Robert Ley
Robert Ley was a German Nazi politician and head of the German Labour Front during its entire existence, from 1933 to 1945. He also held many other high positions in the Nazi Party, including, Reichsleiter and Reichsorganisationsleiter.
The son of a farmer from the Rhine Province, Ley saw action in both the eastern and western fronts of the First World War and received the Iron Cross Second Class. After the war he resumed his studies in chemistry, obtained his doctorate, and worked for IG Farben as a food chemist. Radicalised following the French occupation of the Ruhr, Ley joined the Nazi Party in 1925 and subsequently became the Gauleiter of Southern Rhineland. Steadily rising through the ranks, he was elected to the Reichstag in 1930, and replaced Gregor Strasser as Reichsorganisationsleiter in 1932.
In 1933, Hitler appointed Ley as the head of the newly founded German Labour Front following the suppression of the trade unions. In addition to facilitating German rearmament, Ley also presided over the creation of a number of programs, including Strength Through Joy and the Volkswagen. Ley's influence declined after the outbreak of the Second World War, his role as leader of the German workforce supplanted by Fritz Todt and his alcoholism gradually coming into focus. Nevertheless, he retained Hitler's favour, and remained part of Hitler's inner circle until the last months of the war.
Ley was captured by American paratroopers near the Austrian border at the end of the war. He died by suicide in October 1945 while awaiting trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Early life
Ley was born in Niederbreidenbach in the Rhine Province, the seventh of 11 children of a farmer, Friedrich Ley, and his wife Emilie. He studied chemistry at the universities of Jena, Bonn, and Münster. He volunteered for the army on the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and spent two years in the 10th Foot Artillery Regiment and saw action on both the eastern and western fronts. In 1916 he was promoted to Leutnant and trained as an aerial artillery spotter with Artillery Flier Detachment 202. In July 1917 his aircraft was shot down over France and he was taken prisoner of war. It has been suggested that he suffered a traumatic brain injury in the crash; for the rest of his life he spoke with a stammer and suffered bouts of erratic behaviour, aggravated by heavy drinking. He earned the Iron Cross, 2nd class and the Wound Badge, in silver.After the war Ley was released from captivity in January 1920 and returned to university, gaining a doctorate later that year. He was employed as a food chemist by a branch of the giant IG Farben company, based in Leverkusen in the Ruhr. Enraged by the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1924, Ley became an ultra-nationalist and joined the Nazi Party soon after reading Adolf Hitler's speech at his trial following the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Ley proved unswervingly loyal to Hitler, which led Hitler to ignore complaints about his arrogance, incompetence and drunkenness.
Ley's impoverished upbringing and his experience as head of the largely working-class Rhineland party region meant that he was sympathetic to the Strasserite elements in the party, but he always sided with Hitler in inner party disputes. This helped him survive the hostility of other party officials such as the party treasurer, Franz Xaver Schwarz, who regarded him as an incompetent drunk.
Rise in the Nazi Party
Ley rejoined the re-founded Nazi Party in March 1925, shortly after the party's ban was lifted. He was named Deputy Gauleiter of the Southern Rhineland that month, and was promoted to Gauleiter on 17 July. In September 1925, he became a member of the National Socialist Working Association, a short-lived group of northern and western German Gauleiters, organized and led by Gregor Strasser, which advocated a more working-class focus for the Party and unsuccessfully sought to amend the Party program. At a meeting on 24 January 1926, however, Ley joined with others in raising objections to Strasser's proposed new draft program and it was shelved. Shortly thereafter, the Working Association was dissolved following the Bamberg Conference.In March 1928, Ley became the editor and publisher of a virulently anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper, the Westdeutscher Beobachter in Cologne. On 20 May 1928, he was elected to the Prussian Landtag, and also was appointed to the provincial parliament of the Rhine Province. He was first elected to the Reichstag in September 1930 from electoral constituency 20, Cologne-Aachen, a seat he retained until May 1945. He remained as the Gauleiter of Rhineland until 1 June 1931 when his Gau was divided into two and new leaders named.
On 21 October 1931, Ley was brought to Munich party headquarters as the Deputy to Strasser, then the head of party organization. Ley was styled Reichsorganisationsinspekteur and conducted inspection visits to the various Gaue. On 10 June 1932, following a further organizational restructuring by Strasser, Ley was named one of two Reichsinspecteurs with oversight of approximately half the Gaue. Furthermore, he was made the Acting Landesinspekteur for Bavaria with direct responsibility for the six Bavarian Gaue. This was a short-lived initiative by Strasser to centralize control over the Gaue. However, it was unpopular with the Gauleiters and was repealed on Strasser's fall from power. Strasser resigned on 8 December 1932 in a break with Hitler over the future direction of the Party. Hitler himself took over as Reichsorganisationsleiter and installed Ley as his Stabschef. The positions of Reichsinspecteur and Landesinspekteur were abolished. When Hitler became Reich Chancellor in January 1933, Ley accompanied him to Berlin. On 2 June 1933, Ley was among those raised to Reichsleiter, the second highest political rank in the Nazi Party. This was followed on 14 September 1933 by his appointment to the reconstituted Prussian State Council by Prussian Minister-President Hermann Göring. On 3 October 1933, Ley was named to Hans Frank's Academy for German Law and, on 10 November 1934, Hitler finally formally promoted Ley to the position of Reichsorganisationsleiter. Ley would retain these positions until the fall of the Nazi regime.
