre Gregoire: The Reichstag fire: the provocation of the 20th century. Research result , 1978 and Alexander Bahar : The Reichstag fire. How history is made , 2001.