The Mysterious Erich von Richthofen May 18, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
The King and Country debate has been described previously on this blog. It was a talk at Oxford Students’ Union 9 Feb 1933, which saw 275 to 153 students vote for the motion ‘that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. This surprisingly pacifist stance from a major British institution attracted first British then international attention. Beach argued in the previous post that the influence of the debate was certainly felt on the streets in other countries: it damaged British prestige or at least gave the sense that Britain was supine in a decade when it would need to be martial and energetic. However, it was also noted that the evidence that the debate swung opinions in the German high command was slight. The only evidence for this comes down, in fact, to (i) some bombastic words from Churchill and (ii) also a letter written to The Daily Telegraph 4 May 1965:
I am an ex-officer of the old Wehrmacht and served on what you would call the German General Staff at the time of the Oxford resolution. I can assure you, from personal knowledge, that no other factor influenced Hitler more and decided him on his course that the ‘refusal to fight for King and Country’ coming from what was assumed to be intellectual élite of your country
The author was Erich von Richthofen. Who was, though, Erich von Richthofen? The historian of the debate, Martin Ceadel, who published a notable article in 1979 in the Historical Journal, came to believe that von Richthofen was a lie.
The only address given in the letter is Newton Abbot and an inquiry through the local newspaper has revealed no knowledge of anyone of that name living there in the mid-sixties or any other time; the only member of the von Richthofen family of that name is now a professor in the University of Toronto, was never in the German army, and denies having written the letter; and the German military archives have no record of any General Staff or senior army officer of that name in the period.
Ceadel was a thorough scholar: he had used the Mid-Devon Gazette to make local inquiries, he had got in touch with Erich von Richthofen, Dep’t of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto and he had written to the Privatarchiv Generalstabsoffiziere Deutscher Heere (Bonn) and the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Freiburg im Breisgau). All had turned up negatives and justified the paragraph above. The question is can internet research take this further now, or in ten years time? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
It might be noted that this sounds very much like the name that a British faker would come up with: Manfred von Richthofen (pictured above, the Red Baron) was, after the Kaiser, arguably the best known German of the Great War, whereas Erich was an easy German name.
If this is a fake as Ceadel credibly suggests then it has got everywhere: Jones, Most Secret War; Europäische Wehrkunde; Rees, Mark My Words… Yet more Second World War cobblers.
