Joachim Lemelsen
Joachim Lemelsen was born in Germany in 1888. He joined the German Army and by April 1937 had reached the rank of general major. In May 1940 he was promoted to commander of the 5th Panzer Division and took part in the Western Offensive.
During Operation Barbarossa Lemelsen fought under Heinz Guderian and was involved in the offensive to Smolensk. Afterwards he was engaged in anti-partisan operations in the Bryansk in 1943. The following year he fought in the Ukraine.
In June 1944 Lemelsen took command of the 14th Army he joined General Albrecht Kesselring in the fight against the Allied invasion.
Captured in May 1945, Joachim Lemelsen died in 1954.
Primary Sources
(1) Ernst Hanfstaengel first met Anton Drexler in 1922.
Anton Drexler, the original founder of the Party, was there most evenings, but by this time he was only its honorary president and had been pushed more or less to one side. A blacksmith by trade, he had a trade union background and although it was he who had thought up the original idea of appealing to the workers with a patriotic programme, he disapproved strongly of the street fighting and violence which was slowly becoming a factor in the Party's activities and wanted to build up as a working-class movement in an orderly fashion.