Commemorating Stauffenberg and Cavalry Regiment 17: German Veterans’ Associations and Memorials in the 1980S and 1990S
Chapter 4 Commemorating Stauffenberg and Cavalry Regiment 17: German Veterans’ Associations and Memorials in the 1980s and 1990s
Martina Metzger
Introduction
Most associations of German veterans confined their activities after 1945 on the remembrance of obedient Wehrmacht1 soldiers who had fought the war to the end without questioning Hitler’s brutal and inhuman warfare. Especially among former officers there were many who avoided the challenging ques- tion if their scopes of action to prevent the crimes committed by the German army during the war might have been larger than they had thought. Therefore, they were not interested at all in the issue of opposition and resistance against Nazi rule. So the veterans’ association of former Cavalry Regiment 17 in which Stauffenberg and five other conspirators of 20 July 1944 had served since the 1920s and the material and non-material memory they have created for their executed comrades seems to be unique in Germany.2 This article examines the memorials created by Cavalry Regiment 17 veterans to remember their com- rades involved in military resistance and it shows their interdependency with the controversial debates on Second World War memory within the German public in the postwar decades. Its main focus will be the dedication of rolls of honor in the cathedral in Bamberg 1987 as this event had been a turning point in the commemoration activities which showed a new self-concept of former members of Cavalry Regiment 17 officer corps. In the last decades a
1 The Wehrmacht was the army which Hitler had created for his plans of expansionist warfare. It was established in 1935 as the result of Hitler’s efforts of redeveloping and rearming the German armed forces. Its high command and several of its members were responsible for the inhuman and criminal warfare of extermination during the Second World War from 1939 to 1945. 2 Cavalry Regiment 17 was – together with Infantry Regiment 9 garrisoned in Potsdam – the German army unit with the highest number of officers sentenced to death after the upheaval attempt had failed on July 20th, 1944. Up to the publication of this article research has shown no evidence about comparable activities by veterans’ associations of Infantry Regiment 9. It can be assumed that activities at their former garrison have been very difficult up to 1989 because Potsdam belonged to the Socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in which this sort of commemoration was not wanted at all for ideological reasons.
© Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019 | doi:10.30965/9783657788231_005 56 Martina Metzger lot of interesting literature had been published about discussions on adequate forms of commemorative culture within the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as far as the military is concerned but – as Robert Buck had remarked in the late 1990s – the debates are still in progress.3 This article focuses mainly on the special case of Cavalry Regiment 17. Therefore, it is mostly based on the unpublished records created by the former Lieutenant Franz Graf Du Moulin (1922–2003) who had been chairman of the former officers’ veterans’ associa- tion from 1985 until he died.
The Bavarian Cavalry Regiment 17 and Its Connections to the Plot of 20 July 1944
This unit was established in 1920 as the Reichswehr4 successor of all twelve cavalry regiments which had existed within the army of the Bavarian king- dom before 1918. Its mostly aristocratic members shared the same social back- ground and the same values based on their Christian belief. Although the regiment as a military unit formally existed only up to mobilization in 19395 soldiers and officers identified themselves with the common spirit it still rep- resented. Cavalry Regiment 17 became relevant for German history because it was the unit in which the later Colonel in General Staff Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1907–1944) had started his military career in the mid-1920s. Furthermore four of his comrades from that regiment were sentenced to death
3 See Robert Buck, “Die Rezeption des 20. Juli 1944 in der Bundeswehr. Anmerkungen zu deren Traditionsverständnis,” in Der 20. Juli. Das “andere Deutschland” in der Vergangenheitspolitik, ed. Gerd R. Ueberschär (Berlin: Elefanten-Press, 1998), 286-287; Peter Steinbach, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg: Wagnis – Tat – Erinnerung (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2015), Hugendubel e-book edition (epub), 7-9. 4 The Reichswehr was the first united German army during the Weimar Republic and the early years of the “Third Reich” from 1919 to 1935. Its force level and its armament had been mas- sively restricted by the Versailles treaty until the Nazi regime began with their arms build-up program. 5 In September 1939 Cavalry Regiment 17 was divided into four reconnaissance units which were supposed to assist the Wehrmacht infantry during the war. These units were restructured and redeveloped several times – especially after the beginning of Operation “Barbarossa” in 1941. However, soldiers and officers themselves identified themselves more with their peace- time regiment than with their wartime units.