Otto von Stülpnagel

Otto von Stülpnagel was born in Berlin. He served in World War I and retired in 1939. Days before the September 1939 [about:blank German invasion of Poland], Hitler recalled Stülpnagel to active service and placed him in charge of a military district in Austria (Wehrkreis XVII). Stülpnagel held this position for 14 months. On 25 October 1940, the German army high command transferred Stülpnagel to France and placed him in charge of the German military administration known as “Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich” (MbF; “Military Command in France”). This position gave him considerable authority over the flow of vital raw materials, food, and people across the demarcation line that separated occupied from unoccupied France. On the other hand, Stülpnagel did not approve of the confiscations that were carried out by the ERR, in particular the seizure of France’s artistic patrimony. Hitler, irrespective of Stülpnagel’s disapproval, exempted the ERR from military control. On 2 February 1942, Wilhelm Keitel, the head of “Oberkommando der Wehrmacht” (OKW; Armed Forces High Command) directed Stülpnagel to execute a large number of prisoners in response to acts of resistance. Stülpnagel, who had ordered the execution of 95 hostages on 15 December 1941, refused to go any further in the implementation of the retaliation policy. He submitted a letter of resignation, and was succeeded by his cousin [about:blank Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel]. He spent the remainder of the war with his wife in Berlin. At the end of the war, he was arrested by Allied authorities and moved to a French military prison. Charged with war crimes by French authorities, Stülpnagel committed suicide on 6 February 1948 at the prison on Rue du Cherche-Midi in Paris.

Literature: [about:blank Otto von Stülpnagel], Die Wahrheit über die deutschen Kriegsverbrechen, [about:blank Staatspolitischer Verlag] 1920. M. Brunschwig, “L’Allemagne En Guerre,” Revue Historique, Presses Universitaires de France, [about:blank 1 (1953)], pp. 34-63. Thomas Laub, After the Fall: German Policy in Occupied France, 1940-1944, Oxford University Press 2010. Allan Mitchell, Nazi Paris: The History of an Occupation, Berghahn 2008.