Ulrich de Maizière

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Ulrich de Maizière in a general's uniform, shortly after his appointment as Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, September 1966.
General a. D. Ulrich de Maizière (2005)

Karl Ernst Ulrich de Maizière [ də mɛˈzjɛʀ ] (born February 24, 1912 in Stade , † August 26, 2006 in Bonn ) was a German officer . He served in the Reichswehr , the Wehrmacht and was most recently General of the Army of the Bundeswehr . During the Second World War he served in the last months of the war from spring 1945 as first general staff officer in the operations department of the general staff of the army in the OKH . From 1951 de Maizière was involved in the reconstruction of German armed forces in the Federal Republic of Germany and served from 1964 to 1966 as the third inspector of the army and then from 1966 to 1972 as the fourth inspector general of the Bundeswehr . Together with Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg and Wolf von Baudissin, De Maizière is considered to be the “father of the Bundeswehr” and the principle of “ inner leadership ”, which made the “ citizen in uniform ” a model.

Military career

Service in the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht and World War II

Ulrich de Maizière came from the Huguenot family Maizière and grew up in Hanover as the son of a doctorate in law, administrative officer and reserve officer Walter de Maizière († 1915) and Elsbeth, née. Dückers, on. After graduating from high school in 1930 at the Hanoverian Ratsgymnasium , he joined the Greifswald training battalion of the 5th Infantry Regiment of the Reichswehr in Stettin as an officer candidate . From 1931 to 1933 he attended the Dresden Infantry School and graduated as the best in the course. On August 1, 1933, he was made a lieutenant . In 1934/35 he was platoon leader and intelligence officer in Infantry Regiment 5 in Neuruppin . From 1935 to 1937 he was a battalion adjutant in the 50th Infantry Regiment Landsberg an der Warthe . In 1937 he became a regimental adjutant. In 1939 he took part in the attack on Poland as a captain and was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd class. After finishing a shortened general staff training in 1940 at the Military Academy in Dresden and promotion to the leader Reserve took place from August 1940, the use in the Army Group C . Here de Maizière was the first orderly officer (O 1) on the staff of Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb .

Promotions

In January 1941 he was transferred to the staff of the 18th Infantry Division under Lieutenant General Friedrich-Carl Cranz as Second General Staff Officer ( Ib ), responsible for supply . As part of the German-Soviet war in the summer of 1941, the division advanced towards Leningrad and was then forced into a positional war in the Volkhov Marshes .

In January 1942, de Maizière was withdrawn from the Eastern Front and transferred to the General Staff of the Army in the Army High Command (OKH). In the organizational department there, he was a major under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand, responsible for structuring, setting up and refreshing the field army divisions. During this time he got to know the chief of operations, Major General Adolf Heusinger, and his assistant Major Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg , whom he met again after the war when the German armed forces were rebuilding. After a year he handed over his duties to Major Ernst Ferber in February 1943 and was then reassigned to the Eastern Front.

In Orel , Russia , de Maizière, meanwhile promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, took over the post of First General Staff Officer (Ia) of the newly established 10th Panzer Grenadier Division under Lieutenant General August Schmidt . The division took part in the major Kursk offensive called Enterprise Citadel . The division was subject to retreat skirmishes for almost 16 months after the failure of the offensive. During this time, de Maizière was wounded by a fragment from an anti-tank shell. In January 1944 he received the Iron Cross 1st Class.

At the beginning of February 1945 he was reassigned to the General Staff of the Army in the OKH and served there as the first general staff officer in the operations department. After a short time he temporarily took over the department. In this function he also took part in the situation lectures given by Adolf Hitler in the Berlin Reich Chancellery in the spring of 1945 .

“The clearest and most sober presentations of the situation in these decisive days were given by Lieutenant Colonel i. G. de Maizière. As a rule, at night he summarized the last events of the day briefly and clearly without any glossing over. Most of the audience were impressed, and Hitler also enjoyed his precise expression. Given the current situation, he could no longer expect good news from the Eastern Front. All the more he valued de Maizière's confident and unpathetic demeanor. "

- Nicolaus von Below

When the Wehrmacht surrendered on May 8, 1945, in his function as chief of operations, he had the order to fly into the Kurland Basin in order to deliver farewell to the Kurland Army Group , which was about to be captured by the Soviets , and to clarify whether the order to surrender the local Commander-in-Chief Colonel - General Carl Hilpert and his Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Friedrich Foertsch , who later became the Inspector General of the Bundeswehr. Back in Flensburg , where parts of the Wehrmacht High Command had moved after the Red Army captured Berlin , de Maizière witnessed the arrest of the government of Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz on May 23, 1945 and was himself a British prisoner of war.

Captivity and civil life

Ulrich de Maizière was interned in the Zedelgem POW camp , Camp 2226 , where he managed the camp library with a stock of 750 books.

After two years, de Maizière returned from captivity to his daughter Barbara and his wife Eva , whom he had married in 1944.

In the same year, through contacts between his wife and Fritz Schmorl's sister, he began training as a bookseller in the Schmorl & von Seefeld bookstore in Hanover on September 1, 1947 , where he built up their music department.

