Alexander von Falkenhausen

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Alexander von Falkenhausen
Nassau, West Germany
Allegiance German Empire (to 1918)
 Weimar Republic (to 1933)
Taiwan Republic of China (to 1938)
 Nazi Germany
Service/branch Imperial German Army
 Reichsheer
 Republic of China Army
 German Army
Years of service1897–1930, 1934–1944
Rank General of the Infantry
AwardsPour le Mérite
Order of the Sacred Tripod

Alexander Ernst Alfred Hermann

Sino-German cooperation to reform the Chinese army. In 1938, Germany ended its support for China under pressure from Japan, and Falkenhausen was forced to return home.[4] Back in Europe, he later became the head of the military government of Belgium from 1940 to 1944 during its German occupation
.

Early life and military career

Alexander von Falkenhausen was born at

Eastern Asia
and its societies. He travelled and studied in Japan, northern China, Korea and Indochina from 1909 to 1911.

In 1897 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the 91st Oldenburg Infantry Regiment of the

First World War.[citation needed] He was awarded the prestigious Pour le Mérite award while serving with the Ottoman Army in Palestine. After the war, he remained in the Reichswehr (German Army) and in 1927 was appointed to head the Dresden
Infantry School.

Adviser to Chiang Kai-shek

Falkenhausen in 1933

In 1930, Falkenhausen retired from the service. In 1934, he went to China to join

Republic of China.[5] Von Falkenhausen was responsible for most of the military training of the army. The original plans by von Seeckt called for a drastic reduction of the Chinese army to 60 elite divisions modeled on the Wehrmacht
. This would require disbanding some of the forces of regional leaders, and the question of which factions' troops would be axed remained a problem.

On June 30, 1934, Alexander's brother Hans Joachim von Falkenhausen, SA-

SS in the Night of the Long Knives
.

The Germans trained

80,000 Chinese troops, in eight divisions, which formed the elite of Chiang's army. However, China was not ready to face Japan on equal term. Chiang's decision to commit all of his new divisions in the Battle of Shanghai, despite objections from his own staff officers and von Falkenhausen, would cost him one-third of his best troops.[6] Chiang switched his strategy to preserve strength for the eventual Chinese Civil War
.

Von Falkenhausen recommended that Chiang fight a war of attrition as Falkenhausen calculated that Japan could not win a long-term war. He suggested that Chiang should hold the Yellow River line, and not attack until later in the war. Also, Chiang should give up a number of provinces in northern China including Shandong. He also recommended construction of fortifications at strategically important locations to slow the Japanese advance.[7] Falkenhausen also advised the Chinese to establish a number of guerrilla operations behind Japanese lines.[8]

In 1937, Nazi Germany allied with the Empire of Japan which was fighting the Second Sino-Japanese War with China. As a goodwill gesture to Japan, Germany recognized the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, withdrew German support from China and forced Falkenhausen to resign by threatening to have his family in Germany punished for disloyalty. After a goodbye dinner party with Chiang Kai-shek's family, Falkenhausen promised that he would never reveal any of the battle plans he had devised to the Japanese.

According to some sources (especially from Communist Chinese ones in the late 1930s), Falkenhausen kept in contact with Chiang Kai-shek and occasionally sent European luxury items and food to him, the Chiang household, and his officers. On his 72nd birthday in 1950, Falkenhausen received a $12,000 cheque from Chiang Kai-shek as a birthday gift and a personal note declaring him a "Friend of China".

On Falkenhausen's 80th birthday in 1958, Wang Xiaoxi, the Nationalist Chinese ambassador to Belgium, awarded him the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Tripod for his contributions in defending China.[9]

Military governor for Belgium

Recalled to active duty in 1938, Falkenhausen served as an infantry general on the Western Front, until he was appointed military governor of Belgium in May 1940, the same post his uncle

Hague Convention in their region, often against the wishes and instructions of their Wehrmacht and SS superiors.[10]

Though opposed to Nazi extremism towards the Jewish population, he yielded to pressure from Reinhard Heydrich's RSHA, leading in June 1942 to the deportation of 28,900 Jews.[11] His deputy for economic affairs, Eggert Reeder, was in charge of the destruction of "Jewish influence" in the Belgian economy, leading to mass unemployment of Jewish workers, especially in the diamond business. While implementation of economic policy led to mass unemployment of Belgian Jewish workers, Reeder's efforts preserved existing national administrative structures and business relations within Belgium and northern France during the German occupation. 2,250 of these unemployed Belgian Jews were sent to forced labor camps in Northern France, in order to build the Atlantic Wall for Organisation Todt.

