Introduction by Bolko Freiherr von Richthofen to the 1933 reprint of The Red Fighter Pilot.
Event ID: 483
Categories:
21 April 1933
Source ID: 22
“My brother Manfred.
Even if a person is granted a long life, he will always remain to a certain extent a product of his origins and upbringing. But anyone who is called away from this earthly existence at an early age by an inexorable fate, the mental and physical heritage of his parents and other ancestors, the impressions of his childhood and youth will unmistakably appear in his thoughts and actions. And so it was with my beloved brother, Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, for he died a hero’s death before he had even completed his twenty-sixth year. Anyone who wants to paint a picture of his life must go back to the history and the nature of the family from which he came, must describe the environment and the people with whom he grew up, whose intuitions became familiar to him and gave rise to the qualities of his character which then enabled him at a young age to achieve such extraordinary things for nation and country.
The Richthofen family originated from Bernau in der Mark, which was once larger than Berlin, but is now only a small neighbouring town of the imperial capital. Sebastian Schmidt, himself a native of Koblenz and once a pupil of Luther in Wittenberg, was a Lutheran deacon there from 1543 to 1553. In accordance with the custom of the time and his clerical profession, he Latinised his name and called himself Faber. The family descended from him and his wife Barbara Below, a councillor’s daughter from Berlin. But presumably it would never have risen to such an unusual height if the pastor Sebastian Faber had not been given a friend of about the same age, who must be counted among the most outstanding men in the Margraviate of Brandenburg. This was Paulus Schultze or Schultheiß, who came from the Schulzen family of Bernau and whose father and grandfather, Andreas and Thomas Schultze, were demonstrably mayors of Bernau even before the beginning of the 16th century. Paulus Schultze also Latinised his name, and so in the history of the Mark he is called Paulus Praetorius. He was born in Bernau on 24 January 1521 and died in Moritzburg near Halle on 16 June 1565 as an imperial and electoral Brandenburg councillor, archbishop of Magdeburg and Halberstadt privy councillor, hereditary feudal lord and lord of the court on various estates he acquired in his relatively short life. Old pictures of him bear the words: ‘Vir prudens et orator gravissimus’, meaning ‘A wise man and excellent speaker’.
And indeed, this Paul Praetorius must have been an important and well-studied gentleman. At a young age, he was appointed informant to Margraves Frederick and Sigismund of Brandenburg, the sons of Elector Joachim II, both of whom later became archbishops of Magdeburg. He won the trust of his electoral master to the highest degree, was appointed to his inner council and sent on various diplomatic missions, in particular to the imperial court in Prague to Ferdinand the First Roman Majesty. In 1561, the same Emperor Ferdinand I Oculi awarded him and his heirs a noble coat of arms, which, in keeping with Praetorius’ name, depicts a praetor, i.e. a judge sitting on a judge’s chair, dressed in black. But Paulus Praetorius had no male heirs, and so he decided to accept the son of his friend Sebastian Faber, Samuel Faber, born in Bernau in 1543, or Samuel Praetorius as he was known from then on, in his place. Paulus Praetorius left him not only his newly acquired coat of arms, but also his undoubtedly not inconsiderable possessions. Samuel Praetorius was also a learned man; he moved to Frankfurt an der Oder, where he was a councillor, municipal judge and finally mayor. He died in 1605 and his son Tobias Praetorius (1576 to 1644) increased the family’s fortune and acquired the first estates in Silesia, and through his marriage to a noble lady he increasingly moved from the circle of learned patricians to noble landownership. His son Johann Praetorius (1611-1664) moved entirely to Silesia and was granted hereditary Bohemian knighthood by Emperor Leopold I in 1661, adding the surname von Richthofen. From this Johann Praetorius von Richthofen descended the entire Richthofen family, which still flourishes today. From the middle of the 17th century onwards, the family was predominantly settled in Silesia, particularly in the districts of Striegau, Jauer, Schweidnitz and Liegnitz, and has remained so to this day. As much as the family was grateful to the Roman-German Emperor in Vienna for all the help and honours it received, its origins in the Margraviate of Brandenburg lived on.
When Frederick the Great made Silesia a Prussian province, the family joined the new ruling house, which was an old one for them, without exception. Frederick the Great rewarded this loyalty with the elevation to the rank of barons of the Kingdom of Prussia on 6 November 1741. The vast majority of the Richthofen family has remained active in agriculture since the days of the acquisition of the first Silesian estate. The generations have dedicated their labour to the cultivation and maintenance of their extensive estates, but have not neglected the common good through their activities in the provincial administration of Silesia. And in war and peace, the members of the family did their natural duty in defence of their province and the kingdom. The cavalry general Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen, my brother’s godfather, led an army in the Great War. But at the same time, the descendants of councillors, pastors and mayors had by no means lost their sense of scholarly professions. And the example set by their adoptive father Paulus Praetorius led many a member of the family into political and diplomatic professions. Lawyers today are still familiar with the name of Karl Freiherr von Richthofen, German lawyer and professor at the University of Berlin, a specialist in the field of old Germanic and especially Frisian law. And Ferdinand von Richthofen’s great reputation as one of the first geographers not only of Germany but of the world has remained unchanged even now, almost thirty years after his death; the name of this unrivalled explorer of China still lives on today in the mountains and rivers he travelled and named after him. But members of the family have also had a considerable influence on the political shaping of our country’s history right up to the present day. For example, Oswald Freiherr von Richthofen, the long-serving Prussian Minister of State and State Secretary of the Foreign Office during Prince Bülow’s chancellorship, and Barons Karl, Ernst, Hartmann and Praetorius von Richthofen in the National Assembly in Weimar and in the pre- and post-war days of the German Empire.
