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Alexander Löhr

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Alexander Löhr
Löhr in 1939
Born(1885-05-20)20 May 1885
Turnu-Severin, Mehedinți, Kingdom of Romania
Died26 February 1947(1947-02-26) (aged 61)
Belgrade, PR Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia
Cause of deathExecution by firing squad
Allegiance Austria-Hungary (1906–18)
 Austria (1918–38)
 Nazi Germany (1938–45)
Service / branchAustro-Hungarian Army
Austrian Armed Forces
Austrian Air Force (1927–38)
 Luftwaffe (1938–45)
Years of service1906–45
Rank Generaloberst
CommandsLuftflotte 4
Army Group E
OB Südost
Battles / wars
AwardsKnight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves
Signature

Alexander Löhr (20 May 1885 – 26 February 1947) was an Austrian Air Force commander during the 1930s and, after the annexation of Austria, he was a Luftwaffe commander. Löhr served in the Luftwaffe during World War II, rising to commander of Army Group E and then to commander-in-chief in Southeastern Europe (OB Südost).

Löhr was captured by Yugoslav Partisans at the end of the war in Europe. He was tried and convicted of war crimes by the Yugoslav government for anti-partisan reprisals committed under his command, and the bombing of Belgrade in 1941. He was executed by firing squad on 26 February 1947 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Early life and career

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Löhr was born on 20 May 1885 in Turnu-Severin in the Kingdom of Romania. He was the youngest child of Friedrich Johann Löhr and his wife Catherine, née Heimann. His father had served as a 2nd captain on a hospital ship in the Black Sea during the Russo-Turkish War. Here his father had met his mother, a Ukrainian nurse. She was the daughter of the military doctor Mihail Alexandrovich Heimann from Odessa. After the war, they married in 1879 and moved to Turnu-Severin in Romania. The marriage produced three sons.[1] Due to his mother's faith, he belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church; he grew up speaking German, Russian, French and Romanian. Löhr attended a military secondary school in Kaschau, present-day Košice in Slovakia until 1900.[2]

Löhr transferred to the infantry cadet school at Temeswar, present-day Timișoara in Romania, in January 1900.[3] In 1903 he was posted to Vienna, where he attended the Theresian Military Academy in Burg Wiener Neustadt until 1906.[4] He graduated from the military academy on 18 August 1906, with an overall rating of "very good". On the same day Löhr was retired as a second lieutenant and immediately volunteered for active service. Löhr served as platoon commander of a pioneer battalion in the Imperial and Royal 85th Infantry Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I.[5] By 1921 Löhr had reached the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Between 1921 and 1934 he held many staff positions in the military, including Director of the Air Force in the Federal Armies Ministry. In 1934, he was made Commander of the small Austrian Air Force, a position which he held until the annexation in 1938.

World War II

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See also: Operation Retribution (1941)
Warsaw burning, September 1939
Belgrade burning, April 1941

Löhr, who had been promoted to Major on 1 July 1920, was accepted into the newly created Austrian Armed Forces on 1 September 1920.[6] On 15 March 1938, Löhr was transferred to the Luftwaffe, where he became commander of Luftwaffe forces in Austria. By then he had been promoted to Generalleutnant. He was commander of Luftflotte 4 in the East from May 1939 until June 1942.

Luftflotte 4 carried out the bombing of Warsaw, Poland in September 1939 and of Belgrade, Yugoslavia in April 1941. Löhr had developed a plan to bomb Belgrade with incendiary bombs first, so that the fires would help the second, nighttime, attack to find the targets.[7][8] This cost thousands of people their lives. Löhr was promoted to colonel general effective 3 May 1941. He commanded the 12th Army from 12 July 1942 through to December 1942.

Commander-in-Chief South East

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Löhr succeeded General der Pioniere Walter Kuntze as Commander-in-Chief of the 12th Army on 3 July 1942.[9] He was appointed the Wehrmacht Commander in southeast Europe on 1 August 1942, and from 28 December 1942 this position was re-designated as Commander-in-chief in southeast Europe.[10] The forces under his command were also designated as Army Group E, and he was appointed as its commander. In this role, Löhr controlled all subordinate commands in southeast Europe, including the commanding general in Serbia (Paul Bader), the military commander in the Salonika-Aegean area (Curt von Krenzki), the military commander in southern Greece, the commander of Crete, the naval commander in the Aegean Sea, the German plenipotentiary general in the Independent State of Croatia, the commanding general of German troops in Croatia, and the military attaché in Sofia, Bulgaria.[11] Löhr was selected to command the German forces in the Balkans because he was an Austrian and thus was felt by Adolf Hitler to understand the region better as the Austrian empire had long included parts of the Balkans.[12] Hitler had a marked preference for appointing his fellow Austrians to positions of power in the Balkans as he felt that Austrians had a better understanding of the Balkans.[13] Like many other Austrians, Löhr had much contempt for the "non-historic" peoples of the Balkans, especially the Serbs.[12] Likewise, he regarded the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatsk-Independent State of Croatia) as a something of joke, and despite it's name he frequently disregarded the claims of the NDH to be a sovereign state.[12] Löhr ignored warnings from Edmund Glaise-Horstenau that the way he rode roughshod over NDH officials was damaging support for the NDH amongst the Croats.[12]

