Viktor Haefner
Viktor Haefner (born May 18, 1896 in Brenden , Waldshut district ; died 1967 ) was a German pilot.
Life and activity
During the First World War Haefner belonged to the Royal Bavarian Air Force, with which he a. a. in Palestine, where he fought with the Air Force 304 against the English. Most recently he reached the rank of first lieutenant.
From 1925 Haefner worked as a civilian pilot for Lufthansa and its predecessor companies. In the same year, on June 18, 1925, he was charged with providing military information to Western powers, guilty of divulging military secrets, and sentenced to five years in Spandau Prison. He was released on December 24, 1930.
In 1931 Haefner, who had joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) after 1918 , supported the Italian Democrat Giovanni Bassanesi in his actions to scatter anti-fascist leaflets over Milan from an airplane . When Bassanesi's arrest in Constance in November 1931 , he was pilot of the two-seater Junkers aircraft A50 ce , registration D 2155, which was also loaded with propaganda material, and was also arrested; it turned out that he did not have a valid license. Martin Venedey made himself available in Constance as legal counsel for the arrested.
A few weeks after the National Socialists came to power , Haefner was briefly taken into protective custody. After his release he went to Paris as an emigrant.
From Paris, Haefner wrote a letter dated June 29, 1933 to the Cardinal Secretary of State of the Vatican, Eugenio Pacelli , whom he had once flown as a pilot from Berlin to Freiburg: In this letter he denounced the terror that had prevailed in Germany since the National Socialists came to power - whereby he relied in particular on his own experiences during his protective custody as evidence - as well as the criminal character of the National Socialist system and linked to this the call to the powerful cardinal - who was de facto the head of government of the Papal States - to work to ensure that the Church should position against the Hitler station with all its forces at its disposal. In particular, he called on Pacelli, the German Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen , who came from the conservative camp and was then in Vienna to negotiate the Concordat, and whom he accused of having "his hands stained with the blood of his fellow believers" because of his collaboration with the National Socialists and his willingness to serve them, to confront them and to negotiate them with contempt. Like the rest of the Catholics in Hitler's government, who tolerated "fellow believers being locked up, beaten, and mistreated," he sharply criticized. He also addressed attacks against Jews and characterized the treatment of Jewish prisoners in protective custody, which he had witnessed, as cattle and criminal: "It is the greatest cultural disgrace of the last centuries as we German Catholics have to experience." In retrospect, he astutely prophesied that the annihilation of the Jews by National Socialism would be followed by the annihilation of the Catholics if the system were not stopped in time. As a first step he asked Pacelli to excommunicate the National Socialists - "these creatures" and the conservatives who cooperated with them.
His letter was - despite the request to do so - not answered and filed in the Vatican in a file La cuestione degli Ebrei in Germania . In Paris Haefner received material support from French Jews, which led him to emphasize to Pacelli in his letter of 1933 their human size - in contrast to the National Socialists and their accomplices.
After the outbreak of World War II , Haefner fled France to England. Haefner was on the GB special wanted list in 1940
On January 31, 1942, Haefner's name was put on the Reich citizenship list.
literature
- Hubert Wolf Papst & Teufel: the archives of the Vatican and the Third Reich , pp. 226–228.
Web links
- Viktor Haefner , at DNB
- Viktor Haefner , personnel files 1914–1919, at the Baden-Württemberg State Archives
- Report in Pariser Tageblatt , March 22, 1934, p. 4
- Aviator, soci, Catholic and anti-fascist , at grainworks, November 16, 2015. There is a military photo of Haefner and a newspaper snippet from the Milwaukee Journal from November 18, 1931
- Photo from the First World War at the Bavarian Main State Archive in the German Digital Library
- Viktor Haefner , in a group photo with Walter Rieseler , 1920 at the Johannisthal airfield
Individual evidence
- ↑ With the camera against Lawrence of Arabia , photo by Leutnant Haefner and legend, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 14, 2015, p. 24
- ↑ The information about the prison sentence is contradicting Hubert Wolf.
- ↑ Registration D 2155 , at Airhistory
- ↑ Werner Trapp: Difficult Terrain for Mussolini's opponents , in: Nebelhorn (Konstanz) No. 22, February 1983, at seemoz.de
- ↑ Alexander Smoltczyk : Vatican. Angels and demons . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 2006 ( online ).
- ^ Hitler's Black Book - information for Victor Haefner , at the Imperial War Museum
- ↑ Michael Hepp (ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger. 1. Lists in chronological order . Munich: Saur, 1985, p. 587
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Haefner, Viktor |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Häfner, Viktor |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German pilot |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 18, 1896 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brenden |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1967 |