Josef Selmayr

Josef Selmayr (born 7 July 1905 in Straubing, died 11 November 2005) was a German Brigadier General, who is best known as the first Director of the West German Military Counterintelligence Service from 1955 to 1964. He is the grandfather of the European civil servant Martin Selmayr.

Selmayr was born to a prominent bourgeois Catholic family from Bavaria. He became a professional soldier in 1924 during the Weimar Republic and eventually served as a lieutenant-colonel in the Foreign Armies East military intelligence organization, which focused on analyzing the Soviet Union and other East European states, during the Second World War. He received the German Cross in Gold and the Iron Cross First Class. After the end of the war, he was briefly imprisoned by the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1948 and 1950. He then made it back to West Germany, and in 1951 he was employed by the Gehlen Organization, a CIA-affiliated intelligence agency focused on the East European communist regimes, especially the Soviet Union. In 1955 he was promoted to Brigadier General in the West German Bundeswehr and appointed as the first Director of the Military Counterintelligence Service, serving in the position for nine years until 1964. He is credited with building the organization.^[1]

At the end of his career, Selmayr became known for contesting his retirement with legal means. The normal retirement age for senior military officers was 60 years, but the Ministry of Defence at the time sought to retire senior officers even before they reached 60 to make room for younger talent, and accordingly it was decided that Selmayr had to retire in 1964, the year he turned 59. Selmayr contested this decision in the Federal Administrative Court, but lost.^[2]

He has published several books about his own experiences as a soldier. He died in 2005 at the age of 100, 41 years after he retired.

References

1. ↑ Dieter Krüger (ed.): Konspiration als Beruf. Deutsche Geheimdienstchefs im Kalten Krieg. Links, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-86153-287-5, S. 312.
2. ↑ Sperre geknackt, Der Spiegel