Wolfgang Abshagen

Hans Joachim Wolfgang Abshagen (born November 17, 1897 in Stralsund ; † August 21, 1945 in Brest , Belarusian Socialist Soviet Republic ) was a German officer in the Wehrmacht who was involved in the preparation of the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt .

Life

Imperial period until 1918

Wolfgang Abshagen was born as the youngest of six siblings in 1897 in Stralsund's Sarnowstrasse. One of his brothers is the writer Karl Heinz Abshagen .

In 1915, at the age of 17, Abshagen passed his secondary school diploma at the secondary school in Stralsund and, with his father's consent, signed up for military service in the Imperial Marine Infantry to become an active officer there. He took part in the First World War in Flanders from 1916 , became an ensign and soon a lieutenant . Disappointed with the military conduct of the war, Abshagen applied for his transfer from active service to the reserve in 1917 . Since there had never been such an application with this elite unit , the application was submitted to the emperor , who had the application approved by means of a cabinet order.

Weimar Republic

After the war ended, Abshagen completed an apprenticeship at the Carl Becker paint factory , where his father was the manager and authorized signatory . He then joined the company Abshagen, Kegel & Co , founded by his brothers Kurt and Karl Heinz in Wandsbek near Hamburg , which also produced varnishes and paints, and also became a partner.

On October 31, 1922 Abshagen became engaged to Irmgard Wilken, whom he married on January 25, 1923. His bride had worked as a laboratory assistant in the Höchst inking works during the war . The couple had two children, Ilse (* 1924) and Hans Ulrich (1926–2017).

After the fire and total loss of the company building, Abshagen switched to the film industry on the advice of his older brother Otto. In the meantime, he was assistant to the board of directors at Deutsche Bank , which was a major financial force behind the UFA film company.

In the publication “Deutsche Wirtschaftsführer” from 1929, under “W. Cancel ”the entry“ Dir. u. Board member National-Film, AG; Board member d. National-Filmverleih- u. Vertriebs-AG; Business f. d. National-Film-Theater-GmbH ”. When the National Filmverleih- und Vertriebs-AG ran into economic difficulties in 1929, it was Abshagen who transferred the majority of the shares to Warner Brothers Inc.

time of the nationalsocialism

After the takeover of the NSDAP tried Abshagen in by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to remain dominated film industry has therefore been promoting member of the SS and joined the Nazi Party. Up until the Second World War he was the managing director of the Hugo Lemke film theater company, which included 14 cinemas in Berlin , including the Titania Palace and the Marble House .

Abshagen took part in reserve exercises of the Wehrmacht in the 1930s . When the war began on September 1, 1939, he was called up to the Abwehr II department ( sabotage and disintegration) of the Abwehr Office in the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) and was therefore able to stay in Berlin-Lankwitz with his wife and two children during the war. As head of the chief department, he acted as adjutant to Helmuth Groscurth and Erwin von Lahousen . In August 1943, Abshagen's home in Lankwitz was bombed out. The family stayed with friends. In 1944 Abshagen was transferred to Paris from the Foreign / Defense Office as head of the control center 2 West for front reconnaissance . According to oral tradition in the family, he helped fellow Jewish citizens to flee during this time.

Following the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944 , Abshagen was arrested in Paris and imprisoned in the Lehrter Strasse cell prison in Moab . The reason was that the release certificate for the explosives used by Colonel Graf Stauffenberg in the attack was signed by Abshagen. Since the witnesses for the involvement of Abshagen in the preparation of the assassination, Colonel Wessel Freytag von Loringhoven and Lieutenant Colonel Werner Schrader , had committed suicide, he was released in November 1944 for lack of evidence. However, Abshagen was dishonorably discharged from the Wehrmacht as a major in the reserve. The military historian Klaus A. Maier is of the opinion that the visit of the 17-year-old son Hans Ulrich to the Gestapo chief SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller favored the release of Abshagen.

Abshagen was arrested in May 1945 by the Soviet counterintelligence Smersch ("Death to the Spies") in Berlin and sentenced to death in June 1945 in Fürstenberg / Havel for his work in the Foreign Office / Defense as a spy . His pardon , in which he wrote that he wanted to do reparation work in the Soviet Union with his wife and two children , was not even translated into Russian and was therefore not acknowledged. The sentence was carried out on August 21, 1945 in Brest, Belarus.

