Herbert Schmeidler

Herbert Schmeidler (born October 15, 1889 in Breslau ; † October 25, 1955 ) was a German lawyer and senior general labor leader of the Reich Labor Service .

life and work

The great-grandfather Carl Gottlob Schmeidler (1772–1838) was a well-known Silesian portrait miniature painter , the grandfather a Protestant pastor of Breslau and the father Viktor Schmeidler , a medical officer , a well-known doctor in Breslau. Since 1888 Herbert Schmeidler attended - like his father before - the Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium in Breslau. After graduating from high school in 1908, he began his military career as a flag boy in a railroad regiment. From 1911 he was with the motor vehicle troop. He experienced the beginning of the First World War as an adjutant to the commander of the motorized troops of the 8th Army, in 1916 he was a company commander in the infantry and in 1917 he was appointed captain to the general staff . He was the bearer of the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st class and the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords .

After the war he took part in the fighting of the Freikorps and also took part in the Kapp Putsch in 1920. Schmeidler worked in large-scale industry - including at the Kammerich-Werke in Brackwede , which is part of the Mannesmann Group - and studied law in Berlin and Breslau . In 1924 he received his doctorate with the legal history study The Ministerial Countersignature and Responsibility in Prussian Law and Imperial Law from 1806 to the Present .

In addition to his professional work, which had also taken him to Argentina for a long time , he volunteered for the idea of ​​labor service from 1930 onwards. Schmeidler was a co-founder of the Volksbund for Labor Service . In 1933 he was appointed to what was then the Reich Commissariat for Voluntary Labor Service as head of the administrative and economic office in the Reich leadership of the Labor Service; since April 1933 he was a member of the NSDAP . In 1935 Schmeidler was promoted to general labor leader and in 1937 appointed inspector for administration and economics at the Reich labor leader. In December 1941 he was appointed senior general labor leader. In December 1944 he received the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross with Swords. Since the RAD was not one of the “criminal organizations” in the Nuremberg Trial , Herbert Schmeidler was only classified as a follower after 1945 . Through his nationwide contacts and his knowledge in the field of administration as well as at the insistence of former senior RAD leaders, he soon became the central coordinator of various local and regional initiatives, for which the North Rhine-Westphalia state association founded in 1949 had been a model. In 1951 the Bund der Notgemeinschaften of former professional relatives and their surviving dependents (BNA) was established, and Schmeidler took over the management. The statutes laid down the party-political and denominational neutrality of the BNA, and no member of the federal executive board was allowed to be a functionary of a political party. In contrast to Konstantin Hierl , the former Reichsarbeitsführer, Schmeidler did not pursue a new version of the idea of ​​labor service, but primarily advocated the supply issues of the former senior Reichsarbeitsdienstführer who had civil servant status. When the expected successes failed to materialize and the negotiating tactics of the federal executive committee came under fire, Schmeidler was voted out of office in 1955.

swell

• Herbert Schmeidler's curriculum vitae from 1939 in the Federal Archives (formerly BDC)
• NSDAP central file in the Federal Archives (formerly BDC)
• Annual report 1908 of the urban Protestant high school St. Maria Magdalena in Breslau
• Address book of the main and residential city of Wroclaw 1832

Web links

• Literature by and about Herbert Schmeidler in the catalog of the German National Library
• Michael Hansen, "idealists" and "failed existences". The leadership corps of the Reich Labor Service , dissertation, Trier 2004 (PDF file; 2.27 MB)