Robert Ley

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis Counter-revolutionary forces 1890–1945 ✕ Suicide

Nazi Reich organisation leader who headed the German Labour Front from the destruction of the trade unions in 1933 to 1945

The son of a farmer from Niederbreidenbach in the Rhine Province, he fought on both fronts in the First World War, then took a doctorate in chemistry and worked for IG Farben as a food chemist. Radicalised by the French occupation of the Ruhr, he joined the Nazi Party in 1925 and became Gauleiter of Southern Rhineland. He entered the Reichstag in 1930 and in 1932 replaced Gregor Strasser as the party’s Reichsorganisationsleiter. After the trade unions were suppressed in 1933 he headed the new German Labour Front until 1945, launching Strength Through Joy and the Volkswagen. In the war his command of labour passed to Fritz Todt and then Albert Speer, but he kept Hitler’s favour. Captured by American paratroopers, he killed himself in October 1945 while awaiting trial at Nuremberg.