General Lucius Dubignon Clay (April 23, 1898 -- April 16, 1978) was an American officer and military governor of the United States Army known for his administration of occupied Germany after World War II. Clay was deputy to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1945; deputy military governor, Germany (U.S.) 1946; commander in chief, U.S. Forces in Europe and military governor of the U.S. Zone, Germany, 1947--49. He retired in 1949. Clay orchestrated the Berlin Airlift (1948--1949) when the USSR blockaded West Berlin. Clay was born in 1898 in Marietta, Georgia, the sixth and last child of Alexander Stephens Clay, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1897 to 1910. Lucius Clay graduated from West Point in 1918 and held various civil and military engineering posts during the 1920s and 1930s, including teaching at West Point, directing the construction of dams and civilian airports, and by 1942 rising to the position of the youngest brigadier general in the Army. All the while he acquired a reputation for bringing order and operational efficiency out of chaos, and for being an exceptionally hard and disciplined worker, going long hours and refusing to even stop to eat during his workdays. Clay did not see actual combat but was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1942, the Distinguished Service Medal in 1944, and received the Bronze Star for his action in stabilizing the French harbor of Cherbourg, critical to the flow of war materiel. In 1945 he served as deputy to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The following year, he was made Deputy Governor of Germany during the Allied Military Government. He would later remark regarding the occupation directive guiding his and General Eisenhower's actions: "there was no doubt that JCS 1067 contemplated the Carthaginian peace which dominated our operations in Germany during the early months of occupation." Clay heavily influenced United States Secretary of State James F. Byrnes' September 1946 speech in Stuttgart, Germany. The speech; "Restatement of Policy on Germany" marked the formal transition in American occupation policy away from the Morgenthau Plan of economic dismantlement to one of economic reconstruction. Clay was promoted to lieutenant general on 17 April 1945 and to general on 17 March 1947. On March 15, 1947, Clay succeeded Eisenhower as military governor of occupied Germany—the head of the OMGUS, the "Office of Military Government, United States". Clay's responsibilities covered a wide spectrum of social issues related to Germany's recovery from the war in addition to strictly military issues.[3] He commissioned Lewis H. Brown to research and write "A Report on Germany," which served as a detailed recommendation for the reconstruction of post-war Germany, and served as a basis for the Marshall Plan. Clay promoted democratic federalism in Germany and resisted US politicians who sought to undo a conservative constitution adopted in Bavaria. He also closed the borders of the American Zone in 1947 to stem the tide of Jewish refugees who were generating tension with the local populations. Clay was responsible for commuting the death sentences, among many others, for convicted Nazi war criminals Erwin Metz and his superior, Hauptmann Ludwig Merz, to only five years imprisonment (time served). Metz and Merz were commanders of the infamous Bergba, Thuringia slave labor camp in which 350 U.S. soldiers were beaten, tortured, starved, and forced to work for the German government during World War II. The soldiers were singled out for looking or sounding Jewish. At least 70 U.S. soldiers died in the camp or on a later forced death march.[6][7] At the time West Germany was considered strategically vital in the Cold War developing between the West and Eastern Bloc. Releasing the offenders early had the intended effect of boosting German public opinion towards the United States. He also reduced the sentence of Ilse Koch, "the Beast of Buchenwald", who had been convicted of murder at Nuremberg and who had infamously been accused of having gloves and lampshades made from prisoners' skin. The reductions in sentences were based on the hasty convictions of some Buchenwald personnel following the end of the war; evidence was sometimes questionable and many witnesses claimed to have been beaten by Allied interrogators.[8] Clay confirmed several death sentences as valid, commuted several and had some, including Ilse Koch, released after serving a reduced sentence due to questionable evidence.[9] Under the pressure of public opinion Koch was re-arrested in 1949 and tried before a West German court and on 15 January 1951 was sentenced to life imprisonment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_D._Clay

• published: 27 Feb 2014
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