Leo Killy

Leo Killy (born January 18, 1885 in Bonn , † September 7, 1954 in Bad Godesberg ) was a German lawyer and ministerial official.

life and career

From 1904 to 1906 Killy went to sea as a cabin boy and sailor, completed his military service in 1910, then began studying and received his doctorate in 1914. jur. During his studies in 1907 he became a member of the Frankonia fraternity in Bonn . From 1914 to 1916 he took part in the First World War as a naval officer in the Imperial Navy and was promoted to first lieutenant in 1916 . After the war in 1919 he was a lawyer at the Cologne Higher Regional Court and deputy head of the Reichsausgleichsamt at the Cologne branch.

He later entered the civil service and was promoted to government councilor in 1923. From 1925 he worked in the customs administration. From 1926 to 1929 he worked for the state tax office in Berlin, in 1929 he moved to the Reich Ministry of Finance , where he was promoted to the senior government council.

Killy had been a member of the NSDAP since 1932 . In 1933, on the recommendation of the new State Secretary Hans Heinrich Lammers, he was appointed to the Reich Chancellery, where he was to replace an official who was temporarily retired during the “ seizure of power ”. He stayed there until 1944, during which time he was promoted to Ministerial Councilor and in 1937 to Reich Cabinet Councilor. In the Reich Chancellery, Killy was responsible for the central departments "Reich Finance Ministry", " Reich Labor Ministry" , "Audit Office", "Budget Law" and "Official Law". In addition, as head of the "Labor Assignment" department in Department B, he had to do with forced labor in Nazi Germany; as deputy of State Secretary Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger he also worked on "Jews and mixed race matters". According to the research of Hans Mommsen , Killy appeared despite his early party membership in the Reich Chancellery as the most energetic defender of traditional civil servants' rights against party interests.

In November 1944, he had himself a " Jewish versippter resign from the civil service" and "Jewish half-breed". Killy himself was a "mixed breed II degree" according to the Nazi regulations, his wife a "mixed breed I degree". Nevertheless, in 1936 - on the basis of Killy's merits - Adolf Hitler agreed to the continuation of the civil servant relationship and the exemption of the entire family from the Nuremberg race regulations . When in November 1944 the highest Reich authorities had to report the number of half-breeds within the civil service to the Ministry of the Interior, now headed by Heinrich Himmler , Killy was dismissed.

Since 1933 he was a member of Martin Niemöller's Bible study group in Berlin-Dahlem. In December 1936 he was re-admitted to the Evangelical Church "after the resignation was canceled", and to the Catholic Church in March 1945.

After 1945 he was a co-founder and federal chairman of the General Civil Protection Association . In 1950, the latter spoke out in favor of the reinstatement of those civil servants who were dismissed after 1945 because of their role during the Nazi era .

Killy died in 1954 at the age of 69 in Bonn-Bad Godesberg. His estate is in the Federal Archives . This contains elaborations, memoranda and letters that provide insight into the work of the Reich Chancellery. The records also include interrogations in the Wilhelmstrasse trial in Nuremberg . In addition, there are documents on the denazification of Killy and his pension determination, because of which he had led a lawsuit with the state of North Rhine-Westphalia .

Leo Killy was the father of Germanist Walther Killy .

Works

• Substitution in the case of an order along with an appendix, containing the substitution in other order-like obligations of the BGB . Bonn 1914
• The particular factual and legal circumstances of the persons represented by the Central Protection Association of Officials . Bonn 1950

literature

• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians, Part 7: Supplement A – K, Winter, Heidelberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-8253-6050-4 . Pp. 541-543.

Web links

• Estate of the Federal Archives
• Short biography in the project files of the Reich Chancellery Weimar Republic

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Uwe Dietrich Adam: Jewish policy in the Third Reich . 1972, ISBN 3-7700-4063-5 , pp. 272 ( googlebooks [accessed December 1, 2009]).
2. ^ Dieter Rebentisch: Reich Chancellery and Party Chancellery in Hitler's State. Notes on two edition projects and on source studies of the National Socialist era. In: Archive for Social History, 1985 p. 620
3. ↑ John M. Steiner / Jobst Freiherr von Cornberg: Arbitrariness in der Arbitrariness - Hitler and the Liberations from the Anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws , in: Quarterly Issue for Contemporary History 46/1998, Issue 2, p. 155f ( PDF ).
4. ↑ Norbert Frei: Politics of the Past. The beginnings of the Federal Republic and the Nazi past. Munich, 1996 p. 72
5. ↑ Description of the holdings of the estate at the Federal Archives  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ Gerhard Kaiser: confusion of borders - literary studies in National Socialism. Göttingen 2008, p. 609