Heinrich Leist

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Karl Theodor Heinrich Leist (born May 1, 1859 in Meitzendorf ; † March 12, 1910 in Chicago ) was a German lawyer and colonial official . As a representative of the governor of Cameroon , who was on leave at the time , he sparked a mutiny in 1893 when he had the women of conscientious objectors flogged by African soldiers. His case attracted great public attention in Germany.

Life

Leist was born as the son of the a. D. Friedrich Leist born. After attending grammar school at the Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen in Magdeburg and studying law at the University of Halle and at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin , he was a trainee lawyer at the district court of Groß-Salze and the regional courts of Halle and Magdeburg . In 1887 he became a court assessor . In 1888 he joined the State Railway Administration and was employed by the Royal Railway Directorate in Erfurt . In 1889 he was appointed to the Foreign Office , where he transferred to colonial administration in 1890.

Leist rose to the position of governor chancellor of the German colony of Cameroon and commanded, as the journalist Bartholomäus Grill writes, a “real terrorist group”: He and his court assessor Ernst Wehlan sent punitive expeditions to rebellious regions and against African competitors of German traders houses were ruthlessly burned down, fields devastated and people killed. When Leist stood in for Governor Eugen von Zimmerer , who was on vacation in Germany, from June 1893 to February 1894 , he triggered one of the biggest German colonial scandals by whipping the women of refusing African mercenaries naked in front of their eyes . He was also alleged to have been raped . One consequence of his actions was the so-called Dahomey uprising , in which women also took part. The Dahomey mercenaries attacked the officials' mess in Duala on December 15, 1893 to kill Leist, but mistakenly shot the Assessor Riebow. After the suppression of the mutiny by the marines , Leist left 29 men hanging and 34 women deported to distant plantations for forced labor .

The “Leist case” caused a considerable stir in the German Reich . On February 19, 1894, it became the subject of a debate in the Reichstag in which the mismanagement, the deficiencies in the administration and the pitiful conditions in which the Africans had to live under German colonial rule were discussed. It also came up that, contrary to colonial propaganda to the contrary, slavery continued to exist under German colonial rule. Eugen Richter from the German Liberal Party demanded a prison sentence for Leist, the chairman of the SPD August Bebel presented a hippopotamus whip to parliament , which was used against women and men in Cameroon. In the wake of this and other colonial scandals, the imperial government tried in 1896 to regulate the powers and responsibilities of corporal punishment and executions in the colonies more precisely. Attempts to prevent further excesses of violence, however, failed because afterwards both the executive and the judicial power remained in the hands of the colonial officials.

Leist was ordered back to Germany and brought to justice. The proceedings before the Disciplinary Court in Potsdam revealed in 1894 that, on the pretext that the men were going to die anyway, he had killed or injured prisoners and left them tied until their open wounds were infected by parasites. Leist was punished with a cut in salary and a transfer, but without a loss of rank. In a revision procedure , the Reichsdisciplinary Court in Leipzig released Leist in 1895 from the civil service with the loss of all salaries. He was not to be prosecuted under criminal law. In the same year, Leist emigrated to the United States and opened a practice as a lawyer and notary in Chicago . There he died on March 12, 1910 as a result of an accident.

Honors

  • 1892: Knight's Cross Second Class of the Order of Vigilance and the White Falcon by the Grand Duke of Saxony.

Web links

  • Entry in: Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon (1920), Volume II, p. 449.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pastors' book of the Church Province of Saxony . Volume 5. Leipzig 2007, p. 326.
  2. ↑ Bartholomäus Grill: We gentlemen. Our Racist Legacy: A Journey into German Colonial History. Siedler, Munich 2019, p. 132.
  3. ^ Winfried Speitkamp : German Colonial History . Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, pp. 68 and 138.
  4. ^ Florian Hoffmann: Occupation and military administration in Cameroon. Establishment and institutionalization of the colonial monopoly of force . Part 1, Göttingen 2007, p. 81.
  5. ↑ Martha Mamozai: Natives and "colonial" women . In: Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Mechthild Leutner (eds.): Women in the German colonies . Ch.links, Berlin 2009, p. 233.
  6. ↑ a b Frank Bösch : Limits of the "Authoritative State". Media, politics and scandals in the German Empire . In: Sven-Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (eds.): The German Empire in the Controversy . Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, Göttingen 2009, p. 143.
  7. ^ Horst founder and Gisela Graichen : German colonies. Dream and trauma . Ullstein, Berlin 2005, p. 272.
  8. ^ Winfried Speitkamp: German Colonial History . Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, p. 138.
  9. ^ Peter Duignan: The Rulers of German Africa 1884-1914. Stanford University Press, Stanford 1979, p. 145.
  10. ^ Obituary to Heinrich Leist, in: Korps -bericht der Guestphalia . Halle an der Saale, 1910, p. 13.
personal data
SURNAME Leist, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Leist, Karl Theodor Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and colonial official
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1859
PLACE OF BIRTH Meitzendorf
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1910
Place of death Chicago