Wilhelm Schubert (General)

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Wilhelm Schubert, 1941

Wilhelm Schubert (born November 12, 1879 in Görlitz , † June 26, 1972 in Munich ) was a German officer , from March 1941 to July 1942 head of the Eastern Economic Staff , most recently General of the Air Force in World War II .

Life

Schubert entered the army on March 21, 1898 as an officer candidate . During the First World War , Schubert was initially a liaison officer to the 1st Bulgarian Army in 1915 and then to the 2nd Bulgarian Army until the spring of 1918. From May 1918 to the end of January 1919 he was at the disposal of the Supreme Army Command and from May to November 1918 a military attaché at the German mission in Moscow.

After the end of the war, Schubert was head of the Eastern Border Guard from 1919 to 1920 . In 1921 he worked as a consultant in the Reich Ministry of Economics and was supposedly retired at the end of the year. In 1922 and 1923 Schubert was a member of the Commission of the Troops Office , which dealt with the preparation of the cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army .

Until 1925 Schubert was then employed as part of a German-Soviet military cooperation with the armaments company Junkers Flugzeug- und Motorenwerke in Dessau. The USSR had ordered the Junkers F 13 and later a military version of the Junkers G 24 , which were delivered or armed in the Fili-Park district of Moscow .

In 1925 Schubert received his doctorate as Dr. of political science. He then worked as an instructor in maneuvers for the Black Reichswehr in Military District III, Potsdam, until the beginning of 1928 . From 1928 to 1930 he continued his training at the Turkish Military Academy in Istanbul.

From August 1934 until the end of 1935 Schubert was a reserve officer in Military District III Berlin. At the beginning of 1936 he became a trainer at the Air War Academy and was on the General Staff with Hermann Göring . From April 1938 to the end of February 1939 he was then in the War Economics Office at the Wehrmacht High Command in Berlin. From March 1939 to September 1940 Schubert was with the armaments inspection in Military District VII Munich, which accepted weapons from the armaments factories for the Wehrmacht. Then he was an armaments inspector in the Paris area until the end of March 1941.

From March 1941 to the end of July 1942, Schubert was the head of the Eastern Economic Staff , which was subordinate to the Eastern Economic Management Staff , which dealt with economic issues and the prospects for exploiting the Soviet territories conquered in the course of the attack on the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa ). Schubert was employed here as a connoisseur of the USSR. He was responsible for ensuring that the political guidelines in the economic organizations dominated over the military tasks and that these were ultimately neglected. According to the military historian Rolf-Dieter Müller , Schubert was “as an anti-Semitic Eastern strategist, advocate of a 'crusade' against Bolshevism”. On August 1, 1942, he lost his post - officially for reasons of age, but actually "because of his proven weak leadership".

In May 1941, Schubert chaired meetings of the East Economic Staff, on whose agenda the hunger plan was. On May 2, 1941, seven weeks before the German invasion of the USSR, he took part in a meeting between state secretaries and high Wehrmacht officers “about Barbarossa”, whose minutes state that “the war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the 3rd year of the war. Without a doubt tens of millions of people will starve to death if we get what we need out of the country. ”Among other things, the density of the military administration network was planned under Schubert, and death starvation should be done with little administrative effort. The concepts provoked the massive deaths of people through starvation through theft of food. The so-called Green Map , which had been drawn up by his committee, served as a guide to economic policy .

In an elaboration on the work of the Economic Staff East, which he sent to the Federal Archives-Military Archives Freiburg on July 20, 1965 , Schubert stated that the history of the Economic Staff East had shown “that useful cooperation between the NSDAP and the Wehrmacht was possible on an anti-Bolshevik basis is ".

Awards

literature

  • Christian Gerlach : Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-930908-54-9 .
  • Rolf-Dieter Müller (ed.): German economic policy in the occupied Soviet territories 1941–1943. The final report of the East Economic Staff and notes from a member of the Kiev Economic Command . Boldt, Boppard am Rhein, 1991, ISBN 3-7646-1905-8 .

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Adolf Vogt: Colonel Max Bauer, General Staff Officer in the Twilight, 1869-1929 , Biblio Verlag Osnabrück, 1974 p. 681.
  2. ↑ Rolf-Dieter Müller (ed.): German economic policy in the occupied Soviet territories 1941–1943. The final report of the East Economic Staff and notes from a member of the Kiev Economic Command . Boldt, Boppard am Rhein, 1991, p. 11.
  3. ↑ Rolf-Dieter Müller (ed.): German economic policy in the occupied Soviet territories 1941–1943 , p. 13.
  4. ↑ Rolf-Dieter Müller (Ed.): The German Economic Policy in the Occupied Soviet Territories 1941–1943 , p. 12.
  5. ↑ Alex J. Kay : Starving as a Mass Murder Strategy. The meeting of the German state secretaries on May 2, 1941. In: Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte . Edited by Hans-Heinrich Nolte . Vol. 11, issue 1/2010, pp. 81-105, here pp. 81 f. (Quote) u. P. 95 (participants).
  6. ^ Rolf-Dieter Müller (ed.): German economic policy in the occupied Soviet territories 1941–1943 , p. 12 f.
personal data
SURNAME Schubert, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer, most recently General der Flieger
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Goerlitz
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1972
Place of death Munich