Klaus Reinhardt (General)

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Klaus Reinhardt as COMKFOR 1999

Klaus Reinhardt (born January 15, 1941 in Berlin ) is a retired German general . D. of the army of the Bundeswehr .

He was in command of the Army Command , the NATO Joint Headquarters Center and the KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo .

Military career

In 1960 Reinhardt signed up as an officer candidate for the mountain troops . He was u. a. trained at the Army Officer School III in Munich. In 1963 he was platoon leader in the 222 Mountain Infantry Battalion in Mittenwald and served from October 1966 to October 1967 as an operations officer ( S-3 ) in the battalion's headquarters .

From 1967 to 1972 he studied history and political science at the University of Freiburg . After completing his doctorate with Andreas Hillgruber as Dr. phil. In February 1972 about the failure of Hitler's strategy in the Battle of Moscow , he was promoted to captain in 1968 and deployed as a company commander in the Mountain Infantry Battalion 221 in Mittenwald. From 1973 to 1975 he completed his major at the command academy of the German Armed Forces in Hamburg, training as an officer in the general staff service in the 16th year. This was followed by a US General Staff training at Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in 1975 .

In October 1976 Reinhardt was promoted to lieutenant colonel and served as a staff officer for operations (G-3) of the Central Army Group (CENTAG) of NATO in Heidelberg . From January 1978 to October 1980 he was employed as an adjutant to the Deputy Inspector General of the Bundeswehr , General Jürgen Brandt , in the Federal Ministry of Defense in Bonn . He then took over command of the Mountain Infantry Battalion 231 in Bad Reichenhall until October 1982 . From October 1982 to 1983 he then served as an operations officer (G-3) on the staff of the 1st Mountain Division in Garmisch-Partenkirchen . After his promotion to colonel , Reinhardt served from 1983 to 1986 as adjutant to the then Federal Minister of Defense Manfred Wörner and then from October 1, 1986 to September 30, 1988, he took command of the 23 Mountain Infantry Brigade in Bad Reichenhall.

On October 1, 1988, he was appointed Brigadier General and took over the post of Head of the Planning Department on the command staff of the armed forces in Bonn until 1990 (FüS IV; NATO troops, conception of the Bundeswehr, budget coordination of the Bundeswehr and armaments management). In this position he was u. a. responsible for merging the Bundeswehr and the former National People's Army .

In October 1990, he was appointed major general and appointed commander of the command academy of the Bundeswehr in Hamburg . During this time Reinhardt was also Vice President of the Clausewitz Society and a member of the Advisory Board of the Military History Research Office (MGFA) in Freiburg im Breisgau . As commander of the Staff College, he transformed them into a strategic-operational think tank and opened it for the states of the former Soviet bloc , for which the he University of Budapest , the honorary doctorate conferred.

In June 1993 he was appointed lieutenant general and took command of the III. Corps in Koblenz , which he also disbanded. As of April 1994, he also set up the new Army Command in Koblenz as a commander and made it the switchboard for the Bundeswehr's foreign missions , a task that the Bundeswehr's operations command would later perform. As the commander of the Army Command, he led the German missions abroad in Somalia , Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina within the framework of the multilateral peacekeeping forces IFOR and SFOR, which are under NATO command .

On April 28, 1998 he was finally appointed general and one day later took over the NATO post of Commander Joint Headquarters Center , the former Headquarters Allied Land Forces Central Europe (LANDCENT) and today's Allied Land Component Command - Headquarters Heidelberg of the Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum in Heidelberg. In this function he was involved in the structural reform of NATO, which provided for the support of peace missions as a further task of the alliance, in addition to deterring potential aggressors. During this time Reinhardt was also the commander of the KFOR peacekeeping force in Pristina in Kosovo from October 8, 1999 to April 18, 2000, commanding 50,000 soldiers from 39 nations. After returning from the mission in Kosovo, he integrated the Polish , Czech and Hungarian land forces into NATO structures. In 2000 he was honored with the Federal Cross of Merit by Federal President Johannes Rau .

On March 21, 2001, Reinhardt handed over command in Heidelberg to Lieutenant General Götz Gliemeroth and retired on April 1, 2001. Until his replacement by Klaus Olshausen , he was President of the Clausewitz Society from August 2002 to August 12, 2006, his predecessor being Klaus Naumann .

Civil professional life

After the end of his military career, Reinhardt succeeded Karlheinz Bauer as chairman of the supervisory board of the German group Bauer AG , Schrobenhausen , which is active worldwide in the specialist civil engineering and mechanical engineering sector. In addition, from September 30, 2003 to summer 2005, he was a member of the supervisory board of OWR , a manufacturer of NBC protection and decontamination equipment . At that time, Klaus Naumann was already chairman of the supervisory board. OWR is currently trying to get a 100 million euro contract to build the "Troop Detoxification Area (TEP) 90".

At the beginning of 2006 it was reported by various media that Reinhardt had allegedly not reported these activities in companies in the armaments sector and thus violated Section 20a of the Soldiers Act. However, the accusation was refuted by an examination by the Federal Ministry of Defense.

Reinhardt works as a freelance journalist and is the author of several books. He also teaches political science and modern history at two universities. In the summer of 2007 he was seen as a commenting historian in the ZDF Expedition - Imperium and ROM series.

Private life

Reinhardt was born as the son of the NSDAP politician Fritz Reinhardt and spent childhood and youth in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Mittenwald . Today he lives in Starnberg , is married and has two grown sons. His hobbies are skiing, mountaineering, jazz, classical music and literature.

Fonts

  • The turning point before Moscow. The failure of Hitler's strategy in the winter of 1941.42 (= contributions to military and war history. Volume 13). Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-421-01606-6 .
  • General staff training in the Bundeswehr. For the conception and development of the command academy of the Bundeswehr (= supplements to the Wehrwissenschaftlichen Rundschau. Issue 20). Mittler, Herford et al. 1977, ISBN 3-87547-175-X .
  • KFOR. Armed Forces for Peace. Diary entries as a German commander in Kosovo. 2nd Edition. Blazek & Bergmann, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-9806536-9-2 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Klaus Reinhardt: KFOR. Armed Forces for Peace. Diary entries as a German commander in Kosovo. Frankfurt am Main 2002, p. 440.
personal data
SURNAME Reinhardt, Klaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German General of the Bundeswehr
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin