Wilhelm Staehle

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Wilhelm Staehle (born November 20, 1877 in Neuenhaus , † April 23, 1945 in Berlin ) was a German defense officer , monarchist and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Memorial plaque in the Invalidensiedlung, in Berlin-Frohnau
Grave of Wilhelm Staehle at the Invalidenfriedhof Berlin (status 2013)
Memorial stone on the grave of Wilhelm Staehle

On his father's side, Staehle came from an officer's family. His father August Staehle was captain , grandfather Wilhelm Staehle was Square Major in Kassel . His mother Alberdina, née Wildeboer, came from the Dutch town of Meppel .

After the Abitur at grammar school in Osnabrück Staehle struck the officer's career and became the on March 3, 1897 cadet appointed. From 1900 to 1902 he took part in the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in China with the rank of lieutenant .

At the beginning of the First World War , Staehle was a captain , he initially fought on the Western Front . In 1916 he was transferred to the Prussian General Staff in Berlin and trained as an Abwehr officer . From 1917 he was an intelligence officer at Army High Command 4 in Flanders.

After the revolution, Staehle was taken over by the Reichswehr . He was involved in the suppression of the Spartacus uprising in Berlin; later he worked as an intelligence officer in the defense . During the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 he was transferred to the defense group of the Reichswehr Ministry, where he was involved in the high treason trial against Heinrich Wandt . He worked as the head of the Abwehrstelle in Wehrkreis  VI (Münster) and headed the German defense in Belgium and the Netherlands. From 1926 he was battalion commander in Celle.

In 1928 Staehle married the divorced Hildegard Stille . In 1929 he had to retire from active service in the Reichswehr. From September 1931 he was a welfare officer for Berlin in the military district command III.

From 1935 to 1937 he worked in the supply department of the Wehrmacht Office. On September 30, 1937, Staehle was appointed military director and on November 8, 1939, commandant of the Berlin Invalidenhaus , the last of which he was in command. The Potsdam military orphanage was also subordinate to him . Most recently he was in the rank of colonel in the Wehrmacht .

resistance

Staehle and his wife - with a distinctly conservative, Dutch- Calvinist worldview - opposed National Socialism from the start. Staehle regularly listened to Martin Niemoeller's sermons , had been in close contact with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler since 1937 and joined the Solf Circle . The Staehle couple belonged to the “Church Aid Agency for Protestant Non-Aryans” and actively helped the persecuted.

After the occupation of the Netherlands , Staehle, who spoke Dutch through his mother, sought contact with the resistance there on business trips. Goerdeler commissioned him to inform the Dutch about the overturn plans. At the end of 1943 he met leading members of the Dutch resistance in Coevorden . He asked for support in the transition period after a successful assassination attempt on Hitler. The Dutch government-in-exile in London, to which this news was forwarded, issued a negative decision. After a successful coup on July 20, 1944, Staehle himself was to take over the military leadership in Holland and Belgium. He maintained contact with the Dutch resistance through a conservative resistance group in his home town of Neuenhaus, to which he was closely connected, and other communities in the county of Bentheim .

The Sipo discovered Staehle contacts with the Dutch resistance by an agent radio operator in The Hague , with his arrest in January 1944, a radio message ready for MID - SOE was found in London. It warned against Major Giskes from the Defense Division IIIF, who ran the England game in Holland . Staehle was mentioned as a source. He was arrested for the first time in February 1944.

On June 12, 1944, Staehle was arrested in Berlin for his involvement in the Solf district and taken to the Lehrter Strasse cell prison . After July 20, 1944, he was suspected of complicity.

On March 16, 1945 the trial against Staehle took place before the People's Court . He sentenced him to two years in prison for favoring a political refugee. On the night of April 22-23, 1945, Staehle was shot in the neck by a special command from the Reich Main Security Office near the Lehrter Strasse cell prison.

His grave is in the Berlin Invalidenfriedhof .

Honors

  • Iron Cross (1914) 2nd and 1st class
  • Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with swords for services in the First World War
  • In the Berlin district of Reinickendorf , Frohnau , 26 years after his murder on April 23, 1971, the western section of the Hubertusweg was renamed Staehleweg. The path runs from Oranienburger Chaussee and Hubertusweg to the Invalidensiedlung.
  • A memorial site was set up in the invalids' settlement itself. It is a bell tower with the old bell from the Invalidenhaus and a plaque with the following inscription:
Colonel Wilhelm Staehle
Born November 20, 1877, died April 23, 1945
In memory of the commandant of the Invalidensiedlung who was murdered by the National Socialists immediately before the end of the war because of his participation in the resistance against the Hitler regime.
  • In Staehle's birthplace Neuenhaus on the Dutch border, a street and the secondary and secondary school are named after him.

literature

  • Helmut Lensing: Wilhelm Staehle and the suppression of the Chinese Boxer Rebellion. An unknown episode in the life of the later resistance fighter. In: Bentheimer Jahrbuch 1997 (= Das Bentheimer Land vol. 139), Bad Bentheim 1996, pp. 181–214.
  • Ger van Roon : Wilhelm Staehle. A life on the border 1877–1945. Munich 1969 (photomechanical reprint Neuenhaus 1986).
  • Ger van Roon: Colonel Wilhelm Staehle. A contribution to the foreign contacts of the German resistance. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte Vol. 14/1966, Munich 1966, pp. 209–223.
  • Ger van Roon: Staehle, Wilhelm. In: Study Society for Emsland Regional History (ed.): Emsländische Geschichte Vol. 7, Dohren 1998, pp. 263–267.
  • Peter Steinkamp: Rescue Resistance: Helpers in Uniform. In: Johannes Tuchel (ed.): The forgotten resistance. On real history and perception of the opposition and resistance to National Socialism. (Dachau Symposia on Contemporary History, Vol. 5) Göttingen 2005, pp. 140–157.
  • Gerd Steinwascher : A bourgeois resistance group in the Grafschaft Bentheim district during the Nazi era. In: Bentheimer Jahrbuch 1996 (= Das Bentheimer Land vol. 135), Bad Bentheim 1995, pp. 207–220.

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Staehleweg. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  2. ↑ Announcement by the Neuenhaus community of May 11, 2012.
personal data
SURNAME Staehle, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German defense officer, monarchist and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuenhaus
DATE OF DEATH April 23, 1945
Place of death Berlin