Konrad Meyer

Konrad Meyer-Hetling
Meyer-Hetling in U.S. custody
Born	(1901-05-15)15 May 1901 Lower Saxony, German Empire
Died	25 April 1973(1973-04-25) (aged 71) Einbeck, West Germany
Political party	Nazi Party
Criminal status	Deceased
Motive	Nazism
Conviction(s)	Membership in a criminal organization
Trial	RuSHA trial
Criminal penalty	Time served
SS career
Allegiance	Germany
Service / branch	Schutzstaffel

Konrad Meyer-Hetling (15 May 1901 – 25 April 1973) was a German agronomist and SS-Oberführer. He is best known for his involvement in the development of Generalplan Ost.

Early life

Meyer was born in Salzderhelden, near Einbeck, in southern Lower Saxony, the son of a school teacher.^[1] He studied agronomy at the University of Göttingen and received his doctorate in 1926 with a thesis on crop production.^[1] He became an assistant at the university and did his habilitation in 1930.^[1]

From 1930 to 1933, Meyer worked as a docent at the University of Göttingen, and in 1934, he became a full professor at the University of Jena.^[1] The same year, he became a professor at the University of Berlin.^[1] In November 1934 he became a consultant for the Reich Ministry of Science and Education on the reformation of German agricultural education and research.^[1] Meyer was one of the key agricultural scientists and spatial planners of the Nazi era, and served as the chief editor of the main journals of the field.^[2]

Generalplan Ost

Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Philipp Bouhler, Fritz Todt and Reinhard Heydrich (from left), listening to Meyer at a Generalplan Ost exhibition, 20 March 1941

Meyer joined the NSDAP on 1 February 1932 (member number 908,471),^[1] and the SS on 20 June 1933 (member number 74,695).^[2] In 1935, he was recruited to the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA).^[2] In 1939, he became the head of the Planning Office under Himmler's office of Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood (RKF), and he also worked for Himmler's personal staff.^[2]

In early 1940, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) produced, with Meyer's collaboration, the initial version of Generalplan Ost (General Plan East), a plan for the Germanization of Eastern Europe.^[1] Meyer's subordinates in RKF's creating the memorandum included geographer Walter Christaller and landscape architect Heinrich Friedrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann. From 1944 to 1945, the end of the war, Meyer served an officer in a Waffen-SS officer training school.^[2]

Later life

After the war, Meyer was charged by the US authorities in the RuSHA Trial. He was found guilty of being a member of a criminal organization (SS) but not guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity.^[1] He was released in 1948, and in 1956, he was appointed professor of agriculture and regional planning at Leibniz University Hannover, where he worked until his retirement, in 1968.^[1]

References

1. The Nuremberg Medical Trial 1946/47 - Guide to the Microfiche Edition: With an Introduction to the Trial's History by Angelika Ebbinghaus and Short Biographies of the Participants, 2001, Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 3110950073, p. 119
2. "DFG (German Research Foundation) - Konrad Meyer, Umsiedlungsplaner der SS". Archived from the original on August 20, 2007. Retrieved January 2, 2013.

External links

• Media related to Konrad Meyer (agronomist) at Wikimedia Commons