The territory of the NDH consisted much of modern Croatia along with all of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the NDH had 1, 925, 00 Serbs living within in it's territory (30% of the NDH's population).[14] The policy of the violently anti-Serb Ustaše regime was to forcibly convert one-third of the Serbs to Roman Catholicism, expel one-third into Serbia and to kill the remaining one-third, through in practice the Ustaše policy often degenerated into genocide as Ustaše units to kill all of the Serbs living within their locality.[15] German officials grumbled that it was absurd for the Ustaše to starkly alienate 30% of the NDH's population in such an extreme manner as it was noted that prečani Serbs were disproportionately overrepresented in the ranks of the Partisans.[16] In September 1942, Löhr met with Hitler just before the Fūhrer was due to meet Ante Pavelić, the Poglavnik ("Leader") of the NDH.[14] Löhr complained to Hitler that the Ustaše's anti-Serb policies had driven most of the NDH's Serb population into supporting the Partisans as the only military force capable of defending them from the Ustaše.[16] He wanted Hitler to order Pavelić to stop the attacks on the prečani Serbs not on moral grounds, but as the best way to stop the Partisans from recruiting within the prečani Serb communities.[16] Hitler laughingly dismissed Löhr's concerns, saying that the Ustaše was just "letting off a little steam" by trying to kill all of the Serbs living in the NDH, and ignored Löhr's suggestion that he discuss the issue at his meeting with Pavelić.[17] At the Pavelić-Hitler meeting, the former denied that his anti-Serb policies had anything to do with increasing support for the Partisans and claimed the principle problem was a lack of arms.[17] Pavelić claimed that if only Germany provided more arms, the Ustaše would wipe out the Partisans within a matter of weeks.[17]

Like all other Wehrmacht commanders, Löhr received Hitler's Commando Order of 18 October 1942 giving the standing orders to execute all commandos taken prisoner even in uniform.[12] Acting on his own initiative, Löhr added in a clause to the Commando Order stating that all Partisans taken prisoner were to be summarily executed even if they were wearing uniforms as he wrote "all enemy groups are to be wiped out to the last man".[12] He wrote that the war against the Partisans was to be fought with "brutal severity" and warned that he would be "pitiless" against any officer who did not follow the Commando Order as amended by him to the letter.[12] In February 1943, Löhr reported to Berlin that the NDH was a failure owning to the gross incompetence and corruption of the Ustaše regime, which had alienated most Croats from the NDH, and led to an upsurge in Croat support for the Partisans.[18] He wrote: "Government and bureaucracy have lost all support through mismanagement and the Ustasha course, not only among the Pravoslavs [Serbs], but also among the Croat population".[18] Löhr organised the fourth and fifth offensives against Yugoslav Partisans in 1943, during which most of those taken prisoner, including the wounded, were murdered on the spot.[19]

In September 1943 following the Armistice of Cassibile which ended Italy's war against the Allies, Löhr organised the German take-over of the Italian occupation zones in the Balkans.[20] Löhr made no compromises as he insisted that the Regio Esercito units in the Balkans either surrender to the Germans or fight under Wehrmacht command as part of Army Group E, and failing the acceptance of the first two terms, he would use force against the Italians.[21] Löhr simply ignored Italian objections that this policy violated international law as Germany and Italy were not at war as he argued the armistice of Cassibile endangered the German position in the Balkans.[21] Most of the Italian troops on the mainland of Greece surrendered out of the impression that they would be returned to Italy; instead Löhr shipped them all north to POW camps in Germany.[21] Several of the Italian garrisons on the Greek islands resisted the German attempt to disarm them, leading to a number of massacres of the Italian troops once the Germans had won control of the islands.[22] In the aftermath of Operation Achse, Löhr launched a sustained drive to wipe out the andartes in Greece, especially ELAS (Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós-Greek People's Liberation Army), the largest of the Greek resistance groups.[20] The British historian Mark Mazower wrote about Löhr's campaigns in Greece: "He had travelled widely and was certainly not a slavish admirer of the Fūhrer. None of this prevented him from following the strict and ultimately self-defeating guidelines for anti-guerrilla warfare which the German military had evolved under the influence of National Socialism. Most of Löhr's troops came into Greece from the brutal environment of the Eastern Front and Yugoslavia".[20] Mazower described him as a "short, dapper, taciturn" man who had a deep interest in the Balkans, which he had travelled extensively in from the early 20th century onward.[20]

