Adam, Wilhelm.

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Adam, Wilhelm.
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Adam, Wilhelm, born 28-03-1893 in Eichen, now a part of Niderau, the son of a farmer. After high school he attended from 1908 to 1913 the teacher training college in Schlüchtern. He had a career of a  military officer who served in three German Armies and later became an East German politician.

From 01-10-1913, Adam served as a one-year volunteer in military service with the 5th Company of the 2nd Nassau Infantry Regiment 88 . At the beginning of the First World War on 08-08-1914, now a unter Officer, he moved to the front. He was wounded  on 16-09-1914 and sent to a Protestant hospital in Düsseldorf. returning to the replacement battalion of his regiment 10 days later. On 01-04-1915 he was promoted to Feldwebel. From April to May 1915 he took an officer candidate course in Lockstedter and upon graduation on 22 May was promoted to Leutnant. On 14 June, he became a Zugführer, platoon leader, at 1st Recruits Depot of the XVI Army Corps. On 05-10-1915 he was assigned to the 5th Company of the Infantry Regiment “Graf Werder“ (4. Rheinisches) Nr. 30  . After an illness in July 1916, which he recovered from in a field hospital at Germersheim, he was transferred to the 1st Replacement Battalion of the 2nd Nassau Infantry Regiment 88. On 28-09-1916 he became the commander of a machine gun company of the 424th Infantry Regiment. On 28-10-1916, he was appointed the aide to the Landwehr Infantry Brigade 70 , a position he held until the end of the war. He was dismissed from the Army as a Leutnant on 31-01-1919. From 1919 to 1929, Adam was working as a senior vocational school teacher at the army’s vocational school in Langenselbold, Hesse, and from 1929 to 1934 in Weimar, Thuringia. Alongside these duties, Adam also studied from 1922 to 1924 at the university in Frankfurt am Main and completed the examination for middle school teachers in 1927.

In 1919 he became a member of the Langenselbold Military Association and in 1920 of the Young German Order. In 1923, Adam joined the Nazi Party and was involved that same year in the Beer Hall Putsch. He received the Bloodorder,  The decoration of November 9, 1923 usually called the Order of Blood or Blutorden, was a mark of honor in the form of a medal (it was certainly no knighthood) that reminded of the failed Bierkellerputsch, an amateurish seizure of power of the still young NSDAP  in Munich. The intended coup ended in a shooting with the police outside the Munich residence, in front of the façade of the Feldherrnhalle.

In 1926, Adam left the Nazis and joined the German People’s Party (DVP),  with whom he stayed until 1929. In 1933 he became a member of the Stahlhelm  and an SA Oberscharführer. He worked at the Unit for ideological training with the Staff of Standard 94 in Weimar. After being transferred to the SA reserves  in 1933 came Adam’s reactivation in 1934 at the rank of Hauptmann as well as a promotion to Major once he had finished a course at military school in 1937. Thereafter, until 1939, Adam worked as company chief and a teacher at the infantry school in Döberitz near Berlin.

In 1939 he became an Adjutant in the XXIII Army Corps, under the Army Commanders Walter von Reichenau   and later in 1941, Friedrich Paulus  On 17-12-1942, he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. On 31-01-1943, now an Oberst,

Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-F0316-0204-005,_Russland,_Paulus_in_Kriegsgefangenschaft 0a9db854bc79fc991bcb31003c2df541(1) On 04-02-1943. Paulus meets with other German Generals, captured in Stalingrad. 1. Generalleutnant Alexander Edler von Daniels. 2. Generalleutnant Hans-Heinrich Sixt von Arnim. 3. Generaloberst Walter Heitz.

4. Oberst Wilhelm Adam. 5. Generalfeldmarschall Friedrich Paulus. Adam was captured by the Soviet Army after the surrender at Stalingrad, where he was interrogated by Nikolay Dyatlenko, who died age 82 in 1996. Following the Paulus interrogation, Dyatlenko was assigned to interrogate a number of other captured German Generals, such as the commander of XIV Panzerkorps, General Helmuth Schlömer  , and General Walther von Seydlitz- Kurzbach.. Hellmuth Schlömer died very old age 102 on 18-08-1995.  While a prisoner of war, Adams went to the Central Antifa (i.e. Anti-Fascist) School at Krasnogorsk and became a member of the National Committee for a Free Germany. He was also sentenced to death in absentia by a Nazi German court.

In 1948, Adam returned to the Soviet Zone of Germany. He was among the co-founders of the National Democratic Party of Germany, an East German political party that acted as an organization for former members of the Nazi Party and the Wehrmacht. From 1948 to 1949 he worked as a consultant for the Saxony state government. From 1950 to 1952 he was Saxony’s finance minister and from 1949 to 1963 a member of East Germany’s Volkskammer.

Death and burial ground of Adam, Wilhelm.

In 1952, Adam became an Oberst in the Kasernierte Volkspolizei (KVP) (“Barracked People’s Police”), the forerunner of the East German National People’s Army . From 1953 to 1956 he was commander of the Officers’ College of the KVP – and later became the National People’s Army. In 1958, Adam was sent into retirement. He kept on working, though, for the Working Group of Former Officers. In 1968 he was decorated with the Banner of Labor,  and on the occasion of the twenty-eighth anniversary of East Germany’s founding on 07-10-1977, he was appointed Generalmajor, retired in the East German Army. Wilhelm Adam died on 24-11-1978, age 85 in Dresden and is buried at the Heidefriedhof in Dresden.

800px-Dresden_Heidefriedhof_Adam 800px-Dresden_Heidefriedhof_Adam

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