Anton Meyer-Gerhard

Anton Meyer-Gerhard (born May 22, 1868 in Hamburg , † April 3, 1947 in Lübeck ) was a German lawyer and colonial official.

Life and activity

After attending school, Meyer-Gerhard studied law . He finished his studies with a doctorate as Dr. jur. After completing his legal preparatory service, he was appointed assessor in 1894.

From 1895 to 1898 Meyer-Gerhard worked as a district attorney and then until 1905 as a district judge in Hamburg .

In 1905 Meyer-Gerhard joined the colonial department of the Foreign Office . He was first sent to German South West Africa , where he served as chief judge until 1906. From 1907 he was used as a secret government councilor and lecturer in the Reich Colonial Office, to which he was to belong as a senior official until 1920. During this time he was promoted to the Secret Upper Government Council in 1910. In October 1918 he was to be promoted to Undersecretary of State (in today's terminology: State Secretary) of the Reich Colonial Office.

After the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914, Meyer-Gerhard was sent to the United States of America as a representative of the German Red Cross. In this capacity, his main tasks were to hold advertising lectures in favor of the German cause in the initially neutral country, as well as to set up the Red Cross relief organization there and to collect donations, especially among the German-born part of the US population. Meyer-Gerhard returned in June 1915 after the American President Woodrow Wilson had negotiated safe conduct for him with the Entente powers in order to enable him to pass the sea blockade with which the British navy had occupied the European continent during the war, unscathed. back to Germany via Norway. The background to his return to Berlin was that, on behalf of the German ambassador in Washington, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff , he was to inform the imperial government about the American position after the Lusitania incident and to make it clear to them the urgency not to draw the United States into the war . In the American press, during the later years of the war, Meyer-Gerhard was variously suspected of having been a spy.

During the rest of the war, Meyer-Gerhard was used again in the Reich Colonial Office. According to Ernst Rudolf Hubert , he was politically connected to the circle around Max von Baden . In 1918 he took over the management of Political Department A of the Colonial Office. Interrupted by a brief employment as ministerial conductor of the Reich Chancellery from December 23, 1918 to February 28, 1919, he held this position until 1920.

From November 8, 1919 Meyer-Gerhard worked in the Reich Ministry for Reconstruction . From April 1, 1920 until the dissolution of this ministry in May 1924, he acted there as head of Department K (central colonial administration) with the rank of ministerial director. This made him the highest-ranking colonial official in the Weimar Republic. In 1924 he was retired.

Fonts

• German South West Africa's development opportunities . In: Koloniale Monatsblätter , Vol. 15, 1913, pp. 209–212.
• The German Woman and Modern Problems. Speech Delivered at the First Meeting of the German-American Committee of the Woman Suffrage Party, February 1915 , New York 1915.

literature

• Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon , 1920, Vol. II, p. 554.
• Peter Christian Witt: “Conservatism as 'non-partisan'. The officials of the Reich Chancellery between the Empire and the Weimar Republic 1900-1933 ”, in: Dirk Stegmann (Ed.): German Conservatism in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Festschrift for Fritz Fischer on his 75th birthday and on the 50th anniversary of his doctorate , Berlin 1983, p. 275.

Web links

• Meyer-Gerhard in the files of the Reich Chancellery

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marienkirche (Lübeck) : death register . No. 47/1947.
2. ↑ Holger Stoecker: African Studies in Berlin from 1919 to 1945. On the history and topography of a scientific network , 2008, p. 73.