Hans Leyers

Hans Leyers (born March 5, 1896 in Düsseldorf , † February 2, 1981 in Eschweiler ) was a German Wehrmacht officer , most recently in the rank of major general . In his last assignment as General Plenipotentiary of the Reich War Ministry for Armaments and War Production in Italy , Leyers was one of the highest representatives of the German Empire there .

Live and act

After finishing school, Leyers joined the 5th Foot Artillery Regiment on March 23, 1914, where he was promoted to lieutenant on May 21, 1914. Among other things, he took part in the First World War as a regimental and battalion adjutant . Subsequently, Leyers was taken over by the Reichswehr on October 1, 1919 , transferred to Artillery Regiment No. 1 on October 1, 1920 and promoted to lieutenant on September 1, 1922.

After another assignment from October 1925 to October 1926 in the artillery regiment No. 6, Leyers completed a degree in engineering at the Technical University of Charlottenburg by 1930 , during which he was promoted to captain in 1928. He then received his doctorate and was taken on as a consultant in the Army Weapons Office . On March 1, 1931, he was transferred to the 1st Transport Battalion as squadron chief . Effective July 1, 1934, Leyers completed his habilitation and returned to the Army Weapons Office, where he was the group leader for procurement measures with the rank of major. During this time he published his only book with the title The Foot Artillery Battalion No. 50 in the World War 1914/1918 , self-published with 216 pages.

After being promoted to lieutenant colonel in January 1937, Leyers was given command of the 2nd division of Artillery Regiment No. 20 in October of the same year. Then on November 10, 1938, he took over the management of the "Regimental Staff Artillery Regiment No. 45" and after its renaming on November 24, 1938 the "Regimentsstabes Artillerie-Regiment Nr. 116", and was promoted there in June 1939 to colonel.

With effect from May 1940 Leyers was transferred to the Office Group for Industrial Armament - Weapons and Equipment under the Chief of Army Armament and Commander of the Replacement Army in the Army High Command as head of the weapons department . After his promotion to major general on January 1, 1943, he was finally appointed by Albert Speer on September 13, 1943 to the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production as Plenipotentiary for Italy. He stood by Friedrich Landfried and then Otto Wächter until August 1944 , who, as the highest representatives of the German Reich, held the military administration in Italy.

On April 24, 1945 Leyers fell into American captivity through a ruse by his driver and interpreter Pino Lella , who worked for the Italian resistance , and was transferred to a camp near Innsbruck .

Working in Italy

Hans Leyer's primary tasks were to put the economy of northern and central Italy at the service of the German war economy without consulting the Italian authorities and to strategically secure these processes. During the time of his responsibility in Italy alone, economic goods such as raw materials and heavy metals, semi-finished and finished products as well as operating and manufacturing facilities with tens of thousands of wagons and more than 1,150,000 tons of cargo for German war-relevant companies had been removed from the country. He also procured food and supplies for the German troops from Italian depots, which led to a famine in the country. In addition, Leyers monitored, among other things, the U-relocation of the Caproni works in Torbole , the construction of the Gothic Line and the bunker at Marnate , which was intended as a gold collection warehouse, and often resorted to forced labor for these construction measures .

He granted shelter to Herbert von Karajan in the Villa d'Este on Lake Como after he had left Germany on February 18, 1945 in order to evade a draft notice.

In Italy, only seventeen-year-old Pino Lella was hired as a driver and interpreter for Leyers, who worked as a spy for the Italian resistance and for the Allies. He passed on all the information that he collected on a shortwave radio during his respective working day, including important information about locations for Allied bombing and the extent to which Jews and other people were to be sent to prison camps. On April 24, 1945 Lella personally arrested General Leyers and handed him over to the resistance fighters, who in turn handed Leyers over to the Americans, according to the book again with Lella as driver.

