Reichel incident (1942)
On 28 June 1942, a combined German force of Maximilian von Weichs' Second Army, Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army, and the Hungarian Second Army under Gusztáv Jány drove deep into Soviet territory planning to link up at Voronezh. Mikhail Parsegov’s Soviet Fortieth Army defended Voronezh and had the numerical advantage in tanks, with 640 in all, but the Soviet commanders were inexperienced and deployed their forces haphazardly. Coordination and logistical support among the Soviet armor was poor in comparison to their German counterparts. The Luftwaffe also aided the Germans by softening Soviet defenses, bombing airfields and infantry formations. The German kill ratio vis-a-vis the Red Air Force was more than four to one, with 783 Soviet aircraft destroyed against 175 German planes. The Fourth Panzer Army under Hoth came within thirty miles of Voronezh on the first day. By 4 July 1942, the vanguard of Fourth Panzer, consisting of the 24th Panzer Division and the Panzergrenadier Division Großdeutschland, reached the Don river in many places. Heavy rains slowed down attacks elsewhere, but overall the battle went exceptionally well for the Germans. The commander-in-chief of Army Group South (Heeresgruppe Süd), Fedor von Bock, wanted to take Voronezh itself, but Adolf Hitler and Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder wanted von Bock to quickly wheel south and finish encircling Soviet forces.[1]
The Reichel incident was almost a strategic military disaster for the German Reich in World War II, when the orders for Case Blue, the Wehrmacht's plan for the 1942 strategic summer offensive in southern Russia between 28 June and 24 November 1942, fell into the hands of the enemy through negligence on 19 June 1942 at the Eastern Front.
History
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On 19 June 1942, a few days before the planned start of the German summer offensive, Fall Blau, an incident with serious consequences occurred: 34-year-old Major i. G. Joachim Reichel (b. 8 March 1908 in Glogau), the first general staff officer (Ia) of the 23rd Panzer Division, was on a flight to the command post of the VIII Army Corps and on the way was to inspect the assembly area between the 336th Infantry Division and his own division. He had used a plane because he had no other options, as all the roads were so bad and swampy. Reichel's Fieseler Storch got lost in bad weather during the reconnaissance flight, came under fire from Soviet anti-aircraft guns and was shot down over no man's land between enemy troops. The general staff officer and his pilot Ernst Hermann Dechant (b. 8 May 1919 in Ziebigk) were killed in action, at least according to the Russian representation, when the plane crashed a few kilometers away. At 4 p.m., the plane was reported missing; it was initially assumed that it had made an emergency landing due to bad weather.
For reasons unknown, he carried the division's secret deployment plans for the first phase of Operation Blue in a hand file. These revealed that the Wehrmacht was planning an enveloping attack from the Kursk area to capture Voronezh in order to encircle the Soviet forces between Oskol and Don. Reconnaissance teams from the 12th Company/Infanterie-Regiment 687 found the wreckage behind Soviet lines a good 24 hours later on 20 June 1942. The plane with the serial number 5275 was lying in a swamp about 2 km southeast of the village of Surkowo near the Neshegol River. Debris was scattered within a radius of about 50 meters, and the right tank had bullet holes. What was worrying, however, was that all moving parts such as the machine gun, the pilot's emergency signal pistol and all maps were missing, as was the flight log. At Führer Headquarters in East Prussia, Generaloberst Franz Halder provided a brief update on the Major Reichel incident:
- Major Reichel's plane has been found. He probably is dead. The documents, filled with vital information, must by now be in enemy hands.
During a second advance in the night to 21 June 1942, German reconnaissance soldiers had taken several Soviet prisoners from the 76th Russian Rifle Division; one of them claimed to have witnessed the impact. He reported that a briefcase had also been recovered from the wreckage and handed over to the nearest officer available. The Red Army thus got hold of maps and plans for the first phase of the operation (which Stalin, however, believed to be a forgery). In fact, the staff of the 23rd Panzer Division quickly discovered that the folder with the deployment instructions was missing. The report was immediately sent to the Army High Command - it had to be expected that the enemy would adapt to the plans and move troops on a massive scale. In the morning of 21 June 1942, a reinforced company of the 336th Infantry Division once again was sent to the wreckage, after several hours of fighting, the Russian defense line was broken through and this time the men were successful: they found their comrades. A few meters from the wreckage, covered by a thin layer of earth, lay two bodies; they were identified as Major Reichel and First Lieutenant Dechant.
