Wilhelm Souchon

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Wilhelm Souchon (r.) And Otto Liman von Sanders (l.), Liman's daughter in the middle (1917)

Wilhelm Anton Souchon (* 2. June 1864 in Leipzig , † 13. January 1946 in Bremen ) was Vice-Admiral of the Imperial Navy in the First World War . He became known as the commander of the Mediterranean Division , which in August 1914, when it entered the Dardanelles and surrendered it to Turkey, made a significant contribution to the Ottoman Empire's entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers .

Pre-war period

Souchon came from a Huguenot family; he was the son of the painter Wilhelm Ferdinand Souchon and Charlotte born. Naumann, the daughter of a Berlin bank director. As midshipman of the crew in 1881, Souchon, like the later Admiral Franz Hipper , took part as a crew member of the cruiser frigate Leipzig in the flag-raising and official occupation of the colony of German South West Africa on August 7, 1884 at Fort Vogelsang in Angra Pequena ( Lüderitz Bay ). From May 20 to October 3, 1894 Souchon was in command of the mine training ship Rhein and was promoted to lieutenant captain during this command . In April / March 1900 he was chief officer of the coastal armored ship Odin, acting as its commander. Souchon, who has meanwhile been promoted to corvette captain, was chief of staff of the 2nd (reserve) squadron during the naval maneuvers in 1903 .

In April 1904 Souchon became Chief of Staff of the Cruiser Squadron in East Asia under Vice Admiral Curt von Prittwitz and Gaffron on the Fürst Bismarck . In the same year he took part in a Yangtze River cruise by the squadron chief with visits to high-ranking Chinese dignitaries. During the final phase of the Russo-Japanese War , the squadron made few trips. In November 1905, Rear Admiral Alfred Breusing took command of the squadron. Under him, a trip through the Dutch East Indies was made and the first visit by German naval officers after the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing with an audience with the Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi . After a visit to Japan, Souchon started the journey home.

From June 1906 he worked in the Reichsmarineamt , where he was promoted to captain at sea . In October 1907 he became the commandant of the Wettin liner and in September 1909 chief of staff at the Baltic Naval Station . In this post he was promoted to Rear Admiral on April 10, 1911 . In October he became 2nd Admiral of the Second Squadron of the High Seas Fleet.

Mediterranean Division

On October 23, 1913 Souchon took over command of the Mediterranean division formed the previous year, which consisted of the battle cruiser Goeben , the small cruiser Breslau and the station yacht Loreley . The division was still assigned the old cruiser Geier , deducted from the stationary position in East Africa. In addition, if necessary, the division chief could dispose of the training ships operating in the Mediterranean, of which the Hansa and the Victoria Louise were expected in the winter of 1913/14 .

When hostilities were expected to break out in August 1914, Rear Admiral Souchon led his two ships, the Goeben and the Breslau , from the Adriatic to the western Mediterranean , bombarded the port facilities of Bône and Philippeville in Algeria after the outbreak of war, and then successfully evaded attempts the British Royal Navy to provide him and finally ran into the Dardanelles on August 10, 1914. After several days of negotiations, he led his small squadron to Istanbul , where it was officially taken over into the Turkish Navy on August 12th.

On August 15, Turkey canceled its naval agreement with Great Britain and expelled the British naval mission under Admiral Arthur Limpus until September 15. The Dardanelles were fortified with German help, the Bosporus secured by the Goeben , renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim , and both straits were officially closed to international shipping on September 27, 1914. On October 29, Souchon attacked Russian port cities under the Ottoman flag , while almost simultaneously British units attacked Turkish merchant ships off Smyrna . On November 2, Russia declared war on Turkey and on November 12, 1914, the Ottoman government of the Triple Entente .

Ottoman Navy

Souchon was appointed commander-in-chief of the Ottoman Navy  - and after Bulgaria's entry into the war also the Bulgarian  Navy and carried out various combat operations against the Russian Navy and Russian port and coastal facilities in the Black Sea until 1917 . He was promoted to Vice Admiral on May 27, 1915 and was awarded the Pour le Mérite order on October 29, 1916 .

During his time in the Ottoman Empire, as can be seen from his diaries, he was not only well informed about the genocide of the Armenian population , but also tacitly advocated this approach. Souchon wrote on August 10, 1915: "It would be a salvation for Turkey when it killed the last Armenian, it would then get rid of the anti-state bloodsuckers".

Squadron commander in the deep sea fleet

In September 1917 he returned to Germany, where from September 4, 1917 to August 12, 1918 he commanded the Fourth Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet with the large-line ships of the Kaiser class ( flagship Frederick the Great ) and it during the occupation of the Baltic Islands and commanded various naval advances.

Kiel sailors' uprising

Then he was made "available to the Most High" and on August 11, 1918 promoted to Admiral. In October 1918 he was appointed chief of the Baltic Sea naval station and governor of Kiel .

