Carl Szokoll
| Carl Szokoll | |
|---|---|
| Born |
15 October 1915 Vienna, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 25 August 2004 (aged 88) Vienna, Austria |
| Allegiance | |
| Service/branch | Wehrmacht |
| Rank | Major |
| Battles/wars | |
| Other work | Author, film producer |
Carl Szokoll (15 October 1915 – 25 August 2004) was an Austrian resistance fighter involved in the 20 July Plot, major in the Wehrmacht, and, after the war, author and film producer.
Szokoll was born in Vienna, the son of a low-ranking soldier in the Austrian army who had fought in the First World War and had been a long-term Russian prisoner of war. He grew up under poor circumstances in Vienna, but because he received excellent grades in primary and secondary school he was later admitted as an officer candidate in the Austrian army in 1934. In his years as a cadet, he met his wife Christl Kukula, the daughter of a Jewish Vienniese industrialist. After the Anschluss in 1938, he had to end his relationship with Kukula because of the Nuremberg laws that forbade romantic involvement with Jews. Despite this, he secretly stayed in contact with her during the next years and married her, after the war, in 1946. Together they had one son.
Because of his relationship to a half-Jewish woman (Halbjüdin as the Nuremberg laws put it), he was transferred from an élite panzer unit to the ordinary infantry regiment and fought in the first phases of World War II in Nazi Germany's assaults on Poland and France. Because he was wounded in battle, he was sent back to Vienna for work in the administration of the district of Vienna.
In 1943, then-captain Szokoll was introduced in Berlin to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, one of the heads of the resistance movement in the Third Reich, by the Austrian Lieutenant - Colonel Robert Bernardis and got involved with them by monthly visits of Robert Bernardis in Vienna since February 1944. When the 20 July plot seemed to have succeeded after Stauffenberg placed a bomb in the Führer Headquarters "Wolfsschanze", he was with Colonel Heinrich Kodre, the "Chief of Staff" in Vienna, one of the resistance's man of Stauffenberg, who executed with Colonel Kodre the orders to seize all authorities and arrest the leading members of SS and the Nazi administration.
...
Wikipedia