Walter von Unruh (General of the Infantry)

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Signature of Walter von Unruh as city commander of Brest , August 20, 1941

Walter Rudolf Moritz von Unruh (born December 30, 1877 at Gut Klein Tillendorf, Fraustadt district , † September 16, 1956 in Bad Berneck in the Fichtel Mountains ) was a German officer , most recently a general of the infantry in World War II .

family

Walter came from the noble family of von Unruh and was the son of the Prussian prison director Rudolf von Unruh (1847–1903) and his wife Amalie, née von Schweinichen (1849–1938).

Unruh was his first marriage on October 11, 1902 in Görlitz Maria, née Lüders (born November 28, 1879 in Görlitz, † September 2, 1942 in Regensburg ), the daughter of the engineer and Prussian major of the Landwehr Richard Lüders and his wife Maria, born von Stremayr . Daughter Marga-Maria comes from this marriage.

His second marriage was on October 28, 1952 in Heidenheim an der Brenz Charlotte, née Schneck (born July 6, 1917 in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen ), the daughter of council clerk Wilhelm Schneck and his wife Martha, née Belser.

Military background

Unruh joined the infantry regiment "von Courbière" (2nd Posensches) No. 19 in Görlitz on March 7, 1896 , coming from the cadet corps as a second lieutenant . After a classic officer career, Unruh took part in the First World War as a general staff officer and was awarded the order Pour le Mérite on April 21, 1918 as major and chief of the general staff of the IV Reserve Corps .

After the end of the war, Unruh was the leader of the Görlitz Freikorps from December 23, 1918 to January 14, 1919 . He then worked as first general staff officer in the general staff of the Army High Command South Border Guard, which defeated the Munich Soviet Republic . Balance remained in the 100,000-man army of the Weimar Republic officer . He served from October 1, 1920 to February 28, 1922 as Chief of the General Staff of the 6th Division . In addition, Unruh acted from November 1, 1925 to November 30, 1926 as commander of Küstrin and was then commander of the 6th Infantry Regiment in Lübeck . Unruh his departure, which he on 28 February 1927, awarding of the disease Caused requested character as a major general was approved.

After his departure, Unruh served until 1937 as honorary adjutant of the former German Emperor Wilhelm II in his exile in Doorn . In the mid-thirties he had also worked as a functionary of the soldiers' union that existed between 1935 and 1938 . The concern of the federal government was to secure or even increase the military capability of the army members who had stepped down from active service to the so-called "leave of absence" status.

Unruh received on 27 August 1939 the so-called Tannenbergtag , the character as a lieutenant general bestowed.

On July 24, 1941, Unruh was reactivated while being promoted to lieutenant general in the army of the Wehrmacht and appointed city commander of Brest , where he stayed until September of the same year when he became commander of the rear army area of the 4th Army in Smolensk .

The "Unruh Commission"

Due to the immense personnel losses of the German armed forces after the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, it soon became necessary to develop new personnel resources. Adolf Hitler expressed on 19 April 1942 during a briefing with Franz Halder , the Chief of Staff of the Army that you vigorously against the Drückebergertum in the stage must proceed in the occupied territories. The military took this as an opportunity a few days later to send Lieutenant General Walter von Unruh, at that time commander of the rear army area 559 of the 4th Army in the area of Army Group Center , to the Fuehrer's headquarters in Rastenburg. Without having spoken to him personally, on May 4, 1942, Hitler appointed him commander of a staff to be set up especially for “special use” (e.g. V.) in the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW). Initially, his competencies were limited to the thinning of available personnel in departments of the Wehrmacht and only regionally to the Reichskommissariate Ostland and Ukraine ; later the powers of attorney were extended regionally. In the opinion of the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels , von Unruh was the ideal man for this task, since he was not only a military man, but also a staunch National Socialist. Von Unruh was also supported by the party chancellery Martin Bormanns ; his representative in office was the Deputy Gauleiter of Upper Silesia and former Reichsamtsleiter Albert Hoffmann .

