Background
Fritz Reinhardt was born in Ilmenau, Thuringia, on 3 April 1895.
Fritz Reinhardt was born in Ilmenau, Thuringia, on 3 April 1895.
Interned in Russia during World War I, Reinhardt studied economics after the war and founded an international syndicate for taxation in Ilmenau before becoming a tax executive with the Finance Office in Thuringia. After joining the NSDAP he was Gauleiter of Upper Bavaria from 1928 to 1930.
In 1928 Reinhardt also founded an institute for training local Nazi speakers and, following the Party's success in the elections, the school became a national organization - Rednerschule der NSDA P (Party School for Orators) - where the art of public speaking was taught to would-be National Socialist leaders. In 1930 Reinhardt was elected to the Reichstag as the Nazi deputy for Upper Bavaria/Swabia. When the Nazis came to power, he was appointed State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Finance, where he developed a special programme for fighting unemployment by fiscal means and was involved in financing the rearmament of the Wehrmacht.
On 1 September 1933 Reinhardt was appointed SA-Gruppenführer on the staff of the Supreme SA-Command and on 9 November 1937 he was promoted to SA-Obergruppenführer. Reinhardt was imprisoned in 1945 and released four years later.
In 1950 a Munich de-Nazification court reclassified him as a ‘Major Offender'.