Kurt Meyer was born in December 1910 and died in December 1961 at the age of 61. He was the German commander of the armored forces within the Waffen-SS and the commander of the 12th SS Panzer Division "Hitlerjugend". He was also a war criminal and a staunch Nazi. Kurt Meyer finished his education at elementary school, after which - due to financial reasons - he had to start working as a miner. From an early age, he sympathized with the Nazi movement and very quickly joined the NSDAP, and later the SS (in 1932). He was quickly promoted in the structures of the SS and in 1937 he was Hauptsturmführer em, which is the equivalent of the rank of captain in the land forces. He fought in the campaigns in Poland (1939) and France (1940), and during the battles in Greece in 1941, he commanded a reconnaissance battalion. For participating in the campaign in the Balkans, he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. He took part in the Barbarossa campaign, and in 1943 he distinguished himself in the battles for Kharkiv. In July 1943 he was appointed commander of the 25th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the 12th SS Division. With this unit, he fought in Normandy, especially at Caen, showing personal courage and leadership skills. On August 1, 1944, he was appointed to the rank of SS-Oberführer and took command of 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. He took this position despite the lack of formal military education and experience in commanding such a large tactical union. In September 1944 he was taken into Allied captivity. After World War II, he was tried for war crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment, which, however, was reduced to 10 years. There are many indications that Kurt Meyer remained a Nazi until the end of his life.
Despite their defeat in World War I, the German officer corps in the interwar period still saw the main means of victory in a future war in an offensive operation. Thus, he drew a different experience from the Great War than his French counterpart. Based on the experience of 1914-1918, including the infiltration tactics used by the Stosstruppen troops, but also noticing the intense development of aviation and armored weapons, part of the German officer corps (e.g. Gen. Heinz Guderian) developed theoretical assumptions of the so-called lightning war (German: Blitzkrieg), that is, striving to knock down the enemy with one decisive offensive operation carried out in the shortest possible time and with the maximum intensity of forces and resources. The German officer corps was also trained according to this offensive doctrine of war in the 1930s and during the world war. It is also worth adding that German officers of almost all levels in the course of World War II used the principle of the so-called command by task (Ger. Auftragstaktik), that is, they outlined to their subordinates the task to be achieved and the forces at their disposal, while the execution of the task was entirely up to them. Such a model of command, based on very well and uniformly trained officers, led to the fact that the German army was highly flexible in action and was able to react faster to various levels than its opponents (e.g. the French army during the campaign of 1940 or Soviet army of 1941). This system proved successful (especially at lower levels) throughout World War II. It is also worth adding that many outstanding commanders served in the German officer corps from the Second World War, including: Erich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian, Erwin Rommel and Walter Model.