Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff

Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff
Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff
Born	27 March 1905 Lüben, Silesia, German Empire
Died	27 January 1980(1980-01-27) (aged 74) Munich, West Germany
Buried at	Munich Ostfriedhof Plot 152—Row 1—Grave 1
Allegiance	Weimar Republic  Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Reichswehr Wehrmacht
Years of service	1923–45
Rank	Generalmajor
Unit	Abwehr, Army Group Center
Battles/wars	World War II, Invasion of Poland, Battle of France, Operation Barbarossa, Eastern Front, Battle of Normandy, Falaise pocket
Awards	Iron Cross First Class Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross Großes Verdienstkreuz (Great Cross of Merit)
Other work	Order of St. John, Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe (1952–63 chairman)

Rudolf Christoph Freiherr (Baron) von Gersdorff (27 March 1905 – 27 January 1980) was an officer in the German Army. He attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler by suicide bombing in March 1943; the plan failed when Hitler left early, but Gersdorff was undetected. That same month, soldiers from his unit discovered the mass graves of the Soviet-perpetrated Katyn massacre.

Early years

Rudolf Christoph von Gersdorff was born in the garrison city of Lüben (now Lubin, Poland) in the then-German province of Silesia. He was the second son of Captain (later Major General) Baron Ernst von Gersdorff and his spouse Christine (née Countess von Dohna-Schlodien). In 1934, Gersdorff married Renata Kracker von Schwartzenfeldt (1913–1942), co-heiress to the rich Silesian industrialist family of von Kramsta, with whom he had one daughter.

Gersdorff attended schools in Lüben and joined the Reichswehr as an officer cadet in 1923. He received his initial military education in Breslau at the Kleinburg Barracks, where his forefathers had for generations served in the 1. Schlesisches Leibkürassier Regiment “Großer Kurfürst” (First Silesian Life Guards Cuirassier Regiment “The Great Elector”), later (post-1918) renamed the Reiterregiment 7 (Seventh Cavalry Regiment).

Military career

In 1926, Gersdorff was promoted to second lieutenant, and in 1938 to Rittmeister (cavalry captain). The following year he graduated from the Prussian Military Academy in Berlin. In 1939, Gersdorff’s unit was deployed in the German invasion of Poland, and he subsequently served as a general staff officer in the Battle of France.

In 1941, for Operation Barbarossa, he was transferred to Army Group Center, where he served as intelligence liaison with the Abwehr (German military intelligence). His cousin Fabian von Schlabrendorff had arranged this as a means to bring Gersdorff into the resistance group active under Colonel Henning von Tresckow.^[1]

Tresckow, Gersdorff and their circle of conspirators within the Army Group Center were well informed about the war crimes against Soviet POWs and the mass murder of Jews by Einsatzgruppe B, and provided required military cooperation. As an intelligence staff officer (Ic), Gersdorff was responsible for contact with the Einsatzgruppe staff.^[2]

In April 1943, while still an Army Group Center intelligence staff officer, Gersdorff supervised the excavation of the mass graves of the Katyn massacre, which contained the remains of over 4,000 Polish officers shot by the NKVD in 1940.^[3]

In 1944, Gersdorff was transferred to the Atlantic Wall. Later that year he was decorated with the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for his planning of the escape of the main German force from the Falaise pocket. In 1945, he was promoted to Major General, and was later captured by the Americans; he was released in 1947.

During the war, Gersdorff was decorated with some of the highest awards bestowed on German soldiers, including the Iron Cross First Class, for his performance of duty under fire.

Conspiracy to assassinate Hitler

After becoming close friends with leading Army Group Center conspirator Colonel (later Major-General) Henning von Tresckow, Gersdorff agreed to join the conspiracy to kill Adolf Hitler. After Tresckow’s elaborate plan to assassinate Hitler on 13 March 1943 failed, Gersdorff declared himself ready to give his life for Germany’s sake in an assassination attempt that would entail his own death.