Over the past centuries, our immediate family has not differed in any significant way from the development of the other lines – the separation of the individual branches took place at the beginning of the 18th century. Our ancestors also sat on the acquired and inherited estates. They drew their patrons mainly from the Silesian nobility, such as the von Reibnitz, von Heintze-Weißenrode and von Lüttwitz families. Our great-grandmother was Thecla von Berenhorst, born in Dessau in 1808. She was a granddaughter of the Prussian Field Marshal Prince Leopold von Anhalt-Dessau, the famous Old Dessauer. Her father, Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst, Duke of Anhalt-Dessau’s Lord Chamberlain, was the offspring of a love affair between Prince Leopold and a young female subject. If one wishes, one may perhaps assume that the blood of the victor of Höchstadt, Turin and Kesselsdorf has remained unchanged in his descendants. Our grandmother’s name as a girl was Marie Seip. She came from a Mecklenburg landowner’s family of Hessian origin who had close family ties with Goethe’s family. We grandchildren loved this grandmother, who died a year before the outbreak of the World War, tenderly. Some of our fondest memories of our youth were the holidays we spent at our grandparents’ Romberg estate near Wroclaw. When we entered the manor house built by Schinkel at the start of our holidays, our grandmother used to welcome us with the words: “You can do what you like here!”. We boys didn’t need to be told twice and enjoyed the pleasures of country life, riding, hunting, swimming and everything else that went with it to the full.
Our father, Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, born in 1859, was the first active officer in our line and served in the Leibkürassier Regiment in Breslau. My two brothers Manfred (1892) and Lothar (1894) were also born there. He had to retire relatively early as a major, as military service had become impossible for him due to an ear condition. He had saved one of his cuirassiers, who had lost contact with his horse while swimming in the Oder, from drowning by jumping from a bridge into the river in full uniform. Unfortunately, the cold he caught in the process led to irreparable hearing loss. Our father lived to see the rise and death of his son Manfred and visited him several times in his squadron during the war, when he was the local commander of a small town near Lille. In 1920 he went to his eternal rest in Schweidnitz, where our parents had retired and where our mother lives today. Our mother, the guardian and keeper of the memory of her fallen sons, has made her home in Schweidnitz a place of remembrance for Manfred von Richthofen. On the occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of his death on 21 April 1933, these rooms, which have increasingly taken on the form of a small museum, are to be made permanently accessible to the public. Our mother herself, born in 1868, came from the wealthy Schickfus and Neudorff family in Silesia. Her mother, enie née von Falkenhausen, came from a family of great military renown, whose ancestor was Margrave Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Ansbach, who came from the now extinct Franconian line of the Hohenzollern dynasty and was married to a sister of Frederick the Great.
My two brothers Manfred and Lothar were eleven and nine years older than me, so my memories of them only begin when they were both about to join the army. But my parents have told me so much about their youthful days, especially Manfred’s, that I am able, without running the risk of reporting anything inaccurate, to add a few significant features from his childhood and boyhood.
It was always a great joy for my parents that Manfred had a particularly strong and healthy nature from the very first day of his life. Nothing bad or poisonous wanted to stick to him, not even the vaccination blisters opened up on him, no matter how often you tried. He was actually only ill once in his life, with measles, and so, to his own deep regret, he hardly ever missed a day of school. Manfred had a fabulously skilful body. Even as a very small boy, he did somersaults without using his hands. He would place them tightly on the seam of his trousers like a soldier…
— The text continues here with some anecdotes from Manfred’s childhood. I have included them separately in the chronology. The text ends with the following sentences: —
Manfred took to the skies many hundreds of times, often three or four times on the same day. He knew well that every man had his Achilles heel and that he too was vulnerable. But of all those who experienced the war with him, there will never have been anyone who noticed anything other than a certainty of victory and belief in himself and success when he set out to meet the enemy. Perhaps ambition and a love of sport were the initial driving forces behind Manfred’s decision to climb from the saddle into the pilot’s seat of his world-famous red fighter plane. But the harder and more difficult the battles, the more significant the air war became for Germany’s fate and the greater Manfred’s own responsibility, the more serious his unbending will to do and give his best for his people and his fatherland became, despite all his cheerfulness and confidence of spirit. And the dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, which his teachers in the cadet corps had once preached to him in Latin lessons, not always to his delight, became the content of the short span of life that was still granted to him from 1915 to 1918.
But now let Manfred himself take the floor and tell the reader in his own words what happened to him and around him in those years.
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