Wilhelm Mohnke

Wilhelm Mohnke (born March 15, 1911 in Lübeck , † August 6, 2001 in Damp ) was a German SS brigade leader and major general of the Waffen SS .

Life

Wilhelm Mohnke was born on March 15, 1911 in Lübeck . His father, who was also called Wilhelm Mohnke, was a carpenter. Wilhelm Mohnke attended middle school and did an apprenticeship as a businessman. In September 1931 he joined the NSDAP and in November of the same year he joined the Lübeck SS troop of the 4th SS Standard Altona. In 1932 he became unemployed. After the seizure of power in 1933 he was employed as an auxiliary policeman by the city of Lübeck. After holding several positions in the SS, he was transferred to the SS staff guard in Berlin in March 1933 .

In September 1939 he took part in the attack on Poland as chief of the 5th company of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) . On September 29, 1939 he received the Iron Cross 2nd Class and on November 8, 1939, the Iron Cross 1st Class. Following the attack on Poland, he fought with his company on the Western Front , including in front of Dunkirk, where his battalion came under heavy fire from the British and suffered heavy losses, not least due to the inadequate training of SS officers and men for the Struggle. On May 28, 1940, Mohnke became commander of the 2nd battalion of the LSSAH. Mohnke was responsible for the Wormhout massacre, which took place on the same day , in which 96 British prisoners of war and one Frenchman were murdered near Wormhout in France . After the shooting of individual prisoners of war at various locations, SS men of the 7th Company near Esquelbecq had driven 80 prisoners of war of the "Royal Warwick Regiment", the "Cheshire Regiment" and the "Royal Artillery" into a barn and those in it Caged people killed with hand grenades and machine gun fire. Some British soldiers survived and were later found by medical personnel from a Wehrmacht unit and taken to a hospital. After their injuries healed, these remaining British soldiers were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp. In the spring of 1941 Mohnke fought as commander of the 2nd battalion of the LSSAH in the Balkan War . Here he was wounded for the third time on April 6th by an air raid; as a result of the wound he kept a shortened leg and suffered from constant pain, so that he became addicted to morphine.

In 1942 Wilhelm Mohnke was commissioned by Josef Dietrich to set up a tank division for the LSSAH. In the summer of 1943 Mohnke became the commander of the 2nd SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the new "Hitler Youth" division (later SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment 26 of the 12th SS Panzer Division "Hitler Youth" ). In June 1944, his regiment fought on the Allied landings in Normandy . On June 7th, units of his regiment shot and killed 36 Canadian prisoners of war in Fontenay-le-Pesnel near Tessel . On June 8th, the 2nd Battalion of his regiment, under the leadership of Obersturmbannführer Bernhard Siebken, shot three Canadian prisoners of war near Le Menil-Patry. The efforts of the German units and that of Mohnke to drive the Allies back into the sea were unsuccessful with great losses of their own. Mohnke received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on July 11, 1944 .

On August 20, 1944, he took over command of the 1st SS Panzer Division LSSAH after the previous commander, Theodor Wisch , had been seriously wounded in both legs and had to be spent in hospitals until the end of the war. In December 1944, soldiers from the so-called Kampfgruppe Peiper committed the Malmedy massacre during the Battle of the Bulge , although it remains unclear what exactly happened and to what extent Mohnke was involved. However, the Malmedy Trial in 1946 took place without him because he was a Soviet prisoner of war. After the end of the Ardennes offensive, Mohnke was appointed SS Brigade Leader on January 30, 1945 . Because of a head injury that he sustained in an air raid on February 6, 1945, he had to hand over command of the LSSAH to Otto Kumm .

