Hanns Martin Schleyer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hanns Martin Schleyer (May 1, 1915, Offenburg – October 19, 1977 near Mulhouse, France) was a German manager, CDU member and employer representative. In 1977 he was kidnapped by the extreme-left terrorist organisation Red Army Faction and later murdered.
Contents |
[edit] Youth
Schleyer came from a national-conservative family. His father was a judge and his great-great uncle was Johann Martin Schleyer, a renowned Catholic priest. Hanns Martin Schleyer started studying law at the university of Heidelberg in 1933. He joined the Corps Suevia, a fraternity. In 1939 he obtained a doctorate at the university of Innsbruck.
[edit] Nazi involvement
Very early in his life he became a follower of National Socialism. After a stint in the Hitler Youth, the youth organization of the National Socialist Party, he joined the SS in 1933. During his studies, he was engaged in the Nazi student movement. An early, important mentor of this time was the student leader Gustav Adolf Scheel. In the summer of 1935, Schleyer accused his fraternity of lacking "national socialist spirit". He left the fraternity when the Kösener SC, an umbrella organization, refused to exclude Jewish members. Schleyer started a career as a leader in the national socialist student movement and, in 1937, he joined the NSDAP. At first he was the president of the student body of the university of Heidelberg. Later, Reichsstudentenführer Scheel sent him to post-Anschluss Austria, where he occupied the same position at the university of Innsbruck. In 1939 Schleyer married Waltrude Ketterer (daughter of the physician, city councillor of Munich and SA-Obergruppenführer Emil Ketterer). They had four sons.
During World War II, Schleyer was drafted and spent time on the Western Front. After an accident, he was discharged and appointed president of the student body in Prague. In this position he met Bernhard Adolf, one of the German economic leaders in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, who brought Schleyer to the industrial association of Bohemia and Moravia in 1943. Schleyer became an important deputy and advisor to Bernhard Adolf. On May 5, 1945, Schleyer escaped from the city shortly after the start of the Prague uprising.
[edit] After the war
After World War II, Schleyer was a prisoner of war for three years, because he had held the rank of an officer (Untersturmführer) in the SS. In 1948 he was repatriated.
In 1949 he became secretary of the Handelskammer of Baden-Baden. In 1951, Schleyer joined Daimler-Benz, where he climbed the ladder, with the help of his mentor Fritz Könecke, to be a member of the board of directors. At the end of the 1960s, he was almost appointed chairman of the board, but lost the position to Joachim Zahn. Successively, Schleyer got more involved in employer associations, and was a leader in several employer and industry associations. He was simultaneously president of the Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände (federal union of employer association, or BDA) and the Bundesverbandes der Deutschen Industrie (federal association of the German industry, or BDI).
His uncompromising acts during industrial protests in the 1960s (as lockouts), his history with the Nazi party, and his aggressive appearance, especially on TV (the New York Times described him as a "caricature of an ugly capitalist"), made Schleyer the ideal enemy for the 1968 student movement. A pocket book novel by Bernt Engelmanns, "Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz" from 1974, also created a public image of Schleyer being the key figure of a conservative network with the aim of bringing the tandem Helmut Kohl and Kurt Biedenkopf into power in the German federal government in Bonn.
[edit] Abduction and murder
Schleyer was kidnapped on September 5, 1977 by the Red Army Faction, also known as Baader-Meinhof Gang, in Cologne. The purpose of this was to blackmail the German government to release imprisoned members of their group. Two police officers and Schleyer's driver Heinz Marcicz as well as his body guard were killed in the kidnapping.
Schleyer was hidden in a highrise in Erftstadt (Liblar) near Cologne. Later, he was brought over the border into the Netherlands. The German police came very close to finding Schleyer, but due to lack of internal communication could not rescue him. Several local police officers were convinced that Schleyer was held in the mentioned highrise close to the Autobahn. One investigator had even rung the bell of the apartment in question, but nobody had conveyed this information to the crisis center of the federal police.
After 43 days, the German government had not given in to the demands of the kidnappers. The day after the German anti-terror unit GSG 9 ended the Palestinian hijack of Lufthansa Flight 181, the imprisoned RAF members Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their prison cells. Irmgard Möller was found seriously injured.
After Schleyer's kidnappers received the news of the death of their imprisoned comrades, Schleyer was shot to death and later found in Mulhouse, France on October 19, 1977.
