Meyer was born in Göttingen, the son of a Prussian civil servant who was stationed in Göttingen due to his official duties. The middle-class family was originally from Essen. He was educated at the Gymnasium in Soest, graduating in 1911. In 1912 he became a Fahnenjunker with Infanterieregiment 68, passing his officer exam in 1913 and being promoted to lieutenant. During World War I he fought with Infanterieregiment 363 on the Western Front, earning the Iron Cross First and Second Class and the Wound Badge. In 1917 he was injured and captured by the French. This experience, according to Meyer, was especially traumatic and left him with a hatred against France. Released from captivity in March 1920, the downsized Reichswehr had no use for him and he left the army with the rank of Hauptmann. After the war, Meyer studied jurisprudence and political science at the Universities of Bonn and then Würzburg. He graduated with a Ph.D. in 1922 and joined the legal department of a Gelsenkirchen mining firm. In 1924, he joined the local Masonic lodge. Meyer was also the chairman of the local Kyffhäuserbund unit. He married Dorothee Capell in 1925 and had five daughters with her.
Third Reich
In April 1928, Meyer joined the Nazi Party. The party was still extremely weak in Westphalia during the late 1920s, and had only circa three hundred members in the city of Gelsenkirchen during this period. In less than a year Meyer rose to the position of Ortsgruppenleiter and in November 1929 he was promoted to Bezirksleiter of the Emscher-Lippe district within Westphalia. In November 1929, he was also elected as the only Nazi party representative to the Gelsenkirchen city council. In September 1930 he became a member of the Reichstag and on 31 January 1931 NSDAP Gauleiter in north Westphalia. On 14 September 1932, he was elected to the Prussian Landtag. Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Meyer was appointed federal Reichsstatthalter of the German States of Lippe and Schaumburg-Lippe on 16 May 1933. He also was made Staatsminister in the state governments of Lippe and Schaumburg-Lippe effective 1 February 1936. Finally, on 4 November 1938 he was made Oberpräsident of the Prussian Province of Westphalia, thus uniting under his control the highest party and governmental offices in all his jurisdictions. He was promoted to SA-Gruppenführer on 20 April 1936 and to SA-Obergruppenführer on 9 November 1938. On 6 September 1939, Meyer was made Chef der Zivilverwaltung in the West. On 29 May 1940 he was appointed Acting Reich Defense Commissioner for Military District VI during the absence in Norway of Josef Terboven. On 17 July 1941 he became State Secretary and Deputy to Alfred Rosenberg in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Meyer was responsible for the departments of politics, administration and economics. In his role in the East, he used workers that were mainly Jewish for slave labor assigned to a variety of works. Meyer attended the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 as a representative for Rosenberg. on 16 November that year, he was also made Reichsverteidigungskommissar for his Gau Westphalia-North.
Death
Meyer was found dead on 11 April 1945, by the River Weser. The cause of death was suicide, most likely prompted by Germany's impending defeat in the war.
Fictional portrayals
In the 2001 HBO film Conspiracy, Meyer was played by Brian Pettifer.
