Henryk Dembiński

Count Henryk Dembiński, German transliteration Heinrich Dembinski ( born January 16, 1791 in Krakow, † June 13, 1864 in Paris) was a Polish general.

Life and work

Dembinski visited 1806-1809, the Engineering Academy in Vienna and then entered as a common soldier in a Polish fighter regiment. 1812, when the campaign against Russia was opened, he was a lieutenant, was appointed on the battlefield of Smolensk Napoleon Bonaparte himself to the captain and fought in 1813 in Leipzig. In 1815 he returned to his native country, where he lived in seclusion.

At the outbreak of the revolution of 1830 he was Major of a regiment, which formed in the Cracow Province, but soon received command of the mobile National Guard of the area and fought with this corps at the Battle of Grochów. Soon after, the top commander Jan Zygmunt Skrzynecki put him at the head of a cavalry brigade, with which Dembinski Field Marshal Diebitch one day staying in the battle of Kuflew with an army of 60,000 men.

No less brilliant feat of arms was the storming of the deemed impregnable bridge at Ostrolenka. Then Dembinski marched with a small band through the middle of the flooded land masses of the enemy army to Warsaw, where he was immediately appointed Governor and after Skrzyneckis resignation to the supreme commander, but after a few days replaced in that post by January Krukowiecki. He then entered Rybiński 's Corps, resulted in its conversion from Prussian soil brought up the rear and passed on October 5, 1831 is also the border.

Dembinski went out to France and entered 1843 in the services of Muhammad Ali Pasha of Egypt, who commissioned him to reorganize the Egyptian army, but soon returned to Paris. In 1848 he left his asylum and tried to bring a compound of the Slavs with the Magyars about.

After he had attended the Slavs congress in Wroclaw and Prague, he went to Debrecen, the former seat of the Hungarian government, and there was appointed on 5 February 1849 Oberkommandanteur the main revolutionary army. The jealousy Gorgey but as well as the reluctance of the troops against the arrogant foreigners gave him multiple difficulties. As Dembinski after the unfortunate battle of Kápolna ( 26 to 28 February 1849) during the retreat beyond the Theiss from ignorance of the terrain hit wrong dispositions, the entire Hungarian officer corps asked him to to abdicate, which assumed the government.

Indes was the more spring campaign, only under Antal cousin and later Gorgey high command, for the most part executed by the earlier of Dembinski designed plans. Dembinski was on it for several months engaged in the operation firm to Debrecen, until he at the approach of the Russians was given command of the Hungarian Army of the North in June 1849. But he resigned before the opening of the summer campaign, because his plan to invade Galicia, was not approved by the Hungarian government. As a result of the differences which have arisen between Kossuth and Görgei the high command of the latter to Lázár Mészáros passed (July 2 ), this Dembinski was given as Quartermaster General of the page, in which he is the withdrawal of Theißarmee to Szeged and the Battle of Szöreg (5 initiated. august).

Dembinski retired from here to Temesvár, where he was defeated by the combined Austro- Russian power and completely blown apart his army. Dembinski escaped with Kossuth and the other revolutionary chiefs on Ottoman territory. In July 1850 he moved to Paris, where he has since lived in complete seclusion and died on 13 June 1864.

Writings

• My campaign, and also in Lithuania and my withdrawal from Kurszany to Warsaw. ( Edited by walking, Leipzig 1832)
• Mémoires. (Paris 1833)
• Memoirs on the Hungarian war in 1848 and 1849. (Ibid. 1849)
• Memoirs about the uprising from 1830 to 1831. 2 vols ( Poln., Krakow 1878)