However, he did not practice this profession for long, as he was soon called in by the political leadership of the young Federal Republic to help rebuild the armed forces.

Participation in the reconstruction of the German armed forces

Promotions

On Christmas Eve 1950 he received a letter from Colonel a. D. Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg , who asked him to work in the Blank office , the forerunner of the Federal Ministry of Defense . De Maizière accepted this possibility, as part of the German rearmament operated by Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer . From 1951 to 1955 he was a civil employee in the Blank office. On February 15, 1951, he became a military advisor to the German delegation during the talks with the European Defense Community (EVG) in Paris. After Theodor Blank himself came to Paris and, against the French resistance, had achieved equal rights for Germany in a possible European army and the conference gained in importance, de Maizière was replaced by Lieutenant General a. D. Hans Speidel replaced and returned to Bonn. After the EDC treaties failed in 1954 because France did not ratify them, the Federal Republic of Germany joined NATO in May 1955 .

Back in office Blank de Maizière was 1951 in the "Military Department" under Lieutenant General a. D. Heusinger as a consultant in the department “Military Defense in the Overall Framework”. At the same time, he was the permanent deputy of the Kielmansegg sub-department head. His main tasks in this function were to deal with all international defense issues and to maintain contacts with the military missions accredited in Bonn.

After the founding of the Bundeswehr in May 1955, de Maizière was sworn in on November 12, along with 101 other volunteers, and was appointed to the rank of colonel as head of department in what is now the Federal Ministry of Defense . In this position he was entrusted with leadership issues relating to national defense in the command staff of the Bundeswehr. Together with Colonel Jürgen Bennecke , with whom he had completed his general staff training in 1940, he worked out a compromise solution for the “ territorial organization ”, because a middle ground was required between the mobile NATO troops and the mostly stationary national defense authorities.

From left to right: Army Inspector Albert Schnez , Inspector General de Maizière, Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt , Minister of Defense Helmut Schmidt , Air Force Inspector Johannes Steinhoff , Bonn 1969.

On January 1, 1958, de Maizière, Brigadier General since December 22, 1956 , received his first troop command in the 1st Grenadier Division with Kampfgruppe A1, later Panzerbrigade 2 , in Hanover . In the course of this, the brigade concept was tested and then adopted for the entire Bundeswehr. Major General Burkhart Müller-Hillebrand , who was already superior in the High Command of the Heeres de Maizières, served as deputy division commander at the time. On April 1, 1959, he took over command of the now 1st Panzer Grenadier Division and made de Maizière his deputy.

After these two and a half years in the troop service, de Maizière became the commander of the School for Inner Leadership in 1960 , which was supposed to convey the leadership concept of the Bundeswehr, which is linked to the model of the citizen in uniform . On April 1, 1962, he took over the post of commander of the command academy of the Bundeswehr in Hamburg and was promoted to major general on August 1. In this position, the subject matter has been up to then in each case to the various Teilstreitkräfte Heer , Air Force and Navy was aligned transformed into a cross-training.

Army inspector

After two and a half years in Hamburg, de Maizière handed this post over to Major General Jürgen Bennecke in 1964, and after his appointment as Lieutenant General on October 1 in Bonn, Alfred Zerbel succeeded him as Inspector of the Army . In order to counteract the shortage of NCOs and officers in the army at the time, de Maizière adopted various measures, including an increase in the commitment period to 15 years, more qualified training and the possibility for NCOs to advance to the career of troop officers. During his tenure, the Leopard 1 battle tank was introduced into the army, which now numbered 300,000 soldiers . He also obtained 135 transport helicopters from Defense Minister Kai-Uwe von Hassel , thereby increasing air mobility.

General Inspector of the Bundeswehr

On August 25, 1966, de Maizière succeeded General Heinz Trettner, who resigned because of the Starfighter affair and the dispute between the civil and military leadership in the Ministry of Defense, and became the fourth inspector general of the Bundeswehr with his promotion to general . After the resignations of Trettner and the air force inspector Werner Panitzki, large parts of the officer corps saw de Maizière's quick assumption of office as an overly indulgent behavior towards the civilian political defense officials.

In the course of the 1968 de Maizière's tenure in 1968 and afterwards was accompanied by demonstrations, student riots and an increase in conscientious objection . When the Prague Spring was crushed by Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968 , the Bundeswehr was also on heightened alert, so that parts of the II Corps in southern Germany moved into their areas of disposal . During this time, situation lectures with Defense Minister Gerhard Schröder took place twice a day . In addition, de Maizière coordinated his plans with General Jürgen Bennecke , who was well known to him and who had been in charge of NATO's Allied Forces Central Europe since April .

After the SPD appointed the Federal Chancellor for the first time in the 1969 Bundestag election , Helmut Schmidt became Federal Minister of Defense. Under his leadership, de Maizière pushed ahead with the necessary reforms of the Bundeswehr. In order to meet the shortage of officer candidates in the army, the universities of the Bundeswehr were founded in Hamburg and Munich in the summer of 1970 . This was where future officers should be trained, as the army had become increasingly unattractive for young professionals - in contrast to the navy and the air force with their highly technology-oriented careers. In addition, the specialist officer career was introduced, which went back to de Maizière's predecessor Trettner. So could sergeant with special performance in the career of officers of the military professional service rise and the rank of captain / captain lieutenant (since 1993 Stabshauptmann / stabskapitänleutnant reach).