Löhr saw the Balkans through an Austrian imperialistic spectrum that was little changed from the views he had held in the First World War, regarding all of the Balkan peoples as "savages" in need of German guidance.[23] Like most other Wehrmacht officers, Löhr saw any and all resistance as the work of "Balkan fanatics" unable to appreciate as he saw it Germany's civilising mission in the Balkans.[23] Besides for his views about violent "Balkan fanatics", Löhr and the officers who served under him were very much influenced by the Nazi views about "Judeo-Bolshevism" as he saw Communism as a demonic ideology which posed an existential threat to Western civilization.[24] The fact that the two principle resistance movements he was fighting in the Balkans, namely the Partisans in Yugoslavia and EAM in Greece, were both Communist movements led him to see the war in the Balkans as an extension of the Eastern Front.[24] Alongside Hermann Neubacher of the Auswärtige Amt, Löhr governed Greece.[25] From the fall of 1943 onwards, both Neubacher and Löhr privately believed that the war was lost for Germany in a military sense, and the duo held out hope that the Reich could only win the war in a political sense.[25] Both Neubacher and Löhr believed that the only possible way that Germany could win would be if the United States and the United Kingdom were to switch sides and join forces with the Reich against the Soviet Union.[25] The fact that the main resistance group was EAM and that a number of the Greek royalist collaborators had ties to the Greek government-in-exile was seen by Löhr and Neubacher as a potential opening for forming an Anglo-American-German alliance.[25] Over the protests of the SS, Löhr and Neubacher tolerated the Greek royalist collaborators exchanging messages with the government-in-exile.[25] Neubacher and Löhr came into conflict with Jürgen Stroop, the Higher SS Police Chief of Greece, who asserted a claim for the SS to run anti-guerrilla operations under his command in defiance of Hitler's orders that Löhr was in charge of all anti-guerrilla operations in Greece.[26] On October 4 1943, Stroop was recalled to the Reich as Löhr and Neubacher had more powerful friends in Berlin than Stroop.[27] During one of his campaigns to destroy the andartes, Löhr sent a message to the commander of the 1st Panzer Division that he wanted the "most severe measures against any signs of hostility" and warned that any officers who showed any "softness" towards the Greeks would face a court-martial.[28] In another order, Löhr stated about the war against the andartes that "this is a fight to the death without any half-way house" and that any "ideas of a 'peace-loving people's heroism' are misguided. Precious German blood is at stake".[29] As Commander-in-Chief of Army Group E, Löhr oversaw the Dodecanese campaign. On 26 August 1944, with the Allies driving on Germany on three fronts, Hitler ordered Löhr to begin evacuating Army Group E from Greece and move north to defend the Fatherland.

At the end of the war in Europe, Löhr received orders for unconditional surrender, but instead directed his forces to break out towards Austria. According to the historian Jozo Tomasevich, Löhr was captured by the 14th Slovene Division of Yugoslav Partisans in Slovenia on 9 May 1945, and attempted to negotiate passage for his troops to Austria. This was refused and Löhr was prevailed upon to issue orders to cease fighting, which the troops nonetheless disobeyed. He escaped, countermanded his order to surrender and continued with the breakout attempt. After an intense manhunt, Löhr was recaptured on 13 May.[19]

Conviction and execution

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The capture of Alexander Löhr

Löhr was imprisoned by Yugoslavia from 15 May 1945 to 26 February 1947. He was tried and convicted for war crimes committed during the anti-partisan operations of 1943, including the killing of hostages and burning of villages, and disregarding Germany's unconditional surrender.[30] On 16 February 1947, the court sentenced the accused based on Article 3, Item 3 of the Act on Crimes Against the Nation and the State, to death by firing squad, and co-defendants Generalleutnants Josef Kübler, Fritz Neidholdt and Johann Fortner, Generalmajor Adalbert Lontschar, Oberst Günther Tribukait and SS-Brigadeführer August Schmidhuber to death by hanging.[31]

In 1955, a memorial plaque dedicated to Löhr was installed in the Stiftskirche church in Vienna by the members of Vienna Aero Club. The Church belongs to the Military Ordinariate. The inscription read: "for the unforgotten comrade Colonel General Alexander Löhr". The ordinariate clarified that "The memorial plaques [...] in no way serve to glorify war crimes."[32] After some protests, the plaque was removed in 1986 during the Waldheim affair, but reappeared again some years later. It was finally removed in 2015.[33]

