Liedtke Max

Liedtke, Max Major Max Liedtke, the highest-ranking German officer to be honored by Yad Vashem, was the son of a Protestant vicar from Preussisch-Holland (today Paslek in Poland), a small district town in East Prussia, where he was born in 1894. After the end of World War I, Liedtke pursued a moderately successful career as a journalist and advanced to the position of editor-in-chief of the local newspaper in Greifswald. However, the Nazi rise to power placed him in an increasingly difficult position and, in 1935, he finally lost his job as editor of the Greifswalder Zeitung. Following that, he tried his hand at several odd jobs, until he was drafted by the army in July 1939. After the outbreak of war, he first saw some action in the Polish campaign and was then posted to the German military administration – at first in Belgium, and later in Greece (Piraeus). At the beginning of July 1942, Liedtke returned to Poland from Greece at the invitation of General von Gienanth, the chief-in-command of the military administration of the Generalgouvernement, and assumed the post of military commander of Przemysl. In this southern Polish border town on the banks of the San River, in July 1942, German Wehrmacht officers conducted a unique rearguard battle against the SS and Gestapo in a vain effort to rescue the local Jewish population from extermination. The moving spirit behind this resistance was the ordnance officer, Oberleutnant Albert Battel*. However, it was only with the arrival of Liedtke upon the scene, that Battel (who had already managed to incur the wrath of the Gestapo and the disfavor of his immediate superiors by his propensity to befriend Jews) had the ear and backing of the senior military officer on the spot. Matters came to a head on the morning of July 26, 1942, when the Gestapo cordoned off the Jewish ghetto on the eastern bank of the San in anticipation of the projected Aktion. In an urgent consultation among the local Wehrmacht officers, Battel proposed ordering blocking the San Bridge to SS and Gestapo personnel under the legal guise of the declaration of a “state of siege.” Liedtke, at considerable risk to himself, adopted the proposed course, which, of course, led to an inevitable clash with the all-powerful SS. “The worst they can do to us,” he remarked half in jest, half seriously, “is to shoot us.” In their daring defiance of the SS, Liedtke and Battel probably reckoned on gaining the support of the military high command in Poland. This turned out to be a miscalculation. Liedtke was compelled by his superiors on the very same day to lift the “state of siege,” and, on the following day, the Security Police were able to carry out their projected deportation of some 8,000 Jews to the Belzec extermination camp. In the short run, however, he was able to achieve some measure of temporary alleviation for those Jews working for the Wehrmacht, placing them and their families under military protection. According to the report of the head of the field office of the Security Police in Przemysl, SS-Untersturmführer Benthin, Major Liedtke even entertained the idea of building up, within the framework of his jurisdiction, “a model Jewish community” that would enjoy the protection of the Wehrmacht. This would not materialize. On September 30, 1942, Liedtke was relieved of his post as the Wehrmacht commander of Przemysl and assigned to the command of the First Panzer Army, which was active on the southern Russian front in the Caucasus. This transfer may well have been a punitive measure for Liedtke’s defiance of the SS. At any rate, with his removal, the SS could at last have their way and carry out unimpeded the liquidation of the entire Jewish population of Przemysl. Liedtke himself was handed over to the Russians after the end of the war. Indicted as an alleged war criminal, he was incarcerated in a Soviet prison camp in the Ural Mountains until his death in 1955. On June 24, 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Major Max Liedtke as Righteous Among the Nations.