Under Defense Minister Schmidt, the elitist general staff training at the command academy of the Bundeswehr was to be abolished as part of the policy of détente . However, this failed because of the resistance of de Maizières. As a compromise, the curricula were supplemented with various aspects of the social sciences . However, it was Schmidt who passed the Blankenese decree on March 21, 1970 at a conference at the leadership academy . For the first time, this regulated the position and powers of the Inspector General and defined him as “overall responsible for Bundeswehr planning in the Ministry of Defense” . In de Maizière's term of office, the hairnet decree of February 1971 and the reduction of the basic military service from 18 to 15 months in September 1971 fall .

On March 31, 1972, de Maizière finally retired, handed over his post to Admiral Armin Zimmermann and retired in Bonn-Bad Godesberg .

After retirement

After retiring from active service, de Maizière was from 1973 to 1994 chairman of the Federal Defense Minister's commission for the "History of the Armed Forces". Between 1978 and 1979 he also chaired the Defense Minister Hans Apel's commission for “Leadership and Decision-making Responsibility in the Bundeswehr”. He was also President of the Clausewitz Society from 1976 to 1982 , and Honorary President from 1983.

In retirement, he wrote the books Leading in Peace and In Duty . His memories On Duty - Life Report of a German Soldier in the 20th Century are considered to be significant testimony to recent German military history and trace the events of the 20th century from the perspective of one of the most important historical figures in the Bundeswehr.

family

Ulrich de Maizière's father Walter de Maizière (born October 22, 1876 in Dortmund; † October 24, 1915 in Palanca / Serbia) was a councilor and head of the Stader district government when Ulrich was born . In August 1912, Walter de Maizière followed his friend Kurd Graf von Berg-Schönfeld to the Prussian provincial government in Hanover. He fell in World War I as a reserve captain and company commander of the 10th Company of the 4th Brandenburg Infantry Regiment No. 24.

Ulrich and Eva de Maizière had two daughters and two sons. The younger son Thomas de Maizière ( CDU ) was Federal Minister of Defense from 2011 to 2013 and Federal Minister of the Interior until March 2018 . The older son Andreas de Maizière was a long time member of the Board of Management of Commerzbank .

Ulrich's older brother Clemens de Maizière (1906–1980) was a lawyer in the GDR , a synodal of the Berlin-Brandenburg Church, a member of the GDR CDU and a long-time employee of the MfS . He reported to the MfS in particular about his brother Ulrich de Maizière. Ulrich de Maiziere had two sisters, Irene and Suzanne. Lothar de Maizière , the last Prime Minister of the GDR, is the son of Clemens de Maizière and thus Ulrich de Maizière's nephew.

Awards and honors

Fonts

  • Soldier leadership - today. Lectures and speeches on the task and situation of the Bundeswehr , R. v. Decker's Verlag G. Schenck, Hamburg 1966; 2nd expanded and 3rd edition under the title Confession to the Soldier. Military Leadership in Our Time , 1971, ISBN 3-7685-2271-7 .
  • Lead - in peace. 20 years service for the armed forces and the state , Bernard & Graefe, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-7637-5134-3 .
  • Defense in Central Europe. Study on behalf of the Assembly of the Western European Union , Lehmann, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-469-00554-0 .
  • In duty. Life report of a German soldier in the 20th century , Mittler, Herford Bonn 1989, ISBN 3-8132-0315-8 (autobiography).

literature

Web links

Commons : Ulrich de Maizière  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c John Zimmermann: Ulrich de Maizière - General der Bonner Republik, 1912–2006 , Munich 2012, p. 11 f.
  2. ↑ Nicolaus v. Below, as Hitler's adjutant 1937–45, v. Hase & Koehler Verlag, Mainz 1980, ISBN 3-7758-0998-8 , p. 410.
  3. ↑ Camp library Camp 2226 (page 109)
  4. ↑ Helmut R. Hammerich, Rudolf J. Schlaffer (Eds.): Military development generations of the Bundeswehr 1955 to 1970. Selected biographies , in the series Security Policy and Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Germany , Volume 10, on behalf of the Military History Research Office , Munich 2011: Oldenbourg, ISBN 978-3-486-70436-5 , p. 411; online through google books .
  5. ↑ The spelling of the first name with and without "h" varies in the official documents. It is also not clear from the literature that he was the police chief of Hanover.
  6. ↑ Gerhard Besier : The Brotherly Agent , Focus online, July 1, 1996.
  7. ↑ Zimmermann: de Maiziere , p. 15.
  8. ↑ Legion of Honor for German General . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , December 12, 1962.
personal data
SURNAME Maizière, Ulrich de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Maizière, Karl Ernst Ulrich de (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German military, General Inspector of the Bundeswehr and President of the Clausewitz Society
DATE OF BIRTH February 24, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Stade
DATE OF DEATH August 26, 2006
Place of death Bonn