Mayer, Georg Alfred

Journalist

Born: 17.03.1883 in Munich

died: 24.08.1954 in Mainz

Alongside Fritz Otto Ulm, Mayer was the first licensee of the Wiesbadener Kurier (WK). He initially embarked on a military career, became a lieutenant in 1904, was a member of the German protection force in South West Africa from 1905-07 and was involved in the suppression of the Herero uprising (1904-08). In August 1914, he was taken prisoner in Australia while defending the colony of New Pomerania in the Pacific Bismarck Archipelago. In 1920, Mayer was promoted to major, and a year later he became a government councillor in the Reich Ministry of Economics.

In Bad Ems, he headed the export office for the occupied territories in the Rhineland, was managing director of the Reich Economic Council and worked in the foreign exchange department of the Reich Ministry of Economics. During the Weimar Republic, Mayer was a member of the Center Party and worked as a journalist for the party newspaper Germania, from 1924-27 as a correspondent in Rome. Despite strict surveillance in the Mussolini state, he repeatedly succeeded in sending revealing reports about fascism to Germany. From Rome, he repeatedly warned of Italian conditions in Germany. Mayer saw through the criminal nature of National Socialism from the very beginning. After 1933, he was observed by the Gestapo. In 1934, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler and lost his position.

In 1935, his application for retirement was granted. Mayer moved from Berlin to Wissbaden and lived in seclusion in his relatives' villa. In 1945, the Americans granted him a license for the WK alongside Fritz Otto Ulm. Together with his wife Margarete, née Schütz, he is buried in the family grave in the North Cemetery.