Arthur Ehrhardt (21 March 1896 – 16 May 1971) was a Waffen-SS commander who served as a

Nazi security warfare Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...

expert during World War II. After the war, he became a leading figure in the

neo-Nazi Neo-Nazism comprises the post–World War II militant, social, and political movements that seek to revive and reinstate Nazism, Nazi ideology. Neo-Nazis employ their ideology to promote hatred and Supremacism#Racial, racial supremacy (ofte ...

movement.

Early years

Ehrhardt was born

Mengersgereuth-Hämmern Mengersgereuth-Hämmern is a former municipality in the Sonneberg district of Thuringia, Germany. Since 1 January 2012, it is part of the municipality Frankenblick Frankenblick is a municipality in the Sonneberg district of Thuringia, Germany. F ...

, Saxe-Meiningen. He took part in the Free German Youth movement and was also the founder of the

Boy Scout A Scout (in some countries a Boy Scout, Girl Scout, or Pathfinder) is a child, usually 10–18 years of age, participating in the worldwide Scouting movement. Because of the large age and development span, many Scouting associations have split ...

s in his home town of Coburg. Philip Rees, '' Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890'', 1990, p. 110 He saw action in the First World War before returning to Coburg to teach

elementary school A primary school (in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and South Africa), junior school (in Australia), elementary school or grade school (in North America and the Philippines) is a school for primary ed ...

. He first came to politics as a member of the right-wing paramilitary force, the Freikorps, after the First World War. Karl Dietrich Bracher, ''The German Dictatorship'', 1970, p. 587 Ehrhardt had been a paid informer for the Wehrmacht and was also involved in the training of units of '' Der Stahlhelm'' and the''

Sturmabteilung The (; SA; literally "Storm Detachment") was the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. It played a significant role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Its primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi ral ...

''. It was through his involvement in the latter that Ehrhardt first came to Nazism. He became an officer in the SA but left the movement after the killing of

Ernst Röhm Ernst Julius Günther Röhm (; 28 November 1887 – 1 July 1934) was a German military officer and an early member of the Nazi Party. As one of the members of its predecessor, the German Workers' Party, he was a close friend and early ally ...

and became estranged from the Nazi Party.

SS service

Ehrhardt re-enlisted in the Wehrmacht when war broke out in 1939 and initially served with the

Abwehr The ''Abwehr'' (German for ''resistance'' or ''defence'', but the word usually means ''counterintelligence'' in a military context; ) was the German military-intelligence service for the ''Reichswehr'' and the ''Wehrmacht'' from 1920 to 1944. A ...

. At his own request he was transferred to the Waffen-SS in 1944 and worked as a member of Heinrich Himmler's staff. Within the SS he rose to rank of Sturmbannführer (Major), becoming an expert in anti-espionage tactics in the Balkans. He also wrote extensively on the subject of guerrilla warfare, notably in such books as '' Kleinkrieg''. This work has been edited by the Command and General Staff School of the United States Army in Fort Leavenworth, KS in 1936 under the title: ''Guerrilla Warfare. Lessons of the Past and Possibilities of the Future''. However, his insights into the possibility of unusual tactics being used by and against partisans were largely ignored by the Wehrmacht high command. He also served as the expert in the

in the Führer Headquarters.

Neo-Nazi activist

Following the end of the Second World War Ehrhardt became a strong supporter of Oswald Mosley's

Europe a Nation Europe a Nation was a policy developed by the British fascist politician Oswald Mosley as the cornerstone of his Union Movement. It called for the integration of Europe into a single political entity. Although the idea failed to gain widespread ...

ideal and to this end was the founder (with

Herbert Böhme Herbert Böhme (7 October 1907 – 23 October 1971) was a German poet who wrote poems and battle hymns for the Nazi Party. In 1930 he became one of the newly formed ''Junge Mannschaft'', a group of semi-official Nazi poets that also included H ...

) and editor of the magazine '' Nation Europa'' in 1949. He was a minority shareholder in the enterprise and, although the journal was damaged by financial wrangling between Ehrhardt and Werner Naumann, it continued publishing until 2009. He was also a regular writer for ''Western Destiny'', the magazine of Roger Pearson.Foundation for Fascism: the New Eugenics Movement in the United States, Patterns of Prejudice
Politically he was an active member of the European Social Movement and also founded his own group, the ''Jungeuropäischer Arbeitskreis'', in 1958.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ehrhardt, Arhtur 1896 births 1971 deaths People from Sonneberg (district) People from Saxe-Meiningen German military writers German neo-Nazis 20th-century Freikorps personnel Sturmabteilung officers SS-Sturmbannführer Waffen-SS personnel German male non-fiction writers German nationalists German magazine founders