Souchon thus played a central role in the Kiel sailors' uprising . He was repeatedly accused of having suppressed the uprising by taking more decisive action and of torpedoing planned measures. This accusation was last made in 1978 by Ernst-Heinrich Schmidt in his dissertation.

The trigger for the mutiny was the naval advance planned against the declared will of the new Reich government by the naval war command and the command of the high seas in accordance with the naval order of October 24, 1918 . Souchon, on the other hand, decided early on to cooperate with the new government by asking on November 3, 1918 to send a leading Social Democrat to Kiel. Schmidt does not take into account the problem of the sailors resisting illegal action by their officers. He also uses two sources from the time of National Socialism that are important for his evidence, without any discernible critical distance.

Dirk Dähnhardt comes to a different conclusion in his analysis, which was carried out around the same time (although he does not hide the fact that Souchon acted too hesitantly, incorrectly and inconsistently in some cases): The patrol shots at the sailors and workers in Karlstrasse had shown that The long pent-up, deep-seated dissatisfaction could no longer be suppressed with violence and that this violence rather strengthened the solidarity process of the sailors among one another but also with the Kiel workers. Souchon in Kiel would have faced almost impossible tasks. Since he had only been in Kiel for a few days, he had to rely on his subordinates, who were far too optimistic about the situation or who did not have the courage to admit their own failures. On the other hand, the uprising spread so quickly that the officers gave up. Souchon demonstrated a sense of responsibility, however, because the reckless use of force could no longer have suppressed the uprising, but would have evoked chaos with unforeseeable consequences.

In a more recent study from 2010, Wolfram Wette also came to the conclusion that “a violent confrontation with the sailors was impossible and hopeless because they lacked means of power”.

Souchon was forced to negotiate with Karl Artelt and other members of the Kiel soldiers' council and representatives of the SPD and USPD and to release the jailed sailors. The SPD member of the Reichstag, Gustav Noske , who had arrived in Kiel on the evening of November 4th, replaced Admiral Souchon as Governor of Kiel on November 7th.

Wilhelm Souchon retired in 1919. In 1932 he gave a commemorative speech for the last chief of the ocean-going fleet, Admiral Franz von Hipper , at the Ohlsdorf cemetery in Hamburg , alongside the chief of the naval command, Admiral Erich Raeder .

Awards

literature

  • Dermot Bradley (eds.), Hans H. Hildebrand, Ernest Henriot: Germany's Admirals 1849-1945. Volume 3: PZ. Osnabrück 1990, ISBN 3-7648-2482-4 , pp. 347-348.
  • Dirk Dähnhardt : Revolution in Kiel. The transition from the German Empire to the Weimar Republic in 1918/19. Wachholtz, Neumünster 1978, ISBN 3-529-02636-0 .
  • Hans H. Hildebrand, Albert Röhr, Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships: Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present. Koehlers Verlagsgesellschaft, Herford. (7 volumes)
  • Ernst-Heinrich Schmidt: Heimatheer and Revolution 1918. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-421-06060-6 .
  • Wolfram Wette : Gustav Noske and the revolution in Kiel 1918. Boyens, Heide 2010, ISBN 978-3-8042-1322-7 .

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Anton Souchon  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfgang Gust : The genocide against the Armenians. The tragedy of the oldest Christian people in the world. Hanser, Munich / Vienna 1993, ISBN 3-446-17373-0 , p. 277.
  2. ↑ Jürgen Gottschlich : Aiding and abetting genocide: Germany's role in the annihilation of the Armenians. Ch. Links Verlag, 1st edition 2015, ISBN 978-3-86153-817-2 , pp. 205f.
  3. ^ Naval Officer Association (ed.): Honorary ranking of the Imperial German Navy 1914-18 . Berlin 1930.
  4. ^ Ernst-Heinrich Schmidt: Heimatheer and Revolution 1918. The military powers in the home area between the October reform and the November revolution. Published as volume 23 as part of the series "Contributions to Military and War History", published by the Military History Research Office, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt , Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-421-06060-6 .
  5. ^ Dirk Dähnhardt : Revolution in Kiel. The transition from the German Empire to the Weimar Republic in 1918/19. Neumünster 1978, p. 61.
  6. ↑ Schmidt, Heimatheer, pp. 43–58.
  7. ↑ Dähnhardt, Revolution, p. 78 f.
  8. ^ Wolfram Wette : Gustav Noske and the Revolution in Kiel 1918 . Heide 2010, p. 18.
  9. ↑ a b c d e f g h Ranking list of the Imperial German Navy for 1918. Ed .: Marine-Kabinett, Mittler & Sohn Verlag, Berlin 1918, p. 6.
personal data
SURNAME Souchon, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Souchon, Wilhelm Anton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German naval officer, most recently admiral in World War I and supreme commanding officer of the Ottoman and Bulgarian naval forces
DATE OF BIRTH June 2, 1864
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH January 13, 1946
Place of death Bremen