Konstantin Hierl, the head of the Reich Labour Service

18-05-2017

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Konstantin Hierl (born 24 February 1875 in Parsberg, Germany) was a national socialist politician and official. He was a cousin of Johann Baptist Hierl , auxiliary bishop in Regensburg (1911-1936). After the visit of the Humanist Gymnasium in Burghausen and Regensburg, Hierl joined the Bavarian Army’s 11th Infantry Regiment “von der Tann”  in 1893 as a flag-youngster. In 1895 he was promoted to lieutenant. From 1899 to 1902, Hierl completed the war academy, which gave him the qualification for the General Staff, the Higher Adjutant, and the teaching subject (tactics, war history). In 1903, he was transferred to the Central Office of the General Staff, and in 1907 he was transferred to the Grand General Staff in Berlin. Since 1908, Hierl was then the company commander from 1909 to 1911 in the 17th Infantry Regiment “Orff” . Subsequently Hierl was active until the outbreak of war as a teacher for war history and the history of the art of war at the academy of war.

In 1919, as a major in the Reichswehr’s Political Department in Munich, Hierl ordered the ex-soldier Adolf Hitler to attend a meeting of the German Workers Party (which soon became the Nazi Party.

On June 5, 1931, two years before the Nazi party ascended to power, Hierl became head of the FAD (Freiwilliger Arbeitsdienst) , a state sponsored voluntary labour organization that provided services to civic and agricultural construction projects.

   There were many such organzations in Europe at the time, founded to provide much-needed employment during the Great Depression.

At the time, Hierl was already a high-ranking member of the NSDAP and when they took power in 1933, he remained the head of the labour organization – now called the Nationalsozialistischer Arbeitsdienst, or NSAD . In 1934, it was yet again renamed, this time as the Reichsarbeitsdienst , and Hierl would control it to the very end of World War II.

When the Nazi Party came to power, Hitler named Hierl as the State Secretary for Labor Service, a Reich Labor Leader in 1935, a Reichsleiter in 1936 and a Reichsminister in 1943.

  He was tried and found guilty of “major offenses” after the war, and spent five years in a labor camp. He died on September 23, 1955, in Heidelberg, Germany  at the age of 80.