Alexander Löhr (20 May 1885 – 26 February 1947) was an Austrian Air Force commander during the 1930s and, after the annexation of Austria, he was a Luftwaffe commander. Löhr served in the Luftwaffe during World War II, rising to commander of Army Group E and then to commander-in-chief in Southeastern Europe (OB Südost). Löhr was one of three Austrians who rose to the rank of Generaloberst (colonel general) in the German armed forces. The other two were Lothar Rendulic and Erhard Raus.

Löhr was captured by Yugoslav Partisans at the end of the war in Europe. He was tried and convicted of war crimes by the Yugoslav government for anti-partisan reprisals committed under his command, and the bombing of Belgrade in 1941. He was executed by firing squad on 26 February 1947 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

Löhr was born on 20 May 1885 in Turnu-Severin in the Kingdom of Romania. He was the youngest child of Friedrich Johann Löhr and his wife Catherine, née Heimann. His father had served as a 2nd captain on a hospital ship in the Black Sea during the Russo-Turkish War. Here his father had met his mother, a Ukrainian nurse. She was the daughter of the military doctor Mihail Alexandrovich Heimann from Odessa. After the war, they married in 1879 and moved to Turnu-Severin in Romania. The marriage produced three sons. Due to his mother's faith, he belonged to the Eastern Orthodox Church; he grew up speaking German, Russian, French and Romanian. Löhr attended a military secondary school in Kaschau, present-day Košice in Slovakia until 1900.

Löhr transferred to the infantry cadet school at Temeswar, present-day Timișoara in Romania, in January 1900. In 1903 he was posted to Vienna, where he attended the Theresian Military Academy in Burg Wiener Neustadt until 1906. He graduated from the military academy on 18 August 1906, with an overall rating of "very good". On the same day Löhr was retired as a second lieutenant and immediately volunteered for active service. Löhr served as platoon commander of a pioneer battalion in the Imperial and Royal 85th Infantry Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army in World War I. By 1921 Löhr had reached the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Between 1921 and 1934 he held many staff positions in the military, including Director of the Air Force in the Federal Armies Ministry. In 1934, he was made Commander of the small Austrian Air Force, a position which he held until the annexation in 1938.

Löhr, who had been promoted to Major on 1 July 1920, was accepted into the newly created Austrian Armed Forces on 1 September 1920. On 15 March 1938, Löhr was transferred to the Luftwaffe, where he became commander of Luftwaffe forces in Austria. By then he had been promoted to Generalleutnant. He was commander of Luftflotte 4 in the East from May 1939 until June 1942.

Luftflotte 4 carried out the bombing of Warsaw, Poland in September 1939 and of Belgrade, Yugoslavia in April 1941. Löhr had developed a plan to bomb Belgrade with incendiary bombs first, so that the fires would help the second, nighttime, attack to find the targets. This cost thousands of people their lives. Löhr was promoted to colonel general effective 3 May 1941. He commanded the 12th Army from 12 July 1942 through to December 1942.

Löhr succeeded General der Pioniere Walter Kuntze as Commander-in-Chief of the 12th Army on 3 July 1942. He was appointed the Wehrmacht Commander in southeast Europe on 1 August 1942, and from 28 December 1942 this position was re-designated as Commander-in-chief in southeast Europe. The forces under his command were also designated as Army Group E, and he was appointed as its commander. In this role, Löhr controlled all subordinate commands in southeast Europe, including the commanding general in Serbia (Paul Bader), the military commander in the Salonika-Aegean area (Curt von Krenzki), the military commander in southern Greece, the commander of Crete, the naval commander in the Aegean Sea, the German plenipotentiary general in the Independent State of Croatia, the commanding general of German troops in Croatia, and the military attaché in Sofia, Bulgaria. Löhr was selected to command the German forces in the Balkans because he was an Austrian and thus was felt by Adolf Hitler to understand the region better as the Austrian empire had long included parts of the Balkans. Hitler had a marked preference for appointing his fellow Austrians to positions of power in the Balkans. The Balkans were considered by Hitler and the OKW to be of prime importance because it was the source of so many raw materials needed to sustain the German industrial economy such as oil from Romania and bauxite from Yugoslavia as well being the region where chrome from Turkey was transported across. The Ploesti oilfields in Romania were the Reich's main source of oil after Operation Barbarossa was launched on 22 June 1941 and Hitler was always very concerned about the prospect of the Allies using Greek airfields to bomb the Romanian oil fields. Germany had invaded and occupied Greece in April–May 1941 largely because of Hitler's obsessive fear that the British would bomb the Ploesti oilfields from Greece and thereby cripple the German war machine. Because of its economic importance to the Reich, Hitler was convinced that the Allies and the British in particular would attempt a return to the Balkans by landing in Greece, and the Balkan guerrillas could pose a threat to the lines of communication when the expected Allied landing in Greece occurred.

Löhr told Siegfried Kasche, the German ambassador in Zagreb, that Hitler appointed him to make the Balkans "quiet even if it was the quiet of the cemetery". Like many other Austrians, Löhr had much contempt for the "non-historic" peoples of the Balkans, especially the Serbs. Likewise, he regarded the NDH (Nezavisna Država Hrvatsk-Independent State of Croatia) as a something of joke, and despite its name he frequently disregarded the claims of the NDH to be a sovereign state. Löhr ignored warnings from Edmund Glaise-Horstenau that the way he rode roughshod over NDH officials was damaging support for the NDH amongst the Croats. On 29 August 1942, Löhr while visiting Belgrade met General Milan Nedić, the prime minister of the puppet Government of National Salvation in Serbia. Nedić told Löhr that contrary to the promises he received when he formed his government in August 1941 that the Government of National Salvation had almost no power. In particular, Nedić was exercised over the fact that his plans to merge the Serbian Volunteer Corps into the Serbian State Guard had been vetoed by both the Wehrmacht and the SS, which preferred to cap the strength of the Serb para-military forces assisting the occupation by keeping them divided. In common with many other German officials, Löhr did not trust Nedić because he was a Serb and Nedić's plans for a merged Serbian collaborating force came to naught.