Henning Hars

Henning Hars (born November 11, 1955 in Pinneberg ) is a Brigadier General a. D. of the army of the Bundeswehr .

Military career

Training and first uses

After graduating from high school in 1974, Hars entered the service of the German Armed Forces and served as a sergeant and reserve officer candidate ( SaZ2 ) in Panzergrenadierbataillon 72. After he had served his time in 1976, he returned to service as an officer candidate in 1977/1978 and graduated officer training in Hamburg and Münster. From 1978 to 1982 Hars studied pedagogy at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg . He completed this course as a qualified pedagogue and finally received his doctorate in 1993 at the University of the Federal Armed Forces in Hamburg with a thesis on political education in the German armed forces.

From 1982 to 1989, Hars served as platoon leader and company commander in Jägerbataillon 67 in Nordoe and in Panzergrenadierbataillon 73 in Altenwalde . In these uses he was promoted to captain . He was then transferred to the German Armed Forces Command Academy in Hamburg , where he completed the General Staff Course (LGAN) from 1989 to 1991. At the end of the course he received the “ General Heusinger Prize ”, which is awarded annually to a participant in the national general staff course for outstanding performance. After that he was promoted to major .

Service as a staff officer

Hars stayed at the leadership academy and served there from 1991 to 1993 as a planning staff officer and lecturer in social science. Between 1993 and 1994 he completed the US General Staff training at Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth , Kansas .

Back in Germany, he was deployed from 1994 to 1995 as an operations staff officer ( G3 ) in the Defense Area Command I / 6th Panzer Grenadier Division under the command of Major General Jürgen von Falkenhayn . In 1995 he took over command of the Panzer Grenadier Battalion 182 in Bad Segeberg while being promoted to lieutenant colonel until 1997 . After this deployment of the troops, he was again transferred to the leadership academy in Hamburg in 1997, where he taught as a lecturer in troop leadership in the general staff course.

From 1999 to 2000, Hars was finally a consultant in the secretariat of the Weizsäcker Commission in Bonn and Berlin , which, under the leadership of former Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker, was to develop proposals for a structural reform of the Bundeswehr.

After this ministerial assignment , he was deployed abroad from 2000 to 2001 in Kosovo , where he was deployed at the KFOR headquarters in Pristina . Back in Germany only briefly, Hars was transferred to Brussels from 2001 to 2004 , where he served on the staff of the German Military Representative (DMV) at the NATO Military Committee as Head of Division G3 under Lieutenant General Klaus Olshausen .

From 2004 to 2006, Colonel Hars was in Berlin in the Federal Chancellery under Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder ( SPD ) and Angela Merkel ( CDU ) as group leader 22 responsible for military policy and military affairs. He handed this position over to Colonel Gerd Bischof in 2006 and was thereafter Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, DC

Service in the rank of general

From October 2006 to October 2009 he was used as a defense attaché at the German Embassy in Washington . In this employment, Hars was appointed brigadier general. In October 2009 he was transferred from the Armed Forces Base to Kiel in preparation for his new assignment to the Military District Command I - Coast , and was preparing for a four-month deployment in Kosovo . He would then serve as the director of teaching at the leadership academy.

In March 2010, however, Federal Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg put Hars into temporary retirement according to Section 50 of the Soldiers Act without giving any reason. According to press reports, the reason for the early retirement was said to have been a critical letter to Defense Minister Guttenberg in connection with the air attack near Kunduz . In the letter he asked for information from Guttenberg why he had dismissed the former inspector general of the Bundeswehr, Wolfgang Schneiderhan .

Works

• Between peace education and war training ( dissertation , 1993), ISBN 3-86108-217-9
• NATO between September 11th and the Prague Summit (2002), ISBN 3-86108-024-9

Web links

• Literature by and about Henning Hars in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mönch Verlagsgesellschaft (ed.), Handbook of the Bundeswehr and the Defense Industry 2007/2008, Bonn 2007, p. 150
2. ^ Page of the Bundeswehr Leadership Academy
3. ^ BMVg press and information staff (ed.): Personnel changes in top military positions . Press release. Berlin September 21, 2006 ( PDF ( Memento from October 20, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) [accessed on April 3, 2016]).
4. ↑ Guttenberg dismisses General for frontal criticism (Der Spiegel, March 13, 2010)
5. ↑ The dismissal was lawfully carried out by the Federal President.
6. ↑ Tagesschau from March 13, 2010 ( Memento from March 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
7. ↑ Michael Schmidt: Guttenberg dismisses General Henning Hars after a letter because of the Kunduz affair (Tagesspiegel of March 13, 2010)