Karl Mayr

Captain Karl Mayr (5 January 1883 – 9 February 1945) was a German General Staff officer and Adolf Hitler's immediate superior in an Army Intelligence Division in the Reichswehr, 1919–1920. Mayr was particularly known as the man who introduced Hitler to politics. In 1919, Mayr directed Hitler to write the Gemlich letter, in which Hitler first expressed his antisemitic views in writing. Mayr later became Hitler's opponent, and wrote in his memoirs that General Erich Ludendorff had personally ordered him to have Hitler join the German Workers' Party (DAP) and build it up. As far as it is known, his last rank was major. In 1933, he fled to France after the Nazis came to national power. Mayr was tracked down by the Gestapo, arrested, imprisoned, and later murdered at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in 1945. A fact-based portrayal of Mayr is dramatized in the 2002 film Max, a fictional account of Hitler's life in Munich just prior to joining the German Workers' Party.