Wilhelm Roloff (resistance fighter)

Wilhelm Roloff (1920)

Wilhelm Berthold Thorvald Roloff (born March 28, 1900 in Altona , † February 22, 1979 in Toronto , Canada ) was a German manager and Nazi opponent.

Life

Wilhelm Roloff was born in 1900 as the first son of the Danish dentist Thorvald Frederick Christian Roloff (1865–1930) and his wife Paula Henriette Johanna Elvers (1878–1959). His father came from Odense and, after a short stay in Munich , moved to Hamburg, where he set up his own practice. The mother was the daughter of a well-known dentist from Hamburg-Blankenese . The Roloff family was wealthy, lived in a representative property in Hamburg-Ottensen and maintained good relationships with the first families in Hamburg. Here Wilhelm Roloff grew up with two younger siblings.

He attended the Realgymnasium Altona and passed the Abitur there in 1918. He spent his military service as a midshipman in the Imperial Navy . After the war ended, he studied medicine from 1918 to 1922 at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen , the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich and the University of Hamburg . In Tübingen he became a member of the Tübingen fraternity Derendingia in 1920 . With him, the future federal judge Wilhelm Fließbach , the journalist Harald Laeuen and the neurosurgeon Otto Voss were active in Derendingia. During his active time he fought eight lengths . He was also involved in university politics . Roloff was temporarily a member of the AStA board in Tübingen and later in Hamburg. Here he made a special contribution to the financing of the student cafeteria by successfully soliciting donations from the leading Hamburg merchant and banker families, with whom he already had good family contacts.

During his time in Hamburg, the banker Max Warburg , a personal friend of Roloff's parents, recommended that he give up medical studies and turn to economics . After studying medicine for several semesters, he took Warburg's advice and finished his studies without a degree. Instead, he went through commercial training in the Netherlands . From 1924 Wilhelm Roloff was an authorized signatory at the Nederlandschen Handelsassociatie NV, Rotterdam . Through Warburg's mediation, he became finance director of the United Seidenwebereien AG in Krefeld in 1929 . In 1934 he was finally appointed director of the North Sea Deutsche Hochseefischerei Bremen-Cuxhaven AG and moved into the Fichtenhof in Bremen.

Resistance to National Socialism

→ Main article : Resistance to National Socialism

Alexandra Roloff was a daughter of the politician Werner von Alvensleben and a cousin of the resistance fighter Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort . Through his father-in-law, Roloff came into contact with members of the bourgeois and aristocratic opposition. The Bremen Fichtenhof subsequently developed into a center of civil resistance in Bremen. The personalities of this discussion group at the Fichtenhof included Roloff and Alvensleben and others. a. Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord , Erwin Planck and Nikolaus Christoph von Halem , later also Hans von Dohnanyi , Hans Bernd Gisevius , Eduard Waetjen , Fabian von Schlabrendorff , Hans Oster and Otto Hübener . According to Roloff, there were several reasons for turning to the resistance: on the one hand, the Gestapo carried out several campaigns against both his father-in-law and against him, and on the other hand, he assessed the campaigns against Unilever and the country's negative economic development as a serious mistake.

In 1943 he gave the former diplomat and resistance fighter Eduard Brücklmeier a job at Nordsee GmbH .

Wilhelm Roloff maintained contact with numerous opposition activists, including some members of the Kreisau Circle . He was also one of those who knew about Stauffenberg's planned assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler . Believing in the success of this attack, Roloff had agreed in writing to accept the post of State Minister in the Ministry of Food. On a list found in General Olbricht's safe , Roloff was designated as State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture . That document fell into the hands of the Gestapo as a result of the investigation against the co-conspirators on July 20th. The name Brücklmeiers, whom Roloff had found a job in 1943, was also on this list.

After the failed assassination attempt on Hitler , Roloff was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Lehrter Strasse cell prison. After his attempted suicide, he was transferred to the state police hospital and stayed there for almost four months. During this time the doctor Charlotte Pommer arranged a meeting between Roloff and his wife Alexandra. At the end of November 1944, he was finally transferred back to the cell prison. Both Charlotte Pommer and Alexandra Roloff were also interned in Berlin because of their commitment to those persecuted by the National Socialist regime. During the confusing conditions in the context of the Battle of Berlin , both women were able to flee, Wilhelm Roloff was released from prison on April 22nd. They managed to escape to Bremen together on bicycles.

After being denounced to the British occupying forces, Roloff was taken to the Neuengamme internment camp and questioned. After a few weeks he was released thanks to affidavits from several well-known opposition members and resistance fighters and left Germany in December 1946. He lived in Ethiopia until 1953 before moving to live with his son in Canada . In the 1970s he lived as a businessman in Baie-D'Urfé . He died in Toronto in 1979.

family

On March 17, 1923, Roloff married his first wife, Käthe Marie Robinow (1904–1990), the daughter of the respected Jewish merchant and art collector Paul Robinow (1865–1922) and Emily Kukla (1883–1967) in Hamburg. Her uncle was the lawyer Richard Robinow (1867–1945). The daughter Gisela, born in 1924, came from this marriage. In 1934 the marriage was divorced by mutual agreement.

On June 5, 1934, he married Anna Alexandra "Lexi" von Alvensleben (1910–1968), the eldest daughter of the politician Werner von Alvensleben (1875–1947) and Alexandra Countess von Einsiedel (1888–1947). The Roloffs had a son named Michael (1937-2019). This marriage also ended in divorce after the war.

His third marriage was on November 14, 1970 in Montreal with the actress Gisela Marie Gabriele Countess Beissel von Gymnich (1921–2001).

Posthumous honors

In 2014, Wilhelm Roloff was honored by the German Resistance Memorial Center as a resistance fighter against National Socialism. His photo and biographical data can be called up and viewed here.

literature

• Antje Vollmer : double life. Heinrich and Gottliebe von Lehndorff in the resistance against Hitler and von Ribbentrop . 2010.
• Heinrich Lohmann: The Bremen Fichtenhof and its residents. A little-known chapter from the resistance against National Socialism . Edition Falkenberg, Bremen 2018, ISBN 978-3-95494-153-7 .
• Barbara Orth: Gestapo in the operating room. Report from hospital doctor Charlotte Pommer . Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2013.
• Johannes Tuchel : "... and the rope is waiting for all of you.": The cell prison at Lehrter Strasse 3 after July 20, 1944 . Lukas-Verlag 2014.
• Sebastian Sigler : Corps students in the resistance against Hitler . Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2015.
• Sebastian Sigler : Conservative resistance against Hitler - Wilhelm Roloff and Eduard Brücklmeier . Once and Now, Yearbook of the Society for Corps Student History Research, Vol. 64 (2019), pp. 337–354.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Membership directory of the Derendingia fraternity in Tübingen. 1967, master roll no. 578
2. ↑ Weser Kurier on May 3, 2018 about Wilhelm Roloff