After the Second World War

After Abshagen's arrest, his wife Irmgard remained without news. Together with her daughter and her son, who had returned from Soviet captivity in 1946, she began the search for the missing man. Irmgard Abshagen was informed of the date of death in August 1945 by the German Red Cross in 1965 on the basis of a communication from the Soviet Red Crescent . On October 25, 2000, Wolfgang Abshagen was rehabilitated by the Russian Chief Military Prosecutor (GVP). His son Hans Ulrich received reliable information about the execution of his father in 2006 . In 2007 he visited his father's presumed grave in Brest.

In a study of Abshagen's activities, the military historian Klaus A. Maier came to the conclusion that Abshagen was involved in the preparation of the July 20 assassination attempt. In the German Resistance Memorial Center, the file “Fahndungen after July 20” contains the Gestapo arrest report for Abshagen and a brief report on his involvement in the preparation of the attack.

literature

• Hans Ulrich Abshagen: Generation clueless. Zeitgut-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-933336-43-0 .
• Karl Heinz Abshagen: Canaris. Patriot and citizen of the world . Munich - Berlin 1955, co-author Erwin Lahousen .
• Karl Glaubauf , Stefanie Lahousen: Major General Erwin Lahousen, Edler von Vivremont - A Linz counterintelligence officer in the military resistance. Lit Verlag, Münster 2005, ISBN 978-3-8258-7259-5 .
• Helmut Krausnick (Ed.): Helmuth Groscurth. Diaries of an Abwehr officer 1938–1940. German publishing house, Stuttgart 1970.
• Klaus Mayer: Exposé on the research project Maj. D. Res. Wolfgang Abshagen (1897–1945?) Head of the chief group Abw II. Berlin 2002.
• Max Trecker, Michael Kamp : Secret Service and Resistance. The life of Wolfgang Abshagen (1897–1945). August Dreesbach Verlag, Munich 2011. ISBN 978-3-940061-67-6 .

Web links

• My father, the Hitler assassin. Newspaper report in the Berliner Zeitung from July 20, 2008
• "Son of a traitor." Hans Ulrich Abshagen wrote a book about his father Wolfgang and July 20, 1944. Newspaper report in the Tagesspiegel from July 18, 2004.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b c} Andreas Weigelt, Klaus-Dieter Müller, Thomas Schaarschmidt, Mike Schmeitzner (eds.): Death sentences of Soviet military tribunals against Germans (1944-1947). A historical-biographical study. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-525-36968-5 , pp. 8-10.
2. ^ Georg Wenzel: German business leader . Life courses of German business personalities. A reference book on 13,000 business figures of our time. Hanseatic Publishing House , Hamburg / Berlin / Leipzig 1929, DNB 948663294 .
3. ↑ See the structure of the R-Networks used for this purpose, Oscar Reile : Meeting point Lutetia Paris. The fight d. Secret services in the western operational area, in England a. North Africa 1939–1945, Gehlen's "Dienst" 1949–1961, Munich (Welsermühl) 1973, p. 364ff. Wolfgang Abshagen was the head of the control center 2 West for front reconnaissance from February to August 1944, responsible for setting up these agent networks. Although this does not prove the tradition existing in the family, it does raise the suspicion that the claim is correct.
4. ↑ The biographies of Canaris by Karl Heinz Abshagen and Heinz Höhne can also be consulted for the targeted rescue of Jews by the Foreign / Defense Office.
5. ↑ Klaus Mayer, synopsis of the research project Maj. D. Res. Wolfgang Abshagen (1897–1945?) Head of the Abw II chief group, Berlin 2002, p. 2f.
6. ↑ Klaus Mayer, synopsis of the research project Maj. D. Res. Wolfgang Abshagen (1897–1945?) Head of Chief Group Abw II, Berlin 2002, p. 5.
7. ↑ ^{a b} My father, the Hitler assassin. Newspaper report in the Berliner Zeitung from July 20, 2008
8. ↑ ^{a b} "Son of a high traitor." Hans Ulrich Abshagen wrote a book about his father Wolfgang and July 20, 1944. Newspaper report in the Tagesspiegel from May 30, 2010.