References

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Citations

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  1. ^ Pitsch 2004, p. 53.
  2. ^ Pitsch 2004, pp. 54–55.
  3. ^ Pitsch 2004, p. 55.
  4. ^ Pitsch 2004, p. 56.
  5. ^ Pitsch 2004, p. 57.
  6. ^ Pitsch 2004, p. 112.
  7. ^ Manoschek 1995, p. 18.
  8. ^ Vogel 2001, pp. 303–308.
  9. ^ Pitsch 2009, p. 4.
  10. ^ Tomasevich 1975, p. 235.
  11. ^ Tomasevich 2001, pp. 70–71.
  12. ^ a b c d e f g Steinberg 2003, p. 35.
  13. ^ Calic 2019, p. 130.
  14. ^ a b Gumz 1998, p. 38.
  15. ^ Gumz 1998, p. 35.
  16. ^ a b c Gumz 1998, p. 38-39.
  17. ^ a b c Gumz 1998, p. 39.
  18. ^ a b Calic 2019, p. 127.
  19. ^ a b Tomasevich 2001, p. 756.
  20. ^ a b c d Mazower 1993, p. 155.
  21. ^ a b c Mazower 1993, p. 149.
  22. ^ Mazower 1993, p. 150.
  23. ^ a b Mazower 1993, p. 158.
  24. ^ a b Mazower 1993, p. 158-159.
  25. ^ a b c d e Mazower 1993, p. 222.
  26. ^ Mazower 1993, p. 222-223.
  27. ^ Mazower 1993, p. 223.
  28. ^ Mazower 1993, p. 177.
  29. ^ Mazower 1993, p. 159.
  30. ^ Tomasevich 2001, p. 756–757.
  31. ^ Ljudska pravica, 17 februarja 1947
  32. ^ "Empörung über Gedenktafel für NS-Kriegsverbrecher in Wiener Stiftskirche". DER STANDARD (in Austrian German). Retrieved 2023-11-12.
  33. ^ "Stiftskirche: Nazi-Ehrentafel entfernt". wien.orf.at (in German). 2015-02-27. Retrieved 2023-11-12.

Bibliography

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  • Calic, Marie-Janine (2019). A History of Yugoslavia. West Lafayette: Purdue University. ISBN 978-1-55753-838-3.
  • Gumz, Jonathan (Fall 1998). "German Counterinsurgency Policy in Independent Croatia, 1941-1944". The Historian. 61 (1): 33–50.
  • Manoschek, Walter (1995). "Serbien ist judenfrei". Militärische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung in Serbien 1941/42. Band 38 von Beiträge zur Militär- und Kriegsgeschichte (in German). Oldenbourg, München. ISBN 3-486-56137-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  • Mazower, Mark (1993). Inside Hitler's Greece The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300089233.
  • Pitsch, Erwin (2004). Alexander Löhr. Band 1: Der Generalmajor und Schöpfer der Österreichischen Luftstreitkräfte [Alexander Löhr. Volume 1: The Major General and Creator of the Austrian Air Force] (in German). Salzburg, Austria: Österreichischer Miliz-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-901185-21-2.
  • Pitsch, Erwin (2009). Alexander Löhr. Band 3: Heerführer auf dem Balkan [Alexander Löhr. Volume 3: Army Commander in the Balkans] (in German). Salzburg, Austria: Österreichischer Miliz-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-901185-23-6.
  • Scherzer, Veit (2007). Die Ritterkreuzträger 1939–1945 [The Knight's Cross Bearers 1939–1945] (in German). Jena, Germany: Scherzers Militaer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3-938845-17-2.
  • Steinberg, Jonathan (2003). All Or Nothing The Axis and the Holocaust 1941-43. London: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781134436569.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  • Tomasevich, Jozo (1975). War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: The Chetniks. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-0857-9.
  • Tomasevich, Jozo (2001). War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-3615-2.
  • Vogel, Detlef (2001). "Operation "Strafgericht". Die rücksichtslose Bombardierung Belgrads durch die deutsche Luftwaffe am 6. April 1941". In Ueberschär, Gerd; Wette, Wolfram (eds.). Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert (in German). Darmstadt: Primus. ISBN 3-89678-417-X.

Further reading

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Media related to Alexander Löhr at Wikimedia Commons

Military offices
Preceded by
none
 Commander of Luftwaffenkommando Österreich
1 July 1938 – 18 March 1939 		Succeeded by
redesignated Luftflotte 4
Preceded by
none
 Commander of Luftflotte 4
18 March 1939 – 20 July 1942 		Succeeded by
Generalfeldmarschall Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen
Preceded by
General der Pioniere Walter Kuntze
 Commander of 12th Army
3 July 1942 – December 1942 		Succeeded by
General der Panzertruppe Walther Wenck
Preceded by
none
 Commander of Army Group E
31 December 1942 – 8 May 1945 		Succeeded by
none
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