Wolfgang Kittel

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Wolfgang Alexander Kittel (born November 11, 1899 in Charlottenburg , † February 27, 1967 in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe ) was a German ice hockey player before he switched to civil aviation in 1928.

Life

Kittel was the son of specialist in gouty - rheumatic diseases Miesko Kittel (1856-1923) in Franzensbad and Merano and his first wife Auguste Juliane Alice Reschke (1869-1925). Kittel attended the Eger grammar school and the Cilli boarding school. After attending the officers' school in Innsbruck , he was in an Austrian Kaiserjäger regiment in the Isonzo battle during the First World War . After the war he was in a volunteer corps in the Baltic States for a short time . He then studied at the Technical University of Munich and the Technical University of Berlin without a degree . Kittel married Carola Mathilde Elfriede Remy in Budapest on July 17, 1922. The marriage remained childless and was divorced in Berlin in 1939. From 1924 to 1928 he worked for the Lohmann Group.

Before 1928 Kittel played at club level for the Berlin ice skating club , with which he won the German championship title in 1928 . Kittel took part in the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz for the German national ice hockey team. At the European Championships in 1927 he won the bronze medal with his team. In total, he completed two international matches for Germany.

In 1928 Kittel went to Barranquilla (Colombia), where he worked for SCADTA (Sociedad Colombo-Alemana de Transportes Aereos) until 1938. Due to health reasons, he came back to Germany in 1938, where he first dealt with collecting documents on his non-Jewish ancestry and in 1939 got a job with Lufthansa . He took over a representation in Bathurst / British West Gambia (today: Sierra Leone ) and was deported to England after the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 - due to his position as German consul . From there he was deported on the ship Arandora Star for further internment in Canada. The ship was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-47 under Captain Günther Prien on July 2, 1940 . Kittel was saved by the Canadian destroyer St. Laurent . It was brought to England and shipped to Australia on July 12th with the HMT Dunera .

On board the Dunera there was a mutiny off Cape Town , which Kittel, according to his second wife Ingeborg Kittel (née Gerlach; 1921-2018), put down on the side of the crew. Thereupon he was sent to London on his word of honor in 1st class on an unaccompanied passenger steamer, in order to be able to testify in the due court martial. Kittel's whereabouts until Christmas 1940, which he spent at Dunluce House, Ramsey, on the Isle of Man , cannot be proven. German VIPs and diplomats were housed in this villa. There he met his future father-in-law Werner Gerlach , the German consul general in Reykjavík, Iceland, whom the English had deported to England with his family in May 1940. It was there that Kittel met his future second wife Ingeborg Gerlach, Gerlach's older daughter. There are two sons from Kittel's second marriage (* 1945 and 1948).

After the Gerlach family had been repatriated via Lisbon in autumn 1941 , Kittel remained in English internment until the end of May 1943. Kittel's exchange took place on May 26, 1943, when he arrived in Lisbon, from where he took the train to Germany. He married Ingeborg Gerlach in the German embassy in Paris on September 15, 1943. From 1943 until he was interned again in 1945–1947, he headed the Bauer & Schaurte company in Neuss, a "war-important company" as a manufacturer of high-strength screws.

After internment by the British military (1945–1947), he worked for a few years at the Matthes-Fischer-Werke, Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, manufacturer of printed tin cans. From 1952/1953 he was then employed by the newly founded Deutsche Lufthansa AG in Cologne. First active in Hamburg in 1954 , he was General Manager for North and Central America in New York from 1955 to 1959, then on the board from 1960 to 1965. After that he was the managing director of the German National Tourist Board until his death in 1967 in Bad Homburg.

Achievements and Awards

swell

  • Berliner SC (ice skate club), communications, May 1930 under "Miscellaneous"
  • Peter and Leni Gillman: Collar the Lot! How Britain Interned & Expelled its Wartime Refugees . Quartet Books Ltd., London, 1980
  • International Who's Who 1964
  • Lupold v. Lehsten: Jakob Gerlach's friendship album on his wandering in 1849 and the Gerlach master locksmith family in Frankfurt am Main . In: Hessische Familienkunde , Volume 38, Issue 3/2015, columns 113–124 (on Kittel and Gerlach)
  • Institute for Personal History (IPG), Bensheim, Vorlass Kittel, folders Kittel ex Wolinski (also with an illustrated sports magazine from 1927/28 with a photo by Kittel at that time, which can be compared with copies of the company magazine "Der Lufthanseat" with later photos, to check the identity of the ice hockey player with the Lufthansa Executive Board member, apart from the exactly matching times and places of birth and death shown above, whereby the correct place of birth must be Charlottenburg and not Berlin, as the incorporation did not take place until 1920.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In a letter to the Berlin Ice Skating Club from 1930, printed in Berliner SC Mitteilungen from May 1930 under the heading "Miscellaneous" addressed to Mr. Kleeberg, "our member Mr. Wolfgang Kittel" reports from Colón. Panama that his company (SCADTA) had transferred him there and that he was pleased to be able to help BSC members passing through.
  2. ^ Paris Match of June 6, 1940: Illustrated note from the deportation of his father-in-law Gerlach in 1940 from Reykjavík to England
personal data
SURNAME Kittel, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kittel, Wolfgang Alexander; Kittel, Wolfgang Alexander Hellmuth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ice hockey player and board member of Deutsche Lufthansa AG
DATE OF BIRTH November 11, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Charlottenburg
DATE OF DEATH February 27, 1967
Place of death Bad Homburg vor der Höhe