On 21 March 1943, Hitler visited the Zeughaus Berlin, the old armory on Unter den Linden, to inspect captured Soviet weapons. A group of top Nazi and leading military officials—among them Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz—were present as well. As an expert, Gersdorff was to guide Hitler on a tour of the exhibition. Moments after Hitler entered the museum, Gersdorff set off two ten-minute delayed fuses on explosive devices hidden in his coat pockets. His plan was to throw himself around Hitler in a death embrace that would blow them both up. A detailed plan for a coup d'état had been worked out and was ready to go; but, contrary to expectations, Hitler raced through the museum in less than ten minutes. After he had left the building, Gersdorff was able to defuse the devices in a public bathroom “at the last second.” After the attempt, he was immediately transferred back to the Eastern Front where he managed to evade suspicion.^[4]

Prior to the 20 July plot, Gersdorff also had hidden the explosives and fuses that another conspirator, Wessel von Freytag-Loringhoven, managed to procure from the Abwehr’s cache of captured British weapons and which Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was to use in his attempt to kill Hitler. Thanks to the silence of his imprisoned and tortured co-conspirators, Gersdorff was able to escape arrest and certain execution. As a result, he was one of the few German military anti-Hitler plotters to survive the war (others included Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche-Streithorst and Eberhard von Breitenbuch).

Later years

Following the war, Gersdorff participated in the work of the U.S. Army Historical Division, whereas, under the guidance of Franz Halder, German generals wrote World War II operational studies for the U.S. Army, first as POWs and then as employees. In the late 1940s, Gersdorff authored an operational study on the Wehrmacht response to the Allied Normandy breakout. (The study, together with contributions from Paul Hausser, Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz, Wilhelm Fahrmbacher and Heinrich Eberbach, was published in 2004 as Fighting the Breakout: The German Army in Normandy from COBRA to the Falaise Gap.)^[2]

In the mid-1950s, Gersdorff tried to join the Bundeswehr, the armed forces of postwar West Germany. Despite his distinguished record and decorations, his attempts were opposed by Hans Globke, the powerful head of the German Chancellery and confidant of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and by various former Wehrmacht officers in the Bundeswehr who did not want a “betrayer” in their midst. He thus was prevented from resuming his military career.

Gersdorff later dedicated his life to charity in the Order of St. John. He was a founding president of the Johanniter-Unfall-Hilfe, which he chaired from 1952 to 1963.^[5] In 1979 he was awarded the Großes Verdienstkreuz (Grand Cross of Merit),^[6] one of the eight classes of West Germany’s only state decoration, in recognition of his accomplishments. A riding accident in 1967 left Gersdorff paraplegic for the last twelve years of his life, during which he wrote and published his memoirs, Soldat im Untergang ("Soldier During the Downfall").

In his memoirs, Gersdorff claimed to have opposed the OKW's Commissar Order and other "criminal orders". This was shown not to have reflected reality by the historian Joannes Huerter, of the Munich Institute for Contemporary History. Huerter also found that the National-conservative ideology espoused by the conspirators within the staff of the Army Group Center was aligned with the Nazi regime in its anti-Communism and racial prejudice against Slavs and Jews. Huerter concludes that only when it became apparent that the defeat was imminent, and that Germany would be held responsible for its genocidal policies, did so-called ethical considerations came into play. The memoirs were influential in shaping the post-war discourse on the German military resistance and included many of the "myth-building statements" that fed much later works on the subject.^[2]

Gersdorff died in Munich, Bavaria, in 1980, at the age of 74.

Works

• Soldat im Untergang ("Soldier During the Downfall") (1982). Ullstein Taschenbuchverlag. ISBN 3-548-34008-3 (ISBN ), ISBN 978-3-548-34008-1 (German)
• Fighting the Breakout: The German Army in Normandy from COBRA to the Falaise Gap (contributor) (2004). Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books. ISBN 978-1-85367-584-3

See also

• German Resistance
• Assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler

References

Citations

Bibliography

External links

• Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff in the German National Library catalogue