Walter Frevert

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From left to right: Oberforstmeister Walter Frevert, Reichsjägermeister Hermann Göring and Oberstjägermeister Ulrich Scherping during the assessment of deer antlers ( drop sticks )

Walter Frevert (* 13. October 1897 in Hamm , † the 30th July 1962 in the forestry office Kaltenbronn , Gernsbach ) was a German forester , hunter , hunting writer and war criminals of different because of his journalistic activities since the 1930s great influence on the German Hunting exercised . As head forester from 1936 to 1945 he managed the state hunting and nature reserve Rominter Heide (East Prussia) and was involved in war crimes in the vicinity of the Białowieża jungle during the Second World War . After the Second World War he was responsible for the state and representative hunting area of Kaltenbronn in the northern Black Forest , where he continued the hunting diplomacy already maintained in Rominten in the interests of the newly founded state of Baden-Württemberg .

Frevert is the editor and author of force as standard works books on German fighter, like the first in 1936 on behalf of Hermann Goering and the German Reich Federal hunters appeared hunting lichen customs . These books are still bestsellers today and are considered classics of German hunting literature that have shaped generations of hunters. Despite their genesis in the ideological context of National Socialism, or despite the revisionist romanticization of the former German East (especially in Rominten , 11th edition 2008), they are reissued to the present day without historical commentary.

Life

Childhood and youth

Walter Frevert was the son of the dentist and landowner Gustav Frevert and his wife Bertha, née Overhoff. He spent his childhood and youth in his hometown Hamm and from 1906 to 1915 at the "Haus Gierken" estate near Schlangen . Not least through his uncle, forester Wilhelm Frevert, he came into contact with hunting and the forestry profession early on , which led him to want to take up the forestry profession himself. He attended the humanistic grammar school in Paderborn and the grammar school in Lemgo .

During the First World War and forestry training

After the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered on June 21, 1915 as a field artilleryman in the replacement division of the 1st Kurhessischer Feldartillerie-Regiment No. 11 in Kassel. He stayed with this unit throughout the war, was awarded the Iron Cross and fought, among others, in front of Verdun and Cambrai .

Immediately after the end of the war, in the winter semester of 1918/19 he began studying forest sciences at the Eberswalde Forest Academy . Further stations in his academic years were Hann. Münden , Munich and Halle . In the spring of 1922, he completed his legal clerkship in several Prussian forest offices . At the beginning of 1924 he passed the Great State Forest Examination . He then found work as a forest assessor from 1924 to 1928 in the Wolfgang forestry office near Hanau .

Forestry career

On April 1, 1928, Walter Frevert was promoted to forester and appointed head of the Battenberg Forestry Office , where he worked until the end of November 1936. Frevert's interest in the management of the red deer and in hunting customs as well as his success in the management of the Hanoverian bloodhound made him known to the German hunters early on.

Frevert had been a member of the German Reichskriegerbund Kyffhäuser since 1928 , joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 (membership no. 2.273.868) and was also a member of the SA reserve from summer 1933 . However, he did not appear politically or otherwise actively in either of the Nazi organizations.

On December 1, 1936, Ulrich Scherping , head of the hunting department in Berlin, arranged for Frevert to be transferred to Rominter Heide , where he initially headed the Nassawen Forestry Office and, from April 1, 1938, also became a forest inspection officer for all four forest offices in Rominter Heide. He was the successor to Ferdinand Wallmann , who had been transferred to the Hanover Government Forestry Office after 29 years. With effect from December 16, 1938, Frevert was promoted to head forester . When he was appointed to the Nassawen Forestry Office in 1936, he resigned from both the German Reichskriegerbund Kyffhäuser and the SA at his own request. When Walter Frevert had started an affair with Heinke Barckhausen, the 24-year-old widow of his colleague forester Paul Barckhausen, his wife Gertrud, née Habich, shot herself with her husband's rifle on October 14th. Frevert then later married Heinke Barckhausen, who would outlive him by 35 years. In addition to forestry and game preservation, one of Frevert's main tasks in Rominten was looking after the hunting guests of Reichsjägermeister Hermann Göring and thus maintaining personal and politically relevant networks through the hunt . The British ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson , King Boris of Bulgaria , international diplomats and aristocrats as well as high-ranking Nazi politicians and the military are explicitly mentioned in his publications .

