Arnold Keller (Chief of Staff)

Arnold Keller (born October 24, 1841 in Lenzburg , † June 18, 1934 in Bern , Catholic , later Christian Catholic , resident in Sarmenstorf , from 1869 in Aarau and from 1874 in Olsberg ) was a Swiss military .

Life

Arnold Keller was born on October 24, 1841 in Lenzburg as the son of the politician and co-founder of the Christian Catholic Church Augustin Keller . Keller began studying law at the universities of Heidelberg , Zurich and Berlin , which he completed in 1866 with an advocacy exam.

As a result, he worked as a lawyer until 1867 , then as a clerk at the criminal court until 1876 , and later at the higher court in Aarau. In 1876, Keller took over the position of section head in the Federal Office of Staff in Bern, which he held until 1890. Immediately afterwards, he served as the first permanent chief of staff in the Swiss Army until 1905 . Most recently, Keller held the rank of colonel division officer .

In 1872 Arnold Keller married Sophie Elise Clara Schmidlin, the daughter of the mayor of Aarau and artillery colonel Gabriel Theodor Schmidlin. He died on June 18, 1934 a few months before he would have turned 93 in Bern.

Act

Arnold Keller assumed that in the event of an armed conflict between neighboring countries, they might not respect Switzerland's neutrality . To this end, from 1890 on, Keller had the hypothetical scenarios of border violations by France (dossier from 1896) and Germany (dossier from 1899, revised in 1902) examined.

He wrote several writings, including “Der Dienst der Stab” (1889), but above all his “Military Geography of Switzerland and its Border Areas”, which was created between 1906 and 1922 and consists of 34 manuscript volumes classified as “secret” . In this geopolitical work, Keller dealt with the Swiss territory and its borders, namely with the topography and hydrography , demography , the road and rail network, the economy, the political and administrative structures, the military organization and the fortresses.

On this basis, he then described the operations and maneuvers that forced themselves on the map due to the terrain. His defense concept, based on the war of movement , provided for operational counter-attacks, a main line of defense along the edge of the Central Plateau and offensive battles between this line of defense and the national border. Keller did not rule out the possibility of a fortified position in the Central Plateau, the Prealps or in the Alps , thus anticipating the Réduit concept of the Second World War . In 1901, Keller received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel .

literature

• Biographisches Lexikon des Aargau, 1803-1957, 1958, p. 427 f.

• General Staff 8, p. 196 f.

• Arnold Linder: Arnold Keller, 1841-1934: Chief of Staff of the Swiss Army, 1890-1905. Sauerländer, Aarau 1991, ISBN 3794134303 . (At the same time dissertation phil. Zurich)

Web links

• Hervé de Weck : Keller, Arnold. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .

• Literature by and about Arnold Keller in the catalog of the German National Library