- Back in June 1942, Stumme was the commanding general of the XXXX Motorized (Panzer) Corps, part of the German forces preparing to push into Southern Russia as part of Case Blue, the strategic offensive toward the Baku oil fields and Stalingrad. Stumme, as a traditionalist German officer, wrote a one-page summary of the upcoming offensive and distributed it out to the XXXX Corps’ divisional commanders, according to historians David M. Glantz and Jonathan House’s 2009 book To the Gates of Stalingrad. How Stumme distributed these orders was the problem — flying them by air. In January 1940, the German plans for the invasion of Belgium fell into Allied hands after a liaison plane crashed behind the lines. Hitler forbade such flights in the future, enforcing strict requirements on who would receive operational orders and how, according to Glantz and House. But German officers often ignored Hitler’s orders, as German military tradition and Auftragstaktik — mission-type tactics — considered information sharing a critical component of success, allowing subordinate officers flexibility on the battlefield while obeying their commanders’ intent. So as a result on June 19, 1942, shortly before the offensive, an officer with the XXXX Corps’ 23rd Panzer Division, Maj. Joachim Reichel, was flying in a long-legged, big-winged Fi 156 Storch liason plane with his Case Blue orders, and an objective map, when the pilot flew off course and crashed behind Soviet lines. The crash shattered the pilot’s skull and killed him. Reichel ran away with the secret plans and was shot when resisting Soviet soldiers, according to a Soviet account of the event, although records from the ground are contradictory and unclear. Stumme’s headquarters were thrown into a panic at Reichel’s disappearance, and he scrambled a reinforced company from the 336th Infantry Division on a daring search and rescue mission. The soldiers would later discover the plane is a marshy, shallow valley — but did not find Reichel or the pilot. The Soviets had the plans. Stalin, however, largely ignored the compromised orders, believing them to be one of many potential future German offensives. He did bolster the tank strength of Soviet forces in the southwest as a precautionary measure, bringing up the total number of tanks on the Briansk Front to 1,600, although in actual practice the Briansk Front and its commander, Gen. Filipp Golikov, would suffer during the upcoming battle due to lack of coordination.[2]
The Russian prisoner who was brought along, the only witness to the crash, stated that the two plane passengers died instantly. and were not beaten to death, as some present suspected. The bodies were taken to the division headquarters and were at the command post of the 686th Infantry Regiment. The bodies were then examined by Stabsarzt Roux of Air Reconnaissance Group 4. Reichel had been wearing his shirt, trousers and boots, then his dog tag, officer's book, other documents and personal belongings. His skull was completely shattered. And there was another wound about 3 cm long above his right eye. His chest was crushed, a few ribs broken. His left shoulder was broken, blood on both arms. On the outside of his left leg there were 5 gunshot wounds, each about the size of a penny. The gunshot wounds went through the leg bones to the genitals. His left lower leg was also broken. First Lieutenant Dechant was wearing his shirt, tie, underpants and trousers. He was missing: jacket, socks, boots, his pilot's badge, other documents and valuable personal belongings. His skull was broken and there was a 2 cm long wound on his forehead. There were also traces of blood in his ears and nose. His chest was also crushed.
Commanding General Georg Stumme, his chief of staff, Colonel Gerhard Franz, and the commander of the 23rd Panzer Division, Lieutenant General Reichsfreiherr von Boineburg, were held responsible for the loss of the secret documents by an angry Hitler, relieved of their posts in on 28 June 1942, imprisoned and shortly afterwards brought before a court martial presided over by Hermann Göring.
