William of Dufais

Wilhelm Dufais , from 1908 by Dufais , (* July 8, 1888 in Berlin , † September 1, 1963 in Stuttgart ) was a German SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the Waffen SS .

Life

Wilhelm was the son of the Prussian Lieutenant General Otto von Dufais (1852-1926) and his wife Marie Elisabeth, née Jordan (1858). His father was raised to the hereditary Prussian nobility on February 12, 1908 by Kaiser Wilhelm II .

After attending grammar school, Dufais joined the Uhlan regiment "Grand Duke Friedrich von Baden" (Rhenish) No. 7 of the Prussian army in September 1906 as a flag junior . From mid-April 1913 he attended the cavalry telegraph school in Berlin-Treptow for four months and then led the telegraph patrol of his regiment with which he participated in the First World War . At the beginning of February 1915 he suffered a serious wound, as a result of which he was hospitalized for several months. Then Dufais was in the regiment's replacement squadron and was promoted to Rittmeister by mid-December 1915 . In the late summer of 1916 he completed a three-month MG training course and from February to October 1917 headed the training staff or the operations department of the telephone replacement department 4. After that, he was group intelligence commander at the General Command zbV and from June to November 1918 as a teacher of intelligence at the war school for reserve officers .

Awarded both classes of the Iron Cross , Dufais was accepted into the Reichswehr at the end of the war and served in the 3rd (Prussian) Cavalry Regiment . He then took on various functions in the army's intelligence forces. At the end of September 1936, Dufais retired from active military service as a colonel and was last head of the regulations department of the Army and Air Intelligence School in Halle (Saale) . Dufais was the author of numerous publications on military communications.

At the time of National Socialism , he joined the NSDAP at the beginning of May 1937 (membership no. 5.276.398) and was accepted into the SS as Standartenführer in August 1937 (SS no. 283.028), where he quickly made a career. From August 1937 he was first head of department in the Office for Communications in the SS Main Office and later SS Main Command Office, in the meantime he was posted to Nuremberg from November 1939 to April 1940 to set up a replacement intelligence department. On April 20, 1940 he was promoted to SS-Oberführer and appointed inspector for communications. From May 1941 to June 1943 he was chief department head in the staff of the chief of telecommunications RFSS and chief of police. In addition, from July 1942 he was the commander of the SS news school in Oberehnheim, where SS helpers were trained in communications technology. He officially held this position until his illness-related task at the end of October 1943. In June 1943 he was promoted to SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of the Waffen SS, his highest SS ranks. He was awarded the War Merit Cross II. Class in 1942 and the War Merit Cross I Class in 1944. Until he retired from active service in the Waffen-SS at the end of January 1945, he was still employed in the office of the chief of telecommunications, RFSS and chief of the police .

Dufais, who had been married to Helene von Gundlach since 1923, took two children of fallen SS men into his family through the agency of Lebensborn eV, and in autumn 1944 tried to take in two more children from welfare offices for “young leaders”.

In the second half of 1944 he was the first assessor of the former camp commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, Karl Otto Koch, on the orders of the RFSS Heinrich Himmler in the trial before an SS and police court .

From the end of April 1945 to November 1945 Dufais was in French captivity and was arrested again in the American occupation zone in mid-January 1946 , interned and on July 29, 1947 classified as the main culprit as part of the denazification process . He was released from internment at the end of July 1948, as his internment counted towards the labor camp sentence. Dufais appealed against this judgment, whereupon he was only classified as incriminated by the Central Appeals Chamber in North Württemberg in June 1949. This judgment also failed and the proceedings were finally abandoned at the end of January 1952.

literature

• Jutta Mühlenberg: The SS helper corps. Training, deployment and denazification of the female members of the Waffen-SS 1942–1949. Hamburger Edition , HIS, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86854-239-4 (also dissertation at the Helmut Schmidt University ).
• Thierry Tixier: General-SS, Police et Waffen-SS Officiers, sous-officiers et Soldats: Biographics. Volume 2: SS Brigade Leader. December 2016, ISBN 978-1-32654-867-4 .
• Andreas Schulz, Günter Wegmann, Dieter Zinke: The generals of the Waffen-SS and the police 1933-1945. Biblio-Verlag, Bissendorf 2003 ff., ISBN 3-7648-2528-6 . (6 volumes)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gothaisches Genealogisches Taschenbuch der Briefadeligen houses. 1917 . Eleventh year, Justus Perhes , Gotha 1916, p. 197.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Thierry Tixier: Allgemeine-SS, Polizei et Waffen-SS Officiers, sous-officiers et Soldats: Biographics. Volume 2: SS Brigade Leader. 2016, p. 1937.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Jutta Mühlenberg: The SS helper corps. Training, deployment and denazification of the female members of the Waffen-SS 1942–1949. Hamburg 2011, p. 427.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Jutta Mühlenberg: The SS helper corps. Training, deployment and denazification of the female members of the Waffen-SS 1942–1949. Hamburg 2011, p. 428.
5. ↑ Hans-Christian Harten: Himmler's teacher: The ideological training in the SS 1933-1945. Schöningh, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978-3-506-76644-1 , p. 329 f.
6. ^ Jutta Mühlenberg: The SS helper corps. Training, deployment and denazification of the female members of the Waffen-SS 1942–1949. Hamburg 2011, p. 427 f.