Rudolf Lahs

Rudolf Lahs (born January 3, 1880 in Marburg , † November 16, 1954 in Neu-Egling ) was a German Rear Admiral of the Reichsmarine and President of the Reich Association of the German Aviation Industry .

Life

Lahs joined the Imperial Navy on April 10, 1899 as a midshipman . He received his basic nautical training at the Naval School Mürwik and on board the training ship Gneisenau . After graduation, he was early October 1901 the battleship Wuerttemberg added and the end of September 1902 Lieutenant transported by sea. From October 1903 it was used for one year on the coastal armored ship Odin . Subsequently, Lahs was assigned to the staff of the Second Shipyard Division and temporarily worked as a court officer. On March 21, 1905 he was first lieutenant at sea and from October 1905 for one year as a watch officer on the ironclad Weißenburg . Subsequently, Lahs was a company officer and, for a time, a court officer in the II. Torpedo Division and officer on watch on the torpedo boat S 103 until the end of September 1908 . During his following service on the battleship Zaehringen he was promoted in late March 1909 in its function as a torpedo officer to lieutenant commander. Then he was a company officer or leader of the II. Torpedo Division and temporarily also first officer of the parent ship of the XII. Reserve division and commands the inspection of torpedo boats in the shipyard. He was also used several times as commander of the torpedo boat V 180 and from September 1913 to March 1914 of the torpedo boat V 156 . During the First World War , Lahs was chief of the 12th torpedo boat flotilla, rose to corvette captain at the end of April 1917 and took over the 8th torpedo boat flotilla in March 1918. For his work he was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross and the Knight's Cross of the Royal House Order of Hohenzollern with Swords.

Weimar Republic

Beyond the end of the war , Lahs remained in his position as chief of the 8th torpedo boat flotilla until February 19, 1919. With the takeover in the provisional Reichsmarine , he then became head of the Iron Flotilla , which was formed from his old flotilla. From mid-December 1920 to mid-April 1923 Lohs was a naval liaison officer to Military District Command VI in Münster. This was followed by a position as commander of the II. Division of the ship master division of the Baltic Sea based in Stralsund. In this capacity, he was promoted to frigate captain on October 1, 1923 . From June 8, 1825, Lahs undertook a tour of Africa on the steamer Adolph Woermann and was then in command of the naval management service as a consultant in the fleet and sea transport department until the end of November 1927 . There Lahs was head of area A III, responsible for aviation. In the same year his department was given the designation BS X, whereby the "X" was used for reasons of confidentiality, since Germany was prohibited from maintaining a military air fleet under the Versailles Treaty . Head of the sea transport department was Captain Walter Lohmann (1878–1930). The main task of the BS X division concerned taking steps to rebuild military aviation. The first developments in the field of sea aviation were already available as experience, but these were organized under the strictest secrecy and partly through cover as a private company with pilot training for civil aviation.

In his work area, Lahs built up the airline “Serva”, which had both aircraft, airfields and the necessary staff, but was also supposed to train future pilots and other technical staff. The Caspar-Werke Travemünde, which is about to close and is responsible for productions in aircraft construction, had already been purchased for this purpose. This gave the work area an airfield that was independent of the army command. In this factory, the construction of the first own flight model began. The assignment of BS X to the maritime transport department remained, although the work items were completely different. But it formed the framework for ensuring that the financing of this delicate task could be covered from the secret funds that Lohmann had at his disposal. On April 1, 1926, Lahs was promoted to sea captain. In the meantime, he was increasingly taking on the role of the “right hand”, the confidante of Walter Lohmann, within the maritime transport department. In consultation with the Zeppelin company in Ludwigshafen, they set up a project workshop for seaplanes in Switzerland. And they hired their own speaker with experience in the field of seaplane construction, Corvette Captain Berthold.

In August 1927, Lahs' secret air fleet development projects were in jeopardy because several articles by a journalist in the Berliner Tageblatt made the first revelations about black funds, secret armaments and irregularities of the two naval officers Lohmann and Canaris (1887–1945) public. After a first quick denial, which Canaris had published, it quickly became clear that the secret project developments that had already been carried out in Section BS X can only be prevented by two steps. The first step was to “drop” Lohmann as quickly as possible, and the second step was to only confirm to the threatened committee of inquiry the facts that were already known from the publications in August 1927. Because that did not apply to the strictly confidential issues initiated under the leadership of Lahs. Lohmann was relieved of his post as head of department on November 23, 1927 and replaced by his deputy Rudolf Lahs. In April of the following year, the maritime transport department was attached to the nautical department. On November 22, 1927, Lahs officially joined the naval command as a sea captain , taking the development projects with him, and became head of the maritime transport department. On April 1, 1928, he was appointed head of the air protection group in Section II / 1 of the Reichswehr Ministry, which now dealt with secret air armaments.

Granted the character of rear admiral, Lahs took his leave on March 31, 1929 and then headed the Reich Association of the German Aviation Industry until 1945. Before that he had already let the company "Serva" disappear from the public. On April 26, 1929, it had been taken over by Lufthansa and was therefore no longer tied to a military structure. Lahs was also Vice President of the German Aviation Research Institute (DVL) and was one of the co-organizers of the German-Soviet cooperation between the Red Army and the Reichswehr until 1933, with the special subject of joint development of aircraft, their construction and testing as well as pilot training Lipetsk .

Rudolf Lahs died on November 16, 1954 in Neu-Egling.

literature

• Dermot Bradley (eds.), Hans H. Hildebrand, Ernest Henriot: Germany's Admirals 1849-1945. The military careers of naval, engineering, medical, weapons and administrative officers with admiral rank. Volume 2: HO. Biblio Verlag, Osnabrück 1989, ISBN 3-7648-1499-3 , pp. 345-346.
• Lutz Budraß : Aircraft Industry and Air Armament in Germany 1918–1945. (= Publications of the Federal Archives. Vol. 50). Droste, Düsseldorf 1998, ISBN 3-7700-1604-1 (Partly at the same time: Bochum, University, dissertation, 1995).
• Olaf Groehler: Suicidal alliance. German-Russian military relations 1920-1941. Visia Verlag, Berlin 1992.
• Bernd Remmele: The Lohmann Affair. Secret armaments measures of the Reichsmarine in the twenties. MA from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg im Breisgau.
• Bernd Remmele: The secret maritime armor under Captain Lohmann. Freiburg University of Education, Freiburg 1997.
• Ernst Schneller: The Phöbus Scandal. Corruption and secret armor. Internationaler Arbeiter Verlag, Berlin 1928.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marine-Kabinett (Ed.): Ranking list of the Imperial German Navy for 1918. Mittler & Sohn, Berlin 1918, p. 26.
2. ↑ Bernd Remmele: The Lohmann Affair. Secret armaments measures of the Reichsmarine in the twenties. MA from the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg im Breisgau, p. 25 ff.
3. ↑ Ernst Schneller: The Phöbus Scandal. Corruption and secret armor. Internationaler Arbeiter Verlag, Berlin 1928.
4. ↑ Helmut Maier (Ed.): Armaments research in National Socialism. Organization, mobilization and delimitation of the technical sciences. Wallstein, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-89244-497-8 , p. 143.
5. ↑ Olaf Groehler: Suicidal Alliance. German-Russian military relations 1920-1941. Visia Verlag, Berlin, 1992 p. 44 ff.