Wolfgang Müller (officer)

Wolfgang Müller (born December 15, 1901 in Bad Rehburg ; † January 6, 1986 in Mettmann ) was a German officer and resistance fighter from July 20, 1944 .

Life

Wolfgang Müller came from a family of doctors. In 1912 he entered the Royal Prussian cadet corps , and was first in the cadet Bensberg stationed, and later in the Hauptkadettenanstalt large light field , where he his Abitur took off.

In 1919 he joined the volunteer corps Landesjägermeister the General Maercker , where he for the monitoring of radical left newspaper was responsible; In 1920 he was given the position of company troop leader .

In 1921 Müller switched to the Infantry School in Munich and in 1922 was accepted into the Reichswehr with the rank of lieutenant . From 1924 to 1926 he worked as a trainer for the Black Reichswehr in Military District Command IV and instructed members of the Young Steel Helmet and the Young German Order, among other things .

From the 1930s on, Müller rose permanently in the military hierarchy (promotion to captain in 1934 , major in 1939 , lieutenant colonel in 1941 and colonel in 1942 ). In June 1944 he was appointed head of the infantry division of the high command of the reserve army in Döberitz .

During the Weimar Republic , Müller had been politically close to conservative-revolutionary forces from the environment of Oswald Spengler , Otto Strasser , Ernst Niekisch and Ernst Jünger and understood each other as anti-capitalist, anti-gallitarian and anti-bourgeois. Against this background , his relationship to National Socialism , whose partisans in the Wehrmacht he assumed to be “boncentre”, was tense. As battalion and regimental commander in World War II , he did not reject the war of annihilation against the Soviet Union . His sympathies with the military resistance against National Socialism grew with the deteriorating military situation. Müller was to support the coup attempt on July 20, 1944 with troops from the Döberitz infantry school . He was arrested by the Gestapo on August 13, 1944 and spent five weeks in solitary confinement. According to his own statements, he could only avoid being expelled from the Wehrmacht through the intercession of General Heinz Guderian . Hitler ordered his demotion to the rifle , which Müller was able to elude with luck by staying in several hospitals during the last months of the war. At the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the British, from which he was released in March 1946.

Even in prisoner-of-war camps, Müller had rallied officers who had distanced themselves from National Socialism and formed a working group “The Truth”, a prototype of the later historical research group “The Other Germany” . Müller served as its chairman from 1948 and as managing director from 1949 . From 1947 to 1949 he also worked on the publication Das Andere Deutschland . At the same time, Müller was a deputy council member of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime from 1946 until he left in 1950 .

On November 20, 1951, Müller applied to the Blank Office to be included in the foreseeable rearmament ; however, his request was rejected.

In the 1950s, Müller held leading positions in various associations of those persecuted by the National Socialist regime ; In 1955 he was awarded the Adenauer commemorative coin of the working group of democratic circles . From 1957 to 1967 Müller was the editor-in-chief of military training in word and picture - the training magazine for NCOs in the Bundeswehr and, as a supporter of the SPD, campaigned for the formation of the grand coalition of 1966 .

literature

• Stefan Appelius : Pacifism in West Germany. The German Peace Society 1945–1968 , Volume 1. G. Mainz, 1999. ISBN 9783896534613 .
• Rolf Düsterberg : Soldier and War Experience . M. Niemeyer, 2000. ISBN 9783484350786 .
• Lothar Wieland: From the time without an army. Former Wehrmacht officers in the vicinity of the pacifist Fritz Küster . Klartext, Essen 2009.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lothar Wieland: From the time without an army. Former Wehrmacht officers in the vicinity of the pacifist Fritz Küster . Klartext, Essen 2009, pp. 25–27.
2. ↑ Lothar Wieland: From the time without an army. Former Wehrmacht officers in the vicinity of the pacifist Fritz Küster . Klartext, Essen 2009, pp. 69–72.