Robert Ley (15 February 1890 – 25 October 1945) was the leader of the German Labor Front of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 under Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. He was among the defendants tried for crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 after World War II, but he killed himself before he could be given a verdict.
Biography[]
Robert Ley was born on 15 February 1890 in Niederbreidenbach (Numbrecht) in the Rhine Province of the German Empire of present-day Germany. In 1914 he volunteered for the Reichswehr during World War I and later was an aerial artillery spotter. His plane was shot down over France in 1917 and he was dealt a brain injury, speaking with a stammer and suffering bouts of erratic behavior exacerbated by heavy drinking. Ley became a food chemist in 1920, and in 1924 he became an ultra-nationalist after reading Adolf Hitler's Nuremberg speeches and the French occupation of the Ruhr, where he worked for the IG Farben company. He was unswervingly loyal to Hitler and his Nazi Party, and was the leader of an anti-Semitic newspaper. In 1933 he was made the leader of the German Labor Front of Nazi Germany with Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany, and he built the Strength Through Joy program that gave amenities to working-class German families. In 1939, he also helped to invent the Volkswagen car.
During World War II, he managed Germany's labor force and was one of Hitler's inner circle with Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels. He also intended the "disappearance" of the Jews of Europe in a conversation with Albert Speer, Bormann, and Wilhelm Keitel in 1941. Ley was captured in his pajamas by the US 101st Airborne Division on 16 May 1945 in Schleching, Bavaria. Ley was tried for crimes against humanity during the Nuremberg Trials, but he suffocated himself to death using a towel noose in his cell before he could face a court.