War crimes in Bialowies / Białowieża

During the Second World War, Frevert, who was promoted to major in the reserve in 1943 , found various uses in which hunting, nature conservation and military activities were superimposed. Even in Rominten, hunting and nature conservation benefited from the race-ideologically motivated campaign of conquest. In 1941, on Göring's orders, Frevert expanded the nature reserve of the Rominter Heide in the south-east by an area of ​​around 20,000 hectares on conquered Polish territory. In order to set up the so-called forest office "Adlerfelde", the residents of ten affected villages were unceremoniously resettled to the Generalgouvernement .

Racial ideology radicalized by the National Socialists, wild game fantasies about hunting, military violence and the attempt to regulate the conquered “living space” in the east complemented and permeated each other in the occupation of the so-called “primeval forest” of Bialowies / Białowieża. The forest area in today's border area of ​​Poland and Belarus had served as a hunting area for Polish kings and Russian tsars for centuries and, due to one of the last populations of wild bison, was one of the mythical places of hunting-motivated nature conservation in Europe. When Göring gave the order in the spring of 1941 to enlarge the reserved area in the core area of ​​the conquered "primeval forest" by 100,000 to 260,000 hectares and to set it up first as a Reich hunting area and later as a regular state hunting area, Frevert and Ulrich Scherping, a delegate with him, had the opportunity to put into practice the fantasies of a Central European-Germanic primeval wilderness projected onto this “primeval forest” since the German Empire. After the establishment of the “Oberforstamt Bialowies” in an old hunting lodge belonging to the Tsar, Göring ordered in July 1941 that the forest area be “cleared” of “Jews” and “partisans”. The area was to become a "Germanic jungle" with "original German" game animals. Among other things, the Heck cattle bred by the Berlin Zoo Director Lutz Heck , which represented a rough copy of the extinct aurochs , were to be released into the wild. Frevert was tasked with the execution, received full powers and a hundredth from the Forest Protection Corps, and proceeded with the utmost ruthlessness. Villages were encircled, the residents were given half an hour to pack their belongings and load them onto wagons in order to be " evacuated " in treks in an easterly direction . The villages, all built of wood, were simply burned down afterwards. From July 24 to 31, 1941 alone, 34 villages were razed to the ground in this way and over 7,000 people displaced. The Police Battalion 322 , which Frevert directly subordinate to perform these actions, shot as part of a special mission by order of the Higher SS and Police Leader from July 23 to August 21, 1941 also all male Jews in the area - the death toll is here at least 584 specified. The remaining Jewish inhabitants, mostly women and children, were in the ghetto of Kobryn near Brest-Litovsk deported .

Against " partisans " Frevert also proceeded with extreme severity, and their supporters were hung up as a deterrent. Frevert described his approach blatantly in his correspondence: "Unfortunately, there are still large numbers of partisans and other bandits here, and the distance on these is considerably greater than on all game". According to Wilhelm Bode and Elisabeth Emmert, “in Bialowies there was a real 'hunt' for the people hiding in the forests - occasionally regular driven hunts and with hunting weapons ”. On the other hand, Frevert - who always spoke of Polish hunting with great respect - treated the few remaining Polish forest workers , foresters and hunters well. By the summer of 1942, 116 villages had been destroyed and around 900 people shot. During this time, Frevert himself was at least temporarily on site, even if he was seriously ill in autumn 1941 and had to undergo an operation in Berlin . As a result, he was also on leave of absence from forestry work until the end of March 1942. His involvement in the war crimes of Bialowies during the occupation in World War II did not become known to a wider public until 2004 through the biography of Andreas Gautschi .