To ensure that all the Belgian people co-operated in the German occupation, Reeder negotiated an agreement to allow native Belgian Jews to remain in Belgium. Part of this was the non-enforcement of the Reich Security Main Office order for all Jews to be marked by wearing a yellow Star of David at all times, until Helmut Knochen's conference in Paris on 14 March 1942.[12]

He intervened twice to prevent the execution of Belgians for resistance against the Germans, at the request of Qian Xiuling, a Chinese-Belgian woman whose elder cousin, Lieutenant General Qian Zhuolun, was a good friend of Falkenhausen during his time in China and in the post-war trial Qian Xiuling spoke in his defense, saying: "Nothing I did could have been accomplished without General von Falkenhausen's help. Even though he might not deserve an award, neither should he be put on trial, definitely not."[13][14]

Bomb plot

Falkenhausen was a close friend of the anti-Hitler conspirators,

20 July Plot to kill Hitler in 1944, Falkenhausen was relieved of his command and later arrested.[15] Falkenhausen spent the rest of the war being transferred from one concentration camp to another. In late April 1945 he was transferred to Tyrol with about 140 other prominent inmates of the Dachau concentration camp
.

The

Fifth U.S. Army on 5 May 1945.[16]

Trial and pardon

Falkenhausen and Reeder were sent to Belgium for trial in 1948, where they were held on remand for three years. A trial for their role in the deportation of Jews from Belgium but not for their deaths in

Auschwitz, began in Brussels on 9 March 1951 and they were defended by the lawyer Ernst Achenbach
.

During the trial, Falkenhausen was vouched for by Qian Xiuling, former French Prime Minister Léon Blum and a number of Belgian Jews, who gave evidence that Falkenhausen and Reeder had tried to save Belgian and Jewish lives.[13] Nevertheless, on 9 July 1951 they were convicted and sentenced to twelve years hard labour in Germany. On their return to West Germany three weeks after the end of the trial,[17] having served one third of their sentence, as required by Belgian law, they were pardoned by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

Later life

On return to Germany, he first lived near the then inner German border on the estate of his friend Franz von Papen and then, fearing kidnapping by East German agents, in Nassau an der Lahn.

In 1950, Falkenhausen became a widower; in 1960 he married his second wife, Cécile Vent (1906–1977), who had been a Belgian resistance fighter.[18] He had met her during his imprisonment in 1948, when Vent was a member of the administrative commission of the prisons of Verviers.[19]

Dates of rank

Decorations and awards

References

  1. ISSN 0040-781X
    . Retrieved 27 January 2018.
  2. ^ "General Alexander von Falkenhausen – Oxford Reference". Retrieved 27 January 2018.
  3. ISBN 978-1-61251-437-6
    .
  4. ISSN 0040-781X
    . Retrieved 27 January 2018.
  5. ISBN 9789023215547
    .
  6. OCLC 10921336
    .
  7. ^ Liang, p. 133
  8. ^ "Generalmajor Hermann Voigt-Ruscheweyh". 29 October 2009. Archived from the original on 29 October 2009. Retrieved 11 January 2019.
  9. ^ Liang, p. ix
  10. ISBN 9789653080683
    .
  11. ISBN 978-1-136-41381-0
    .
  12. ^ "The Destruction of the Jews of Belgium". Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team. Retrieved 30 April 2011.
  13. ^ a b "A Story of World War II Heroism Comes Home to China". China.org.cn. April 2002. Retrieved 2 April 2015.
  14. ^ "A Story of World War II Heroism Comes Home to China". china.org.cn. Retrieved 29 January 2018.
  15. ISBN 978-1-4617-5155-7
    .
  16. ^ Peter Koblank: Die Befreiung der Sonder- und Sippenhäftlinge in Südtirol, Online-Edition Mythos Elser 2006 (in German)
  17. ^ "Alexander von Falkenhausen : Nazi Germany". Spartacus Educational. Retrieved 6 August 2020.
  18. ^ "Cecile Vent, * 1906 | Geneall.net". geneall.net (in German). Retrieved 9 October 2018.
  19. ISBN 978-3-89244-940-9
    .

External links

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