Otto Edwin von Stülpnagel (16 June 1878 – 6 February 1948) was a German military commander of occupied France during the Second World War. Arrested by Allied authorities after the war, he committed suicide in prison in 1948.

Career

Otto von Stülpnagel was born on 16 June 1878 in Berlin. He was a member of the Stülpnagel family. He pursued a military career in keeping with his family's long tradition of military service. Commissioned in 1898 and accepted as a member of the Imperial General Staff, he received several decorations for distinguished service on the western front during World War I. Nominated for the Pour le Mérite, Stülpnagel survived personnel cuts mandated by the Treaty of Versailles. Dismayed by accusations of German atrocities, he published an angry defence of German military conduct in a popular book entitled Die Wahrheit über die deutschen Kriegsverbrechen (The Truth about German War Crimes) (1921). Promoted to the rank Generalleutnant (lieutenant general) in 1931, Stülpnagel played a leading role in the Reichswehr in conjunction with Kurt von Schleicher and Erich Freiherr von dem Bussche-Ippenburg during the Weimar era. Transferred to the fledgling Luftwaffe in 1934, Stülpnagel eventually took charge of the air force academy before falling from favour and retiring in March 1939.

Days before the German invasion of Poland, Hitler recalled Stülpnagel to active service and placed him in charge of a military district in Austria (Wehrkreis XVII), and he held the latter post for fourteen months.

Orders from Hitler placed the army and the MBF in charge of "security" but allowed other state and Nazi party agencies to exercise a degree of influence in Occupied France. The German ambassador in Paris, Otto Abetz, first supervised and later controlled diplomatic relations between France and Germany, but that power amounted to little in practice. Hitler would not allow his ambassador to trade concessions for French cooperation, and formal negotiations between the Third Reich and Vichy France came to nought. With control of the flow of vital raw materials, food, and people across the demarcation line that separated occupied from unoccupied France, Stülpnagel could reward French cooperation by allowing people and goods to cross military checkpoints, or he could seal the borders and bring the French economy to a grinding halt. Control over both the demarcation line inside France and borders with Germany and Belgium gave the MBF considerable influence over German policy and French affairs. Thus Stülpnagel played a major role in Franco-German relations between October 1940 and January 1942. He is buried in the Champigny-Saint-André German war cemetery.

References

;Secondary sources:

  • Walter Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic: Ein Deutscher im besetzten Frankreich (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1987, ).
  • Thomas Laub, After the Fall: German Policy in Occupied France, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
  • Allan Mitchell, Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation (New York: Berghahn, 2008).
  • François Marcot, Dictionnaire Historique de la Résistance (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2006).

;Archival sources:

  • BAMA, N 5 (Depot Stülpnagel)/26/11, 26–29;
  • German Federal Archives: BArch PERS 6/359

;Other sources

  • Otto von Stülpnagel, Die Wahrheit über die deutschen Kriegsverbrechen (Berlin: Staatspolitischer Verlag, 1921).

;Citations