When the Red Army crossed the Reich border at the beginning of October 1944 and stood in front of the Rominter Heide , Frevert sent his family to the west to flee . He himself suffered a serious knee injury in an accident, which resulted in a transfer to the zoo bunker hospital in Berlin. After the recovery, however, Frevert did not go back to Rominten, but to the Western Front in the Netherlands and experienced the " collapse " as commander of The Hague . In the course of the surrender , he handed the city over to the Canadian division commander, became the commander of the German prison camp in Scheveningen, and was released from captivity on July 20, 1945.

Continuity and a new beginning in the Black Forest

In the immediate post-war period Frevert and his family lived on the Barkhausen manor Heinsen above Elze near Hanover , where he worked as a night watchman and caught foxes whose skins he was able to sell well on the black market in Hanover for 300 to 500 Reichsmarks . He also began forest management contracts and Forest expertise for Privatwaldungen elaborate.

By letting his wartime activities in Bialowieza wisely mentioned, he succeeded in Baden successfully around the post as head of the forestry office Forbach I in Murgtal to apply what was approved on April 1, 1947 even if only as an employee. However, allegations and rumors about his activities in Rominten and World War II as well as his wife's suicide arose, which the authorities are now investigating. As early as June 1947, Frevert himself was able to present a whole series of exonerating “ Persil notes ”. In one of these documents, for example, Oberlandforstmeister Fritz Nüßlein cleverly veiled Frevert's role in Bialowies against his better judgment. The investigations finally fizzled out. The denazification process that began in early 1948 also went very well for Frevert. Initially classified as a follower and downgraded from head forester to forester in terms of salary, he was able to convince the investigative commission of his “political unreliability” during the Nazi era , also by pointing out that he had already turned his back on the SA in 1936.

From 1953 Walter Frevert headed the Kaltenbronn Forestry Office in Gernsbach

When Frevert took over the neighboring Kaltenbronn Forestry Office in Gernsbach in 1953, initially as a representative, some of the forestry officials were concerned that Frevert would transform the northern Black Forest into a “little Rominten”. But that was precisely what was ultimately politically desired, because in 1954 the Kaltenbronn, the core area of ​​the red deer population in the northern Black Forest and the former court hunting ground of the Grand Dukes of Baden, was elevated to the state hunting ground of the newly founded state of Baden-Württemberg by a cabinet decision. In 1955, Frevert and his family built the "Haus Rominten" in Gernsbach. In the service of the state of Baden-Württemberg, Frevert kept strong deer and capercaillie, which high-ranking guests were given to hunt according to their status. The political, military and economic elites led by Frevert auf dem Kaltenbronn included allied high commissioners , French and US generals, diplomats such as the British Ambassador Frederick Hoyer Millar, Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie , Bundestag President Eugen Gerstenmaier , but also industrialists such as the South Baden native Textile manufacturer Hans Schöpflin . When Frevert invited the former Chancellor Franz von Papen to drive the Kaltenbronn in December 1958 , however, he aroused the displeasure of his immediate employer and the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg. The courtesy to Papen, who had fallen out of favor and known Frevert from Rominten, earned him the disapproval of the responsible ministry. For the first time, public attention was drawn to the exclusive hunted contacts carried out by Göring's so-called “body hunter master” on Kaltenbronn.

If Frevert put his hunting qualifications in the service of political elites after 1945, as he did in the Nazi era, he seemed to have hardly learned any lessons from the war crimes he co-committed. In 1957 he wrote openly about this time: When I met an old friend in the summer of 1945 as a refugee who had saved nothing but life, he said to me: 'Look, Frevert, now you have the receipt! At that time I advised you not to go to Rominten, if you had followed my advice, you would still be sitting comfortably in Battenberg today! ' Without thinking, I replied: 'And if I had known beforehand how I would fare - I would have gone anyway.'