Labour Front head
By April, 1933 Hitler decided to have the Nazi Party take over the trade union movement. On 10 May 1933, Hitler appointed Ley head of the newly founded German Labour Front. The DAF took over the existing Nazi trade union formation, the National Socialist Factory Cell Organisation as well as the main trade union federation. But Ley's lack of administrative ability meant that the NSBO leader, Reinhold Muchow, a member of the Strasserite wing of the Nazi Party, soon became the dominant figure in the DAF, overshadowing Ley. Muchow began a purge of the DAF administration, rooting out ex-Social Democrats and ex-Communists and placing his own militants in their place.The NSBO cells continued to agitate in the factories on issues of wages and conditions, annoying the employers, who soon complained to Hitler and other Nazi leaders that the DAF was as bad as the Communists had been.
File:Karl Freiherr Michel von Tüßling.jpg|right|thumb|Philipp Bouhler, Karl Freiherr Michel von Tüßling, and Robert Ley, in white uniform, with his wife Inge
Hitler had no sympathy with the syndicalist tendencies of the NSBO, and in January 1934 a new Law for the Ordering of National Labour effectively suppressed independent working-class factory organisations, even Nazi ones, and put questions of wages and conditions in the hands of the Trustees of Labour, dominated by the employers. Around this time Muchow died in a tavern brawl and Ley's control over the DAF was re-established. The NSBO was completely suppressed and the DAF became little more than an arm of the state for the more efficient deployment and disciplining of labour to serve the needs of the regime, particularly its massive expansion of the arms industry.
As head of the Labour Front, Ley invited Edward, Duke of Windsor, and Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, to conduct a tour of Germany in 1937, months after Edward had abdicated the British throne. Ley served as their host and their personal chaperone. During the visit, Ley's alcoholism was noticed, and at one point he crashed the Windsors' car into a gate.
Once his power was established, Ley began to abuse it in a way that was conspicuous even by the standards of the Nazi regime. On top of his generous salaries as DAF head, Reichsorganisationsleiter, and Reichstag deputy, he pocketed the large profits of the Westdeutscher Beobachter, and freely embezzled DAF funds for his personal use. By 1938 he owned a luxurious estate near Cologne, a string of villas in other cities, a fleet of cars, a private railway carriage and a large art collection. He increasingly devoted his time to "womanising and heavy drinking, both of which often led to embarrassing scenes in public."
On 29 December 1942 his second wife Inge Ursula Spilcker shot herself after a drunken brawl. Ley's subordinates took their lead from him, and the DAF became a notorious centre of corruption, all paid for with the compulsory dues paid by German workers. One historian says: "The DAF quickly began to gain a reputation as perhaps the most corrupt of all the major institutions of the Third Reich. For this, Ley himself had to shoulder a large part of the blame."
Strength Through Joy
Hitler and Ley were aware that the suppression of the trade unions and the prevention of wage increases by the Trustees of Labour system, when coupled with their relentless demands for increased productivity to hasten German rearmament, created a real risk of working-class discontent. In November 1933, as a means of preventing labour disaffection, the DAF established Strength Through Joy, to provide a range of benefits and amenities to the German working class and their families. These included subsidised holidays both at resorts across Germany and in "safe" countries abroad. Two of the world's first purpose-built cruise-liners, the Wilhelm Gustloff and the Robert Ley, were built to take KdF members on Mediterranean cruises.Other KdF programs included concerts, opera and other forms of entertainment in factories and other workplaces, free physical education and gymnastics training and coaching in sports such as football, tennis and sailing. All this was paid for by the DAF, at a cost of a year by 1937, and ultimately by the workers themselves through their dues, although the employers also contributed. KdF was one of the Nazi regime's most popular programs, and played a large part in reconciling the working class to the regime, at least before 1939.
The DAF and KdF's most ambitious program was the "people's car," the Volkswagen, originally a project undertaken at Hitler's request by the car-maker Ferdinand Porsche. When the German car industry was unable to meet Hitler's demand that the Volkswagen be sold at or less, the project was taken over by the DAF. This brought Ley's old socialist tendencies back into prominence. The party, he said, had taken over where private industry had failed, because of the "short-sightedness, malevolence, profiteering and stupidity" of the business class. Now working for the DAF, Porsche built a new Volkswagen factory at Fallersleben, at a huge cost which was partly met by raiding the DAF's accumulated assets and misappropriating the dues paid by DAF members. The Volkswagen was sold to German workers on an installment plan, and the first models appeared in February 1939. The outbreak of war, however, meant that none of the 340,000 workers who paid for a car ever received one.