Vladimir Vauhnik

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vladimir Vauhnik in the uniform of the Yugoslav army (photo from the 1920s)

Vladimir Vauhnik (born June 24, 1896 in Friedau , Lower Styria , Austria-Hungary ; † 1955 in Buenos Aires , Argentina ) was a Yugoslav officer of Slovene origin who worked as a military attaché and agent leader as a spy in the German Reich during the Second World War . In Berlin he was informed of the impending attack by the Wehrmacht on Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941 and warned the country leadership, which, however, did not believe him. After the surrender of Yugoslavia in 1941, he was imprisoned by the Gestapo for several months and then returned to occupied Yugoslavia, where he was allegedly active as a spy for the Western Allies . In 1944 he fled to Switzerland, from where he emigrated to Argentina in 1948, where he died seven years later. Its role between the various Yugoslav factions 1941-44 and in exile is controversial.

life and work

Origin, youth and officer school (1896–1914)

Vladimir Vauhnik was in 1896 at the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in the village Svetinje at Friedau (now Ormož) near Pettau born (today Ptuj). His father was a senior teacher at the local school; Vladimir had three brothers and a sister. The Lower Styria was inhabited mostly German at the time, but the parents were trying Vauhnik their children in the Slovenian national consciousness to educate. After attending elementary school, Vladimir switched to high school in Marburg an der Drau (now Maribor), where he quickly became a prime minister, especially in mathematics and history. In the 8th grade (lower secondary) Vladimir took part in an optional examination on Styrian history and was the best in the competition with students from higher grades, for which he received a gold coin from the Styrian state government.

After completing 8th grade, he switched to the infantry cadet school in Marburg an der Drau in 1911 . Admission to the first year of a cadet school required the successful completion of the four lowest classes of a grammar school; Vladimir was thus one of the youngest in his class, but was again one of the top of the class. After his third year at the cadet school, he reached the titular rank of lieutenant and was accepted to attend the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt . With the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, he began his military service in the Austro-Hungarian army at the age of just 18 .

War participation, General Staff Academy and officer career (1914–1936)

Vauhnik served as an officer in Infantry Regiment No. 17 , which consisted mostly of Slovaks , but also a good part of Slovenes . The regiment was part of the 6th Division, which was used in the Battle of Galicia near Przemyśl . He took part in a number of battles and was wounded several times. In 1918 Vauhnik was regimental commander for a short time , and after the collapse of the Alpine front he was taken prisoner in Italy , from which he escaped after a short time.

Vauhnik returned from captivity to Marburg an der Drau, whose affiliation was controversial between what would later become Austria and Yugoslavia. Vauhnik joined the newly formed Yugoslav army as a captain and took part in battles in southern Carinthia . He then completed his studies at the newly formed Yugoslav Military Academy in Belgrade and from 1922 attended the French staff academy École supérieure de guerre , and thus belonged to the same course as Charles de Gaulle and the later Chetnik General Draža Mihailović . After his return to Yugoslavia, he held various positions in the army before he was appointed professor at the Belgrade Military Academy in 1930, where he held the chair of strategy for seven years . In addition to the three languages ​​with which Vauhnik grew up (Slovenian, German and Serbo-Croatian), he learned French, Italian and English. He published a number of military pamphlets and was promoted to colonel - at the time of promotion he was the youngest officer of that rank in the entire Yugoslav army.

Military attaché and spy in Berlin (1937–1941)

In 1937, Vauhnik was appointed military attaché in the Royal Yugoslav Embassy in Berlin .