He was also hunting again and was active as a bloodhound handler in the Hirschmann Association, was one of the judges on the search for exams and had been chairman of the International Bloodhound Association since 1955. He himself had led a total of eight bloodhounds during his life, including the well-known "Hirschmann". At the International Hunting Exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1954 , Frevert took over the shows "Hunting Customs" and "Rominten" - as he had done before at the one in Berlin in 1937.

Author and other activities

He wrote the books The Just Management of the Hanoverian Bloodhound (1935) and Hunting Customs (1936). The latter book was written on behalf of the Nazi Reichsjägermeister Hermann Göring and had a lasting effect on German hunters. Up to the present day it has shaped views of supposedly traditional, hunting customs. Critics such as Wilhelm Bode and Elisabeth Emmert point out that Frevert simply invented some “customs” himself or interpreted them very arbitrarily, and that National Socialist ideas were also incorporated. When compiling Hunting Customs , Frevert made significant use of the Plessian house traditions, which were first imported into the Prussian court hunt and thus popularized by Kaiser Wilhelm II . “What Frevert represented as German customs”, so Bode and Emmert, “was an extract of feudal customs drawn at will, a potpourri”.

He was also active as a hunting writer and wrote several books in addition to a number of articles for specialist magazines such as Wild and Hund . Wide distribution found German Jagdsignale and brackish Jagdsignale (1951) and the Dictionary of hunting. A reference work of hunting expressions (1953). His hunting memory books And can it stay autumn for the whole year (1957), The hunter's life is full of lust and new every day (1960) and In the evening I brought rich prey (posthumously 1963) turned out to be bestsellers, which made him widely known did. In summary, they were last published in 2007 under the title Mein Jägerleben. Collected stories of the great hunter . For his best-known book, Rominten (1957), Frevert received the 1959 literature prize from the German Hunting Protection Association (DJV) . Frevert was able to convey his undisputed hunting expertise in a concise style. However, it cannot be denied that, especially in his hunting memory books, he left out, belittled or marginalized everything that might have been compromising. For example, he presented his work as Goering's hunting guide as a more or less annoying duty.

There were also regular radio and television appearances . For years he was an employee of Südwestfunk Baden-Baden and Süddeutscher Rundfunk . For example, on Hubertustag 1951 , the Südwestfunk broadcast a two-hour program with him about hunting and hunting culture. Although he only rarely wore the forest uniform after the war, but also in civilian hunting clothing, usually combined with a monocle and chamois or saubart on his hat, the ever dashing Frevert conveyed the image of the apparently "typical" German forest official to the public - but it did even to the point of self-caricature.

Waidblatt after Frevert from Puma

His many activities also included designing a range of hunting knives or making himself available to test a new hunting suit.

Death and honors

Frevert died on July 30, 1962, allegedly in a hunting accident. The exact circumstances are considered unclear, but the responsible public prosecutor's office in Baden-Baden found that “the entire circumstances, in particular the location of the dead man and the weapon”, “speak for suicide”. The corresponding letter from the Baden-Baden public prosecutor's office to the Baden-Baden criminal investigation department of September 20, 1962 is in Frevert's personal file in the Stuttgart State Archives. However, the authorities involved agreed to declare the incident a hunting accident without any negligence, also in order to allow the bereaved family to benefit from the accident welfare. The burial took place on August 2, 1962 in the cemetery in Gernsbach. A large number of mourners paid their last respects to Frevert. At his grave, the President of the Bundestag Eugen Gerstenmaier , who has repeatedly been a hunting guest in the Kaltenbronn Forestry Office, and the State Forestry President Hubert Rupf spoke .

In 1964 the forest administration in Frevert's former hunting district Stadtwalderkopf erected a memorial stone in memory of him and his work, just a few hundred meters from the place where he had died two years earlier.

