Alfred-Ingemar Berndt

Alfred-Ingemar Berndt was the son of Gustav Berndt and Alma Berndt née Kaeding. The Berndts were expelled and dispossessed from Posen in 1920, a result of the Versailles Treaty. The family moved to Berlin-Schöneberg, where Berndt in 1922, age 17, joined the National Socialist German Workers Party. In 1924 he joined the Frontbann, reorganized front organization of the Sturmabteilung or SA. After the prohibition of the Nazi Party expired in 1925, he re-joined definitively. He was instrumental in building the organization and structure of the Hitler Youth in Berlin.

In December 1928, after interrupted study of German literature and volunteer work for German newspapers, Berndt got a job at Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau (WTB), the largest news agency in Germany. Berndt was able to disguise his Nazi leanings as serious journalism. He wrote under various pseudonyms as columnist and commentator, and became a writer for two Nazi papers, Der Angriff and Der Völkische Beobachter. In 1931 he became head of the writers’ division of the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, an organization of Nazi authors, high school teachers, journalists, and cultural personages. A central figure in a growing network of Nazi newsmen at home and abroad, he was jailed and imprisoned from time to time during the Weimar Republic on account of his politics.[2]

When Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, Berndt's position in the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur led to his promotion in Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau, which had become the Nazi press office, the Deutsche Nachrichtenbüro (DNB). In December 1933 he became chief editor of the DNB. Berndt was responsible for the coordination of the Reichsverbandes der Deutschen Presse (RDP) and was deputy of the Reich Press Chief, Otto Dietrich. After the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when Hitler's men murdered many opponents, Berndt left the SA and joined the Schutzstaffel (SS).

On 30 August 1939, two days before the start of the Second World War, Berndt was appointed Head of Broadcasting of the Propaganda Ministry (Division III). In early November 1939 Goebbels learned of Berndt's conflicts with the Reich Post Office, and rejected him as a negotiator for the Propaganda Ministry. In February 1940, Berndt reported that he had fulfilled his task of adapting the German broadcasting system to the requirements of war and war propaganda. He was released from all functions in the Propaganda Ministry and enlisted as a volunteer in the Wehrmacht. In the French campaign he was a sergeant in Heavy Tank Destroyer Battalion 605. He was awarded the Iron Cross second class, 27 May 1940. On 6 June 1940 he received the Iron Cross First Class. He wrote about his experiences at the front (Tanks Break Through!, 1940).[6] In August 1940 Berndt returned to the Propaganda Ministry, but left administrative work mainly to his previous deputies. Berndt was first head of the Propaganda Ministry Offices in Paris.[7] In May 1941 he went back to the front; this time as a lieutenant on the staff of the German Afrika Korps under then Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel. Rommel had been enormously displeased with Oberleutnant Alfred Tschimpke, a propaganda reporter who had written a book about the 7th Panzer Division that Rommel commanded in France.[8][9]

Author David Irving described Berndt as "burly, wavy-haired and dark-skinned". He "had the lumbering gait of a bear and a physiological oddity—six toes on one foot. (Goebbels had a right club foot.) Berndt was literate and personable, poked his nose in everywhere, and was put in charge of keeping the Rommel diary. Before joining Rommel's staff as a kind of Party 'commissar,' he was already a tough, ambitious Nazi zealot."[10] In the book Hitler's Airwaves, Berndt is described as a "notably unsavory character: Goebbels and his senior officials were frequently astounded by his slyness and cunning, fabrication and lies." Wilfred von Oven, personal press secretary to Joseph Goebbels, called Berndt "an unscrupulous and ambitious, but not untalented young man."[11]

Allied pilot murder

First lieutenant James Gordon Dennis

On 24 May 1944, just before the Western Allies landed in Normandy, a USAAF B-17 #42-31941 "Big Stoop" from the 350th Bombardment Squadron was shot down by Luftwaffe fighters west of Bückwitz Lake. Eight crew members were taken prisoner, among them the co-pilot second lieutenant James Gordon Dennis. Berndt halted his car on Hamburger Chaussee in Segeletz, where Dennis was being held, and, over the protests of two guards accompanying him, shot him dead in the street.[12] Dennis was initially buried at Friedhof Segeletz on 26 May 1944. His remains were later interred at the Ardennes American Cemetery and Memorial.[13][14]

Berndt responded by volunteering for combat. In September 1944, through the mediation of Heinrich Himmler, Berndt was given the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain), in the Waffen-SS. According to several eyewitnesses, Berndt, as commander of the second battalion of SS Panzer Regiment 5 "Viking," was killed at Veszprém, Hungary, during an attack by Soviet dive bombers on 28 March 1945. He was buried in 1945 to the west of Körmend, Hungary. His name is inscribed in the Szombathely German Military Cemetery, Vas, Hungary.[15] His valise was found in a buried chest near Lake Schwerin in Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania in northeastern Germany, and restored by the Bundesarchiv. It is now at the Bundesarchiv Military Archive in Freiburg.[16]

Berndt married Elisabeth "Lisa" Erna Anna Berndt née Krzoßa in 1928, with whom he had daughters Hildegund and Roswitha Anke Heidelind, the latter being born in 1941.

• We experience the liberation of the Saar (Scherl, Berlin 1935)
• From Work to Machine-Gun (with Kurt Kränzlein). Dreyse (Otto Stollberg, Berlin 1936). This book invitingly portrays the authors' experience as reserve soldiers for eight weeks in summer 1935.
• From critic to art servant (VB-Zeitung Verlag, Berlin 1936)
• Give me four years! - Documents for the first four-year plan of the Führer (Franz Eher Nachf., Munich 1937)
• Milestones of the Third Reich (Franz Eher Nachf., Munich 1938)
• The march into the Greater German Reich (Franz Eher Nachf., Munich 1939)
• The German and East German culture (NSDAP Gau Danzig-West Prussia, Danzig 1939)
• Panzerjäger Brechen Durch! (Tanks (lit. tank destroyers) Break Through!) (Franz Eher Nachf., Munich 1940)
• The songs of the front – song collection of the Great German Radio (Georg Kallmeyer, Wolfenbüttel 1943)
• Germany at War (Deutschland im Kampf) (Otto Stollberg, Berlin 1939–1944). Berndt and Hasso von Wedel (general) were editors of this book series, 43 volumes, almost 10,000 pages, covering every battle in which the German Army, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe were involved, from the Blitzkrieg in Poland, September 1939 to mid-1944.

Berndt wrote, besides various prefaces and epilogues to publications by other authors, several hundred newspaper articles in various non-Nazi newspapers of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Party newspapers. He was later occasionally active as a political commentator in the United Rundfunk program.

• Mitcham, S.W. (2008). Rommel's Desert Commanders: The Men Who Served the Desert Fox, North Africa, 1941-42. Stackpole Military History Series. Stackpole Books. ISBN 978-1-4617-5158-8.

• Newspaper clippings about Alfred-Ingemar Berndt in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
• Tanks Break Through! by Alfred Ingemar Berndt on Google books