Alexander von Falkenhausen
|
|
Alexander von Falkenhausen (October 29, 1878 - July 31, 1966) was the head of the military government of Belgium during the German occupation, from 1940 until 1944 in the Second World War.
He was the nephew of Ludwig von Falkenhausen, who was the governor-general of Belgium during the German occupation, from 1917 until 1918, during the First World War.
Falkenhausen was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the German Army in 1897 and served as a military attaché in Japan prior to the First World War. He was awarded the Pour le Mérite during the war while serving with the Ottoman Army in Palestine. After the war he stayed in service and later headed the Dresden Infantry School in 1927. In 1930 he retired from service and went to China to serve as Chiang Kai-Shek's military advisor. Recalled to active duty in 1938, he served as an infantry general on the Western Front until his appointment as military governor for Belgium in 1940.
A close friend of two anti-Hitler conspirators, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, he soon came to detest Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, offering his support to von Witzleben for a planned coup d'etat. After the failure of the July 20 Plot in 1944, von Falkenhausen spent the rest of the war transferred from one concentration camp to another until freed by the Allies in 1945.
Falkenhausen was sent to Belgium for trial in 1948, and in March 1951 he was sentenced to 12 years hard labor for deporting 25,000 Jews and executing Belgian hostages. However, he was acquitted and released three weeks into his sentence after overwhelming evidence proved that von Falkenhausen tried to save as many Jews and Belgians as possible from deportation and execution. Falkenhausen died on July 31, 1966.de:Alexander von Falkenhausen nl:Alexander von Falkenhausen