Coming to terms with the past

Walter Frevert enjoyed a high reputation among the German hunters for decades. Only Wilhelm Bode and Elisabeth Emmert (2000) and Andreas Gautschi (2004) succeeded in bringing this forester's long veiled involvement in the war crimes of National Socialist Germany to the public. The fact that this took so long has to do with the file situation and various time circumstances. According to Gautschi's research, the name Freverts cannot be found in the files of the Polish main commission investigating National Socialist crimes in Poland . There is also no evidence in Polish files of an alleged extradition request from the Polish government. In addition, Simon Wiesenthal had three or four long conversations with Frevert in the Kaltenbronn Forestry Office in 1958, the content of which, however, is not known. In Germany, the investigation into the Bialowies incidents did not begin until two years after Frevert's death. It was not until 1971 that a preliminary investigation was opened - apparently in ignorance of his death - through an application by the chief public prosecutor to the Darmstadt Regional Court against Frevert and 23 other members of the German occupation in Bialowies for their involvement in war crimes.

bibliography

Original editions and important articles in hunting magazines

  • The fair leadership of the Hanoverian welding dog , Berlin 1935 (7th edition updated by Karl Bergien and Wolfgang Bruchmüller under the title The leadership of the welding dog. Training and use of the hunting dog on the trail of the wound using the example of the Hanoverian welding dog , Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-440 -08253-9 )
  • Hunting Customs , Berlin 1936 (several editions, most recently as Hunting Customs and Hunting Language , Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-440-11034-8 or ISBN 3-440-11034-6 )
  • as editor: old and new hunter songs. With pictures and ways of singing , 7th edition, Hann. Münden 1939
  • as editor: Ferdinand von Raesfeld : Das deutsche Waidwerk. A teaching and manual for hunting , 5th to 9th edition, Berlin 1942 to Hamburg and Berlin 1961
  • The German hunting signals and bracken hunting signals. With Merkversen , Hamburg and Berlin 1951
  • Dictionary of hunting. A reference work for hunting expressions , Hamburg and Berlin 1953 (several editions, most recently as Hunting Customs and Hunting Language , Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-440-11034-8 or ISBN 3-440-11034-6 )
  • Feeding the deer. Establishment and construction of feed systems as well as feed and feed quantities , Hamburg and Berlin 1956
  • Rominten , Munich, Bonn and Vienna 1957 (10th edition, Munich, Vienna and Zurich 1996, ISBN 3-405-11858-1 )
  • And could it be autumn all year round. Hunting and other memories , Hamburg and Berlin 1957 (9th edition, Hamburg and Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-490-36811-8 )
  • The hunter's life is full of lust and new every day. Hunting and other memories , Hamburg and Berlin 1960 (7th edition, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-490-07411-4 )
  • In the evening I brought rich booty. The last part of the hunting memories , Hamburg and Berlin 1963 (6th edition, Hamburg and Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-490-36711-1 )
  • Ten years of hunting master in Rominten , in: Wild und Hund Heft 39/40 (1942), pp. 148–153.

Under pressure

  • Walter Frevert, Heinrich Jacob, instructions for blowing hunting horns. With a selection of the most common hunting signals including the signals for bracken hunting in the official version revised by the DJV and with the memorabilia by Walter Frevert , 10th edition, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-440-10227-0
  • Hunting customs and hunting language , Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-440-11034-8 or ISBN 3-440-11034-6
  • The leadership of the bloodhound. Training and use of the hunting dog on the trail of the wound using the example of the Hanoverian welding dog , 7th edition updated by Karl Bergien and Wolfgang Bruchmüller, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-440-08253-9
  • My hunter life. Collected stories of the great hunter , Stuttgart 2007 ( ISBN 978-3-440-11276-2 or ISBN 3-440-11276-4 )

