page_title: Hans Graf von Sponeck
section_title: Trial, imprisonment and execution
hierarchical_section_title: Hans Graf von Sponeck / Second World War / Trial, imprisonment and execution
caption_attribution_description: Stolperstein in Bremen Horn-Lehe
context_page_description: Hans Graf von Sponeck was a German general during World War II who was imprisoned for disobeying orders and later executed.
context_section_description: On 23 January 1942, Sponeck was tried in front of the Court President Hermann Göring where he maintained that he had acted against orders, on his own initiative, in order to avoid the destruction of his division. He was found guilty of disobedience to a superior officer and given the death sentence. Adolf Hitler (on Manstein's proposal) commuted the sentence to seven years in prison. Sponeck was to serve as an example to those who disobeyed Hitler's new order not to retreat. Sponeck was imprisoned in the Germersheim Fortress.
  Following the 20 July failed attempt to assassinate Hitler, Josef Bürckel, Gauleiter of Gau Westmark where Germersheim was located, pressed Heinrich Himmler, who was the Reich's Security Official, to have Sponeck executed in retribution for the assassination plot, even though the latter had no contact with the German military resistance. On Himmler's orders, Sponeck was shot to death on 23 July 1944. Sponeck was buried in Germersheim and no citations or speeches were permitted at his grave. After the war, Sponeck's remains were transferred to the Soldiers' Cemetery at Dahn in the Palatinate Forest.
  After the war, Sponeck has been commemorated in Germany, with an Air Force base in Germersheim, streets and monuments named after him. However, in 2015, following the publication of an article by Erik Grimmer-Solem published in 2014 in the journal Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, which investigated Sponeck's role in  "numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity in the southern Ukraine and Crimea in 1941," despite civil protests in Germersheim,  the German Federal Airforce, in accordance with the German Government's and the Bundestag's decisions,  renamed the Sponeck Airbase ("General-Hans-Graf-Sponeck-Kaserne") "Südpfalz-Kaserne."
caption: Memorial block in Bremen; removed in 2015 because of Sponeck's role in the Holocaust and other atrocities.[10]
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