Strategic consequences
Now there were only two possibilities: Either the Wehrmacht abandoned the detailed plan to attack the south of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1942 and advance to Stalingrad and the strategically important oil fields on the Caspian Sea. But then there would be no major offensive by the Wehrmacht that year. Or the assembled troops began the attack as quickly as possible, at least before Stalin could regroup the Red Army. Hitler, who was travelling from Obersalzberg via Munich and Berlin to the Führer's headquarters at Wolf's Lair in East Prussia between 19 and 24 June 1942, decided to begin the offensive on 28 June 1942.
The documents that had been found on the wreckage of Reichel's plane were delivered by courier plane to the Soviet High Command, the Stavka, and also to Stalin's attention within a few hours. But the man in the Kremlin did not believe them. Their discovery seemed too implausible to him. He assumed that the Germans would sacrifice a plane and two officers without further ado in order to confuse him with false plans. How much the dictator learned about the circumstances of the crash, which clearly spoke against a deceptive operation, is unknown. His paranoia of seeing traitors at work everywhere and at all times would probably not have led him to think the obvious anyway. In any case, the dictator continued to expect that the Wehrmacht's main attack would be directed at Moscow, and his generals also supported this assessment.
On 28 June 1942, at 2:15 a.m. Berlin time, Colonel General Reichsfreiherr von und zu Weichs' army was the first to attack. The 4th Panzer Army and the 2nd Army advanced on Voronezh on a front about 100 kilometers wide. Two days later, the 6. Armee under Friedrich Paulus followed and forced the crossing of the Oskol River. The advance went according to plan. A large-scale encirclement operation by the 6th Army from 20 July to 11 August resulted in the surrender of 57,000 Red Army soldiers, leaving the Wehrmacht only 85 kilometers west of Stalingrad. With the help of the "Brandenburgers," a bridgehead was formed across the Don in front of Rostov. The low number of prisoners by Russian standards and the low resistance of the Bolsheviks led to a change in the attack strategy.
After the campaign was underway, the city of Stalingrad on the Volga became another objective. The extended left flank was eventually defended by relatively weak German allied armed forces from Romania, Hungary and Italy. Until 28 November 1942, the Red Army lost 1,200,000 men as well as 4,862 tanks and SPG, nonetheless, this offensive is considered an Axis operational failure because it eventually led to the bloody and catastrophic Battle of Stalingrad.
Verdicts
Hitler had appointed Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, the most senior officer in the Wehrmacht, as the presiding judge of a special senate at the Reich Military/War Court (Reichskriegsgericht) in Berlin-Charlottenburg (as of August 1943 in Torgau). Since the beginning of the war, the Reich Military Court was responsible for high treason, treason, war treason, espionage and other politically and militarily relevant crimes, as well as special cases of "undermining military strength". Criminal proceedings against generals and admirals also fell under its jurisdiction. It was Göring who also conducted this delicate court case.
- General der Panzertruppe Georg Stumme, Commanding General of the XXXX. Armeekorps, left his corps on 28 June 1942, sentenced to five years Festungshaft (imprisonment in a fortress) on 22 July 1942
- sentenced for negligent disobedience ("too far-reaching orders" in terms of secrecy); On 2 August 1942, Göring consulted Colonel General Walter Model in Carinhall, whose assessment largely saved Stumme, who was innocent in the case. After Generalfeldmarschall von Bock and Generalfeldmarschall Keitel also intervened, the punishment was remitted at the end of August 1942 "in consideration of your merits and your outstanding bravery" and he was transferred to the theater of war in North Africa two weeks later.
- Major General Hans von Boineburg-Lengsfeld, Commander of the 23. Panzer-Division, left his division on 28 June 1942 ("for health reasons"), acquitted
- Reichsfreiherr von Boineburg-Lengsfeld returned to his division on 26 August 1942
- Lieutenant Colonel Gerhard Franz, Chief of the General Staff of the XXXX. Armeekorps, left the corps on 28 June 1942, sentenced to two years Festungshaft (imprisonment in a fortress)
- released after a few weeks (c. 27 August 1942) and transferred to the theater of war in North Africa