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Walter Frevert. A Weidmann's change and ways . Nimrod-Verlag, Hanstedt 2004, pp. 7-11.
  2. ↑ "Leo u. a., Mobilization and departure of the riding division of the 1st Kurhessischer Feldartillerie-Regiment No. 11 for the western front, 1914 ”. Hessian sources on the First World War. In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
  3. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Walter Frevert. A Weidmann's change and ways . Nimrod-Verlag, Hanstedt 2004, pp. 68-69.
  4. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Walter Frevert. A Weidmann's change and ways . Nimrod-Verlag, Hanstedt 2004, p. 68.
  5. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Walter Frevert. A Weidmann's change and ways . Nimrod-Verlag, Hanstedt 2004, pp. 66-67 u. 149.
  6. ^ Walter Frevert: Rominten. Bonn, Munich, Vienna 1957, pp. 209–224.
  7. ↑ Bernhard Gissibl: Frevert and large animals. Hunting, rule and the protection of 'primeval nature' between the 'German East', Black Forest and East Africa, in: Nils M. Franke, Uwe Pfenning (ed.): Continuities in nature conservation in Germany after 1945. Baden-Baden: Nomos 2014, 107– 131; Thaddeus Sunseri: Exploiting the Jungle. German post-colonial Forestry in Poland and Central Africa, 1900–1960, pp. 305–342, in: Past & Present 214 (2012), pp. 305–342.
  8. ^ On the following, Andreas Gautschi: Walter Frevert. A Weidmann's change and ways . Nimrod-Verlag, Hanstedt 2004, pp. 74-90; Philipp W. Blood: Securing Hitler's living space . The Luftwaffe and Białowieża Forest, 1942–1944, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24.2 (2010), pp. 247–272, 250f.
  9. ↑ C. Driessen and J. Lorimer: Back-breeding the aurochs: the Heck brothers, National Socialism and imagined geographies for nonhuman Lebensraum. In: P. Giaccaria and C. Minca, Hitler's Geographies. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2016. researchgate.net: pdf version , in particular pp. 12-14.
  10. ↑ The numbers according to Blood: Securing Hitler's Lebensraum, p. 251.
  11. ↑ In this section SS group leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was responsible for the shootings of Jews and the fight against partisans , cf. Blood: Securing Hitler's Lebensraum , p. 251. "
  12. ↑ Quoted from: Wilhelm Bode and Elisabeth Emmert: Jagdwende. From noble hobby to ecological craft. (3rd, complete edition) Munich, 2000, p. 154 with sources, ISBN 3-406-45993-5 .
  13. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Walter Frevert. A Weidmann's change and ways . Nimrod-Verlag, Hanstedt 2004
  14. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Walter Frevert. A Weidmann's change and ways . Nimrod-Verlag, Hanstedt 2004, pp. 97-100.
  15. ^ Hubert Intlekofer: History of Kaltenbronn. About high moor, forest and imperial hunt. Gernsbach 2011.
  16. ↑ Gißibl, Frevert and the big animals, p. 108.
  17. ↑ Quoted from: Wilhelm Bode and Elisabeth Emmert: Jagdwende. From noble hobby to ecological craft. (3rd, complete edition) Munich 2000.
  18. ^ Wilhelm Bode, Elisabeth Emmert: Jagdwende. From noble hobby to ecological craft. Munich: CH Beck 2000, p. 150.
  19. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Walter Frevert. A Weidmann's change and ways . Nimrod-Verlag, Hanstedt 2004, p. 124.
  20. ↑ (EA 7/150 Bü 1732)
  21. ↑ Bernhard Gissibl: Frevert and large animals. Hunting, rule and the protection of 'primeval nature' between the 'German East', Black Forest and East Africa, in: Nils M. Franke, Uwe Pfenning (ed.): Continuities in nature conservation in Germany after 1945. Baden-Baden: Nomos 2014, 107– 131, 127.
  22. ^ Andreas Gautschi: Walter Frevert. A Weidmann's change and ways . Nimrod-Verlag, Hanstedt 2004, pp. 147-148.
personal data
SURNAME Frevert, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German forester and hunting writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamm
DATE OF DEATH July 30, 1962
Place of death Kaltenbronn Forestry Office , Gernsbach