page_title: Kurt Agricola
section_title: Interwar period
hierarchical_section_title: Kurt Agricola / Interwar period
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Der Ring (Rynek) in Oppeln auf einer Postkarte von 1938
context_page_description: Kurt Wilhelm Albert Karl Agricola was a general in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II who held senior level occupational rear-security commands in the occupied Soviet Union. A native of Saxony, Agricola entered army service in 1908 and served during World War I. During the interwar era, he held staff assignments and continued to rise through the army's ranks in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany. His career ended stalled in January 1939, when he was sent into retirement on political grounds because of his marriage to Martha born Hahn, a Jewish woman. Reactivated again upon the start of World War II, Agricola received exclusively positions behind the front line. As rear area commander of the 2nd Army in the occupied Soviet union during 1941–43, Agricola brought changes in the Wehrmacht's harsh occupation policies and was successful in maintaining control of his area of occupied territory from Soviet partisans. Shortly after the war's end, he was arrested by Soviet authorities, convicted of war crimes and remained in captivity for a decade. One of the last German prisoners in the Soviet Union, he was released in October 1955 and died shortly thereafter in West Germany.
context_section_description: Following the end of World War I in November 1918, Agricola was retained in the Reichswehr holding a variety of staff roles. He was promoted to Major in 1928. From 1927 to 1930, he commanded a company of the 10th Infantry Regiment. In February 1930 he returned to the staff of Gruppenkommando 1 and in 1931 to that of the 4th Division, where, as an Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) from 1932, he saw the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933. Soon thereafter, in July 1934, he received his promotion to Oberst (Colonel), and after a two-month transfer in the Command of the Wehrkreis (Military District) IV (Dresden) he was named commander of the Infantry Regiment Breslau in 1934 and retained his command after it was redesignated as the 49th Infantry Regiment on 15 October 1935.
  Arguably, Agricola could hope, at the time, that he would have a successful career in the ongoing re–organization of the new armed forces of Germany — the Wehrmacht. Besides his tenure of multiple staff positions, Agricola also received very positive reports from his superiors; he was praised as "very talented", and described as an "especially reliable staff officer", "an excellent regimental commander", while it was noted in most of his assignments that he performed brilliantly at his position. Nonetheless, his hopeful career soon started to fade away. On 12 October 1937, he was named commander of Heeresdienststelle 3, a rather obscure unit tasked with guarding the eastern borders of the Third Reich; during this time, his superiors observed that "sometimes he underestimated his great concern for the troops", an indication of his caring leadership style. On 1 January 1938 he was promoted to Generalmajor (Major General), but no higher commands awaited him: on 10 October 1938 he was named Landwehr Commander in Oppeln (present-day Opole in Poland) and simultaneously given the command over the fortifications of the city. In his function as Landwehr commander, he had attend to the organization and the training of older reservists (35–45 years of age), some of them veterans of World War I. This was a backwater post for an officer such as Agricola, whose once–promising career came finally to an abrupt end on 31 January 1939, when he, 49 years old at the time, retired from the army and was simultaneously given the honorary rank (Charakter) of a Generalleutnant (Lieutenant General).
  The reason for Agricola's retirement was never officially disclosed and remained a puzzling question, until his chief of staff testified in 1967 that the ground was that Agricola's wife was Jewish. For a staunchly antisemitic regime such as the Nazi one, and with the implementation of racial laws, marriage with a Jewish woman could be a threat to an officer's career as well as life. His personal papers indirectly reveal that Agricola had been put on watchlist for racial reasons. Soon, his own ancestry came under official, if indirect, investigation. Initially, Agricola was asked to prove (and was able to do so) his "Aryan" ancestry (up until his great–grandfathers) in 1937. As the effect of the Nazi racial policies became more dangerous to the life of his wife and the couple's children — naturally classified as Mischlinge — Agricola was forced to divorce his wife Martha, who afterwards fled with her son Wilhelm to Brazil. Agricola also sent their other children to the Bethel Institution in Bielefeld for their own protection.
  In 1939, Agricola also published the book Der rote Marschall. Tuchatschewskis Aufstieg und Fall (The Red Marshal. Tukhachevsky's Rise and Fall), an account of the career of Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was executed during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in 1937. This publication revealed, among others, that Agricola was a convinced Anti-bolshevist.
caption: The city of Oppeln at the time when Agricola was commander of its Landwehr and fortifications (1938)
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