Wessel Freytag from Loringhoven

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Coat of arms of the Freytag von Loringhoven

Wessel Freiherr Freytag von Loringhoven (born November 10 . Jul / 22. November  1899 greg. In Gross Born , Courland , Latvia ; † 26. July 1944 in OKH Mauerwald , East Prussia , German Empire ) was colonel in the general staff of the German Wehrmacht . He was a member of the military resistance against Adolf Hitler and had been friends with Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg , who carried out the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, since 1937 .

Life

Wessel Freytag von Loringhoven came from the Baltic branch of an old Westphalian noble family and grew up in Adiamünde in Livonia (today Skulte , Latvia). After graduating from high school, he joined the Baltic State Armed Forces in 1918, when they were converted to the 13th Infantry Regiment of the Latvian Army, he became a Latvian soldier. In 1922 he left the newly founded Republic of Latvia as a German-Baltic to join the German Reichswehr .

His military career led him in 1943 as Colonel i. G. to the Wehrmacht High Command (OKW). Initially a sympathizer of National Socialism , he joined the resistance because of his experiences during the Eastern campaign and the associated German crimes. Through his work as Ic of Army Group South against the Security Police, he collided with the heads of the SS in the Ukraine as early as the spring of 1942 (see “Secret FS SS-Brigadführer Dr. Max Thomas (BdS, Commander of the Security Police and Security Service) to SS -Obergruppenführer Hans-Adolf Prützmann (HSSPF) ”). However, he was able to evade the further investigations of the SS announced by telex. In 1943 he was promoted to Colonel I by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris . G. seconded to the OKW in Berlin and deployed there under Canaris in the Abwehr as chief of Department II. Sabotage . His predecessor in this office was Major General Erwin Lahousen , with whom he and Admiral Canaris flew to Venice on July 29, 1943 to inform the Italian secret service chief Cesare Amè about the SS plans to remove the Pope and King. Canaris had succeeded in getting the Venice flight approved by Keitel under the “review of Italy's loyalty to the Alliance”. The success of this trip is confirmed by the “memories” of the then German ambassador to the Vatican, Ernst von Weizsäcker (page 362 ff).

Wessel Freytag von Loringhoven procured the explosives with which Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg carried out the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 . After Wilhelm Canaris left the defense / foreign office, Freytag-Loringhoven had to leave the defense. He found his next job as head of the Army Department in the Army General Staff . There, thanks to his position, he was able to procure English explosives with fuses, which he now pretended to have sunk in the Mauersee at the end of June 1944. However , after the failure of the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, the Gestapo was able to prove that the detonators and explosive material came from this very source and that Freytag-Loringhoven had handed the material over to Stauffenberg. This agrees with the presentation by Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff , who handled the explosives at Army Group Center and tested them like Henning von Tresckow and Fabian von Schlabrendorff (p. 121 and 144 in Soldat in Downfall , photo of the second, from Stauffenberg and Werner von Haeften thrown away the explosives package on their trip to the airfield.) Ernst Kaltenbrunner from the Reich Security Main Office succeeded in clearing up Freytag's perpetrators in detail. On July 26, 1944, immediately before his arrest by the Gestapo, Freytag-Loringhoven put an end to his life himself because, as an officer of the military defense, he was familiar with the interrogation methods to be expected to track down co-conspirators.

He had been extremely skeptical about the chances of success of an assassination attempt, for example at a meeting of resistance officers in Tolksdorf Castle (near “Wolfsschanze” ) in the early summer of 1944. He said at the time: “But even if it doesn't succeed, at least it will be in Germany History says that people gave their lives to eliminate this criminal. ”Freytag-Loringhoven's farewell letter to his wife is in the Military History Museum of the Bundeswehr in Dresden. After his death his wife Elisabeth was born. von Rauch and the wives of the other participants were arrested on July 20th in Moabit. His four sons were separated from their mother and in Bad Sachsa in Sippenhaft taken from which they were released in October 1944th

Works

As the Third General Staff Officer (Ic) of Army Group B , he presented a memorandum before the Battle of Stalingrad at the beginning of October 1942, which awaited the Russian major attack on the Don , where it actually broke out on November 19. In it he foresaw the coming Kesselschlacht unmistakably, but the content of the memorandum had no effect on the Fiihrer's headquarters or on Hitler.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry in the baptismal register of the Born community (Latvian: Bornes, after 1925: Kaplava)
  2. ^ SS telex in the Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde BDC, SSO Max Thomas. On the Holocaust in Ukraine see Wolfgang Curilla: The German Ordnungspolizei and the Holocaust in the Baltic States and Belarus . Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2006.
  3. ^ Statement by E. Lahousen, Nuremberg February 1, 1946, 1330–1430 and Schlabrendorff, Officers against Hitler .
  4. ↑ page 881 in Peter Hoffmann, Resistance (1969).
  5. ↑ Alexander Dohna-Schlobitten: Memories of an old East Prussia. P. 186
personal data
SURNAME Freytag from Loringhoven, Wessel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Freytag von Loringhoven, Wessel Freiherr
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Colonel in the General Staff of the German Wehrmacht
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Groß Born (Kurland) , Courland
DATE OF DEATH July 26, 1944
Place of death OKH Mauerwald , East Prussia