After a brief recovery break, Mohnke was posted to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in mid-April 1945 . There he was appointed in the night of April 22nd to 23rd 1945 by Adolf Hitler to command the defense forces of the government district. This combat group Mohnke consisted of nine battalions. On May 1, 1945, Mohnke and some of Hitler's confidants, including his last secretary Gerda Christian and his adjutant Otto Günsch , attempted to break out of the encircled government district, starting from the bunker of the New Reich Chancellery. On May 2, he was captured by Soviet troops in Pankow and flown to Moscow via Strausberg . Arrested on May 18, 1945 by the 2nd Headquarters of the KGB of the USSR, Mohnke remained in Soviet captivity until October 10, 1955 , most of which he spent in prisoner-of-war camp 5110/48 Woikowo .

After his release he moved to Hamburg and worked there as a car salesman. From 1979 Mohnke had contact with the Stern reporter Gerd Heidemann . He advised him on matters relating to National Socialism and brought him into contact with Nazi votive traders. It was through this that Heidemann came into contact with the forger of the Hitler diary Konrad Kujau . Heidemann later showed Mohnke the supposed Hitler diaries and read passages from them to him, Mohnke pointed out factual errors, but was ignored. Wilhelm Mohnke died on August 6, 2001 in Damp near Eckernförde.

In art

Wilhelm Mohnke has been portrayed in films by the following actors:

• 1981: Michael Culver in Der Bunker , an American television production with Anthony Hopkins as Hitler.
• 1991: Ralph Michael for sale in Hitler , a British television production that deals with the story of the Hitler diaries .
• 2004: André Hennicke in Der Untergang , a German feature film with Bruno Ganz as Hitler. Mohnke is portrayed here as a loyal Hitler supporter, who tries in vain to convince the dictator to evacuate Berlin. The historian Michael Wildt notes, among other things, that the film has as much to do with history as a film about the mutiny on the Bounty. Professor David Cesarani said in a 2005 Guardian film review that he never expected a film to attempt to sympathize with a man who had murdered so many English soldiers near Dunkirk.

literature

• Uwe Bahnsen, James P. O'Donnell: The catacomb. Bechtermünz, Augsburg 1975, ISBN 3-86047-559-2 . (Mohnke's descriptions of the events during the final battle in Berlin and after his capture).

See also

• List of SS brigade leaders

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Mohnke in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jens Westemeier : Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period . Published with the support of the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77241-1 , p. 75.
2. ↑ Peter Lieb : Military Elite: The Panzer Divisions of the Waffen SS and Wehrmacht in Normandy 1944 in comparison. In: Jan Erik Schulte , Peter Lieb, Bernd Wegner (eds.): The Waffen-SS. New research . Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77383-8 , p. 351.
3. ↑ Contemporary History - It was a nightmare. In: Der Spiegel. 13/1994.
4. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period. Paderborn 2014, p. 159f.
5. ^ Jens Westemeier: Himmler's warriors. Joachim Peiper and the Waffen-SS in the war and the post-war period (= War in History. Volume 71). Published with the support of the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-77241-1 , p. 301.
6. ↑ Veit Scherzer : Knight's Cross bearers 1939-1945. The holders of the Iron Cross of the Army, Air Force, Navy, Waffen-SS, Volkssturm and armed forces allied with Germany according to the documents of the Federal Archives. 2nd Edition. Scherzers Militaer-Verlag, Ranis / Jena 2007, ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2 , p. 549.
7. ^ Howard Margolian: Conduct Unbecoming. The Story of the Murder of Canadian Prisoners of War in Normandy. University of Toronto Press, 2000, ISBN 0-8020-8360-9 , p. 184.
8. ↑ Peter-Ferdinand Koch: The find. The scandals of the "Stern". Gerd Heidemann and the Hitler diaries . Facta, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-926827-24-6 , pp. 385-390.
9. ↑ Seufert: The scandal about the Hitler Days books. P. 114 f.
10. ^ Wilhelm Mohnke (character). Internet Movie Database , accessed April 30, 2012 . 
11. ^ Zeithistorische Forschungen 1/2005 http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/1-2005/id%3D4760
12. ↑ Charlotte Higgins: Bunker film 'is too kind to Nazis'. In: The Guardian. April 5, 2005.