On October 28, 1940, the Greek dictator General Metaxas rejected an unacceptable ultimatum from Mussolini with a famous telegram that consisted only of the word "όχι" (Greek: no). The Italian troops then attacked Greece. On November 1, Vauhink received a telegram outside the normal chain of command from the Yugoslav War Minister Milan Nedić instructing him to make a precautionary claim to Salonika in the event of a Greek defeat in the war against Italy . Saloniki (now Thessaloniki) was Yugoslavia's most important export port to the Mediterranean and, unlike the Adriatic, was not easily blocked by the Italian navy. After coordinating with the envoy Ivo Andrić , who after asking the Deputy Foreign Minister could not find out anything about the telegram and described it as a betrayal of the Greek ally, Vauhnik met with Colonel von Mellenthin , head of the attaché group in the General Staff of the Army . He indicated the possibility of the Yugoslav army intervening in the event of an Italian occupation or Bulgarian annexation of Salonika. This message was then passed on to the German Foreign Office as intended by Vauhnik . This is important for the question of whether Prince Regent Paul and the Yugoslav government demanded Thessaloniki as "consideration" for Yugoslavia's accession to the Tripartite Pact , as Ribbentrop had claimed in a speech on April 6, 1941.

In the second week of March 1941, Vauhnik had received sufficiently reliable information from various sources about Germany's plan of attack on the Soviet Union, so that he sent this message to the Yugoslav General Staff and the Prince Regent's adjutant, including the attack strength of 200 divisions and the date of the second half of May Paul sent. The news, however, has not been confirmed, nor have any conclusions been drawn for Yugoslavia's strategy. Thereupon Vauhnik asked the envoy Andrić to pass the message on to Dimitrije Cincar-Marković , who could use it for his negotiations with Germany. Via the Swedish military attaché, he also informed the British mission, which in turn warned Russia via London.

On March 25, 1941, the signing ceremony of the forced accession of Yugoslavia to the three-power pact of the Germany-Italy-Japan axis took place in Vienna . Two days later, Yugoslav forces close to the German war opponent Great Britain carried out a coup . Thereupon the German leadership changed their plans for entering the war against Greece on the side of Italy (company "Marita"), and combined the operation with an attack on Yugoslavia. On April 2, 1941, Vauhnik warned his superiors in Belgrade with the exact date and time of the planned attack by the Wehrmacht on Yugoslavia (April 6, 1941) and the 32 divisions involved. Allegedly, he is said to have received this information from Colonel Hans Oster from the Abwehr , who, for Abwehr chief Canaris, was connected to the national conservative resistance. After the attack on Belgrade on April 6, 1941, Vauhnik was imprisoned by the Gestapo for four months in defiance of his diplomatic immunity .

In occupied Yugoslavia, flight and exile (1941–1955)

Vauhnik was released in autumn 1941. In his memoirs he writes that in Gestapo custody he was given a piece of paper with the note “Go to Slovakia or Croatia and wait for instructions there!”, And that Gestapo chief Walter Schellenberg personally gave him German citizenship and a leadership position offered to the Kruppwerke . Whether Vauhnik is describing at least attempted recruitment and whether his release is related to it is controversial. In any case, Vauhnik left Germany and stayed in Zagreb for a few months . Allegedly he should also have joined the fascist Ustaše there . Vauhnik's opponent Schellenberg wrote an autobiography in 1950 as a prisoner after his conviction in the Wilhelmstrasse Trial , in which Vauhnik's “knowledge of the political and military plans of the German leadership” was “astonishingly comprehensive and correct”.

After Yugoslavia was broken up in April 1941, conservative groups from Slovenia organized themselves in the Slovenian Confederation ( Slovenska zveza ). The union consisted of former members of the Slovenian People's Party and the Yugoslav National Party (JNS), as well as Roman Catholic circles under the direction of Bishop Gregorij Rožman , and maintained connections with the royal Yugoslav government in exile and the Chetniks Draža Mihailovićs . The Zveza initially had a semi-illegal status, but stepped out of isolation in mid-1942 and took part in the fight against communist resistance in Slovenia . For this purpose, the White Guard (it. MVAC, Milizia volontaria anticomunista ) was founded under Italian patronage , which was formally under Mihailović's command in Slovenia . After Italy's surrender in September 1943, the White Guard was crushed by troops of the Yugoslav People's Liberation Army . The Slovensko domobranstvo formation , which was founded and equipped with German help and commanded by the royal Yugoslav general Leon Rupnik , took its place.