Post-war years

Family seat Haus Palant

Although after the final collapse of fascism in Italy there was initially a diverse political, personal and judicial settlement, this came to an official end with the amnesty law of June 22, 1946 and Leyers, like so many others, became a free man in 1947 return to Germany. He withdrew with his wife and two children to the manor Haus Palant , which had been owned by the family since 1917. From then on, he earned his living professionally as a consultant to several major German corporations, including Friedrich Krupp AG and von Friedrich Flick , for example .

In 1952, Leyers donated the Weisweiler Castle, which was part of Haus Palant, to the Protestant parish of Weisweiler, and supported the conversion of the castle into a Protestant community center with a further donation of 150,000 DM. As a co-founder of the Protestant community in Weisweiler, he later became its church master .

In recognition of its services to the Protestant community, the Eschweiler City Council decided on July 8, 1992 to name a street after Hans Leyers. After the publication of the book by Mark T. Sullivan , published in 2018, Under Blood Red Skies , efforts are under way to reverse this naming. An expert opinion commissioned by Dr. Carlo Gentile from the University of Cologne on August 23, 2019 confirmed in the summary the concerns of the city of Eschweiler, which then considered a final renaming of the street and which was subsequently renamed "Burggraben" by the responsible planning, environmental and construction committee.

Hans Leyers was married to Hannalisa, née Köster (1903–1991), with whom he had the son and doctorate in physics Hans-Jürgen Leyers (1928–2014) and the daughter Ingrid Leyers, married Brück (1926–2017). They found their final resting place in the Eschweiler-Weisweiler community cemetery. Since Hans Leyers' son remained childless, the Palant house was passed on to his daughter's descendants.

Honors (selection)

During his military career, Leyers received numerous honors, including:

• the Iron Cross (1914) 2nd and 1st class in World War I
• the Wound Badge (1918) in black
• the War Merit Cross II. and I. Class with swords
• the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross with Swords (June 24, 1944)

literature

• Mark T. Sullivan : Under blood red skies , translated by Peter Groth, Verlag Ink & Pen, 2018 ISBN 978 1503950085
• Lutz Klinkhammer : Between the alliance and the occupation. National Socialist Germany and the Republic of Salò 1943–1945 (= library of the German Historical Institute in Rome. Vol. 75). Niemeyer, Tübingen 1993 ISBN 978-3-484-82075-3
• Rudolf Müller: The past brings the benefactor home , in Aachener Nachrichten on October 23, 2018
• Michael Wedekind: National Socialist Occupation and Annexation Policy in Northern Italy 1943 to 1945: The Operation Zones “Alpine Foreland” and “Adriatic Coastal Land” , De Gruyter, 2015, pp. 157–159 as well as 221 and 225 ( google books )

Web links

• Biographical data on geocities

Individual evidence

1. ↑ DNB 573193967 - The foot artillery battalion No. 50 in the World War 1914/1918 in the German National Library .
2. ^ My Father's Role in the Fall of Fascism , in: Foundation of Economic Education, May 3, 2018.
3. ↑ Erich Kuby: Verrat auf deutsch - the suffering of the Italian people under the regime of the Wehrmacht and SS , in: ZEIT ONLINE from August 20, 1982.
4. ↑ Nazi conductor or deserter? , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung of May 19, 2010.
5. ^ City checks Leyer's role , in Aachener Nachrichten of October 24, 2018.
6. ↑ Wolfgang Theiler: New view of the former church master Leyers , information on the pages of the Protestant parish Weisweiler-Dürwiß
7. ↑ The full report can be found on the "forum.axishistory.com" page, which is, however, blocked as "spam" by the German-language Wikipedia.
8. ↑ The Weisweiler benefactor is likely to lose his way , in: Aachener Zeitung from September 15, 2019
9. ↑ Renaming: Hans-Leyers-Weg is to be called Burggraben in future , message on localxxl.com from November 29, 2019
10. ↑ Order of Merit for Hans Leyers on traceofwars.com.