On November 22nd, 1942, coincidentally on the day the 6th Army was enclosed near Stalingrad , Unruh was appointed “Special Representative for the Review of Appropriate War Operations” not only in the Wehrmacht, but also in the NSDAP and state administration. In the following period Unruh tried with modest success to free personnel for the front troops, in which he delivered endless arguments with the respective authorities about almost every single man. He owed this activity - in reference to the Nazi propaganda figure of Kohlenklau - the nickname "General Heldenklau".

In view of the increasing number of people lost by the Wehrmacht, Unruhs' success must have appeared questionable from the start. This is all the more true as the state and party services tried to close the gaps left by the release of their personnel for military service, primarily by employing women or members of the Hitler Youth and BDM . But that brought them into conflict with Armaments Minister Albert Speer , who tried to compensate for the staff shortages in the armaments industry by means of the same groups of people. The unrest's efforts ended up in the polycratic skirmish of competence in the “ Führer state ”, which was already in the process of being dissolved .

Life after 1945

Von Unruh was a US prisoner of war from July 1945 to July 1947 . In 1947 he wrote a reminder report for the Historical Division of the US Army about his work in the organization of the " total war ".

In this pamphlet he legitimized the Second World War with the "increasing population increase" and argued indirectly for rearmament for a new war against the USSR - this time on the side of the USA. Unruh presented himself as a benefactor beloved by the population in occupied Brest, whose local commander he was from July 30, 1941 until the city was transferred to the area of ​​responsibility of the civil administration on September 2, 1941. The text also contained numerous anti-Semitic swipes.

In 1948 Unruh was sentenced to five years in a labor camp; In 1950 the judgment was overturned. He died of a heart attack on September 16, 1956 at the age of 79.

Awards

literature

  • Ernst Klee : Walter von Unruh. Entry in ders .: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Updated edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , pp. 636-637.
  • Bernhard R. Kroener : "General Heldenklau." The "Balance Commission" in the vortex of polycratic disorganization (1942–1944). In: Ernst Willi Hansen, Gerhard Schreiber , Bernd Wegner (eds.): Political change, organized violence and national security. Contributions to the recent history of Germany and France. Festschrift for Klaus-Jürgen Müller. R. Oldenbourg, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-486-56063-8 , pp. 269-285.
  • Martin Moll (ed.): “Führer Decrees” 1939–1945. Edition of all surviving directives in the fields of state, party, economy, occupation policy and military administration issued by Hitler in writing during the Second World War, not printed in the Reichsgesetzblatt. Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-515-06873-2 .
  • Dieter Rebentisch : Führer State and Administration in the Second World War. Constitutional development and administrative policy 1939–1945. Steiner Vlg., Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3515051414 .
  • Genealogical manual of the nobility , noble houses volume A XIX, page 485, volume 66 of the complete series, CA Starke Verlag, Limburg (Lahn) 1977.
  • Karl-Friedrich Hildebrand, Christian Zweng: The knights of the order Pour le Mérite of the First World War. Volume 3: P-Z. Biblio Verlag, Bissendorf 2011, ISBN 3-7648-2586-3 , pp. 451-453.
  • Hanns Möller: History of the knights of the order pour le mérite in the world war. Volume II: M-Z. Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Berlin 1935, pp. 442-444.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ General of the Infantry a. D. Walter von Unruh: Contribution to the history of war. "Eastern Campaign." Historical Divisions Headquarters. United States Army, Europe. (1947) p. Ii.
  2. ↑ General a. D. von Unruh died . In: Hamburger Abendblatt from September 19, 1956.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Ranking list of the German Reichsheeres , Ed .: Reichswehrministerium , Mittler & Sohn Verlag , Berlin 1925, p. 116.
  4. ↑ Klaus D. Patzwall : The Knight's Cross Bearers of the War Merit Cross 1942–1945. Patzwall publishing house. Hamburg 1984, p. 34 f.
personal data
SURNAME Unruh, Walter von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Unruh, Walter Rudolf Moritz von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer, most recently General of the Infantry in World War II
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Gut Klein Tillendorf, Fraustadt district
DATE OF DEATH September 16, 1956
Place of death Bad Berneck in the Fichtel Mountains