Against the background of growing military successes of the Allies, there was an unification of nationalist forces in Slovenia in 1944, who pursued a rapprochement with Draža Mihailović. The Yugoslav government-in-exile was pursuing the plan to proclaim an independent Slovenia, which would be helped by an Anglo-American military intervention in case of danger. At the suggestion of the exile Yugoslav minister Miha Krek, the Zveza reorganized its troops in January 1944 and founded a command of the royal Yugoslav army in Slovenia, of which Vauhnik was appointed. Mihailović, confronted with a fait accompli by the Zveza resolution but striving for a reconciliation, recognized the new situation. Vauhnik is mentioned in documents of the Chetnik movement under the code names "Vasić" and "Vajko".

Vauhnik obtained a visa and settled in the Italian occupied Lubiana (German Laibach, today Ljubljana). There he founded and led the espionage organization BBZ , for which he used his contacts from his time as a military attaché. He passed on the information obtained to the British Consul General in neutral Bern via stations in Italy . In April 1944, Vauhnik's cousin Melita Thaler (ad. Tomic), who worked as a spy for BBZ, was arrested in Zagreb and soon afterwards sentenced to death . As a result, Vauhnik left Lubiana in June 1944 in the direction of Milan in order to flee from there to Switzerland by stealth. After the end of the Second World War, he decided against returning to the now socialist Yugoslavia under Tito and emigrated to Argentina in 1948. There he died in 1955 after an unsuccessful operation.

Works

  • Vladimir Vauhnik: Slobodna Slovenija . Argentina 1965. (Slovenian)
  • Vladimir Vauhnik: Memoirs of a military attaché - a fight against Hitler's instinct . Editorial Palabra Eslovena, Argentina 1967. (Translation from Slobodna Slovenija into German.)
  • Vladimir Vauhnik: Slobodna Slovenija . ČGP Delo, Yugoslavia 1972. (Slovenian, abridged edition and changed from the original edition for probably political reasons.)
  • Vladimir Vauhnik: Nevidljivi front - borba za očuvanje Jugoslavije . Munich 1984. (Translation from Slobodna Slovenija into Serbo-Croatian.)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Order of Battle - Galicia August, 1914 Quoted from Austria-Hungary's Last War 1914-1918 . Published by the Austrian Federal Ministry for the Army and the War Archives. Vienna, 1929-31. (Accessed September 23, 2008)
  2. ↑ JB Hoptner: Yugoslavia in Crisis - 1934-1941 , East Central European Studies of Columbia University. Columbia University Press, New York 1962, pp. 182-185.
  3. ^ Ernst von Weizsäcker: The Weizsäcker Papers, 1933-1950 , edited by Leonidas E. Hill. Propylaeen, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 548. ISBN 3-549-07306-2 .
  4. ↑ JB Hoptner: Yugoslavia in Crisis - 1934-1941 , East Central European Studies of Columbia University. Columbia University Press, New York 1962, pp. 232-234.
  5. ↑ The German campaign in Greece (Operation MARITA) In: Center of Military History of the United States Army: The German Campaigns in the Balkans (Spring 1941) . Washington DC, 1984, 1986. (CMH Pub 104-4) (Retrieved September 24, 2008.)
  6. ^ Friedrich Wiener: Partisan struggle in the Balkans - the role of the partisan struggle in the Yugoslav national defense . Ueberreuter, Vienna and Heidelberg 1976, p. 85
  7. ↑ Published in English: "His knowledge of the political and military plans of the German leadership was amazingly comprehensive and correct.", Walter Schellenberg: The Labyrinth. The Memoirs of Hitler's Secret Service Chief . André Deutsch Ltd., London. 1956. Abridged edition: Hitler's Secret Service . Pyramid. 1958. The memoirs first appeared in English, and may have been written in rough draft on behalf of Allen Dulles , the CIA, which was under construction .
personal data
SURNAME Vauhnik, Vladimir
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vauhnik, Vlado
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Yugoslav officer and military attaché, spy against the German Reich
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Friedau , Lower Styria , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH 1955
Place of death Buenos Aires , Argentina