Friedrich Leopold of Prussia (1895–1959)

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Prince Friedrich Leopold (1945)

Franz Joseph Oskar Ernst Patrick Friedrich Leopold Prince of Prussia , to distinguish it from his father of the same name, Prince Friedrich Leopold (son) ; (Born August 27, 1895 in Berlin ; † November 27, 1959 in Lugano ) was a royal Prussian prince and painter and prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp .

ancestry

Friedrich Leopold was the son of Prince Friedrich Leopold of Prussia (1865-1931) and Princess Louise Sophie of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (1866-1952), daughter of Duke Friedrich VIII of Schleswig-Holstein (1829-1880) and Sister of the last German Empress . He had three older siblings: Viktoria Margarete (1890-1923), Friedrich Sigismund (1891-1927) and Friedrich Karl (1893-1917). He came from a branch of the Prussian royal family that went back to Prince Carl von Prussia (1801-1883) and had also been the German imperial family since 1871.

Life

Prince Friedrich Leopold (son) in officer's uniform (ca.1914)

Friedrich Leopold was trained by tutors in his first school years. On his 10th birthday in 1905, like all princes of the royal house, he received the Order of the Black Eagle . In 1906 he was appointed lieutenant in the 1st Foot Guards Regiment .

From 1912 he became interested in painting. He took lessons in drawing and painting from nature with Karl Hagemeister (1848–1933). At the beginning of the First World War he began his military service, which was quickly ended due to poor health. From October 1915 he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under Carl von Marr . He collected art in a rented apartment.

Incapacitation proceedings

Because of the acquisitions he made and the debts associated with them, the Ministry of the Royal House under August zu Eulenburg ran a process of incapacitation from 1917 . Friedrich Leopold sued against the incapacitation that took place in 1917. He justified the lawsuit by stating that the purchases he made, in particular furniture and works of art, had meanwhile increased significantly in value and that there was therefore no waste of assets. In addition, the procedure was not legally admissible, since the Secret Judicial Council was responsible for civil disputes against members of the Prussian royal family . However, an imperial order decreed that only a single member of the Secret Judicial Council had to decide the case and that any other appeal to the Reichsgericht was not permitted. In this respect, it would have to be clarified in the process how far the imperial domestic authority extends.

The proceedings before the Secret Judicial Council responsible for the Royal House, a special department of the Berlin Chamber Court , attracted public attention. On August 12, 1918, the decision of the Chamber Court Councilor Schröder as appointed judge of July 21, 1917, in agreement with the Ministry of the Royal House, was overturned.

Art collectors and dealers

Byzantine Imperial Tondo ( John II (Byzantium) ?), In the courtyard of Glienicke Palace since 1860 , in Dumbarton Oaks since 1937

In the interwar period he continued to collect and worked as an art dealer. Together with his partner and private secretary, the landowner Friedrich (Fritz, "Pierrot") Baron Cerrini de Monte Varchi (1895-1985), son of the Government Assessor Friedrich (Fritz) Münchgesang and the Baroness Marietta Cerrini de Monte Varchi adopted , he ran trade with works of art and autographs from the collection of his great-grandfather Carl von Prussia . He had a right of residence at Glienicke Palace and presumably property rights to the works of art located there. He lived with Cerrini in the gentleman's wing of the palace complex. He sold various pieces to the American diplomat and collector Robert Woods Bliss for his collection in Dumbarton Oaks , including the relief tablet of an intercessing Mother of God and the imperial tondo .

The sale of the Kaisertondo from the Glienicker monastery courtyard led to criminal investigations and to proceedings before the Potsdam Regional Court , which sentenced Friedrich Leopold and Cerrini to heavy fines on July 10, 1940.

After the palace was sold in 1939, they both moved to Friedrich Leopold's Gut Imlau near Werfen in the Salzburg region . Even before the Glienicke Palace was sold, Friedrich Leopold had works of art and parts of the family archive brought to Imlau, which he bequeathed to his partner "Pierrot" (Fritz Cerrini) along with the estate. Cerrini bequeathed the part of it that concerned Glienicke to the State of Berlin for the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg . Parts of it still appear on the art and second-hand book market, for example a furniture group designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Italy in 2001 and 465 letters, 65 letter fragments, three postcards, nine telegrams and two archival items, private correspondence from members of the Prussian royal family and the Ducal houses in Anhalt-Dessau and Schleswig-Holstein , from this inventory were offered in 2016 in Austrian antiquarian shops.

Concentration camp prisoner 1944–1945

During the Second World War , he and his partner Baron Cerrini were prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp. He was arrested on May 25, 1944 in Bad Gastein for listening to enemy broadcasts and came to Dachau on September 11, 1944 as a remand prisoner.

In 1945 he belonged to a group of celebrities and clan prisoners from Dachau who were transported by the SS to South Tyrol , where they were freed first by German soldiers - under the leadership of Captain Wichard von Alvensleben  - and then by American soldiers (see Liberation of the SS hostages in South Tyrol ). Until June 19, 1945, he had to be available to American agencies in Italy before he could return to Imlau after a hunger strike .

In the first of the Dachau trials , he testified as a witness against accused of the camp management, from camp commandant Martin Gottfried Weiss , to heads of branch camps such as Josef Jarolin , Johann Baptist Eichelsdörfer , Arno Lippmann , Alfred Kramer , Michael Redwitz and Friedrich Wilhelm Ruppert , to three prison functionaries and medical personnel. 40 of them were found guilty and 36 sentenced to death. 28 of them were hanged on May 28 and 29, 1946 in the Landsberg war crimes prison, including the last camp doctor, Fritz Hintermayer .

Awards

Friedrich Leopold in the habit of the Black Eagle Order, ca.1914

literature

Web links

Commons : Friedrich Leopold von Prussia (1895–1959)  - collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Military weekly paper , 91, 1906, Col. 1560.
  2. ^ Entry in the register of the academy
  3. ^ Frankfurter Zeitung , October 2, 1917, see dfg-viewer.de, accessed on September 2, 2016.
  4. ↑ Newspaper article
  5. ↑ German History Calendar 1918, p. 235.
  6. ↑ Gary Vikan: Catalog of the Sculpture in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection from the Ptolemaic Period to the Renaissance. Dumbarton Oaks 1995, ISBN 978-0-88402-212-1 (= Dumbarton Oaks Collection Series 6), p. 107.
  7. ↑ Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller (Ed.): Man for man . Biographical lexicon on the history of love for friends and male-male sexuality in the German-speaking area. Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10693-3 . (Marietta Freiin Cerrini de Monte Varchi was a sister of Stephanie Cerrini de Monte Varchi, the lady-in-waiting of Friedrich Leopold's great-aunt Princess Karoline Amalie of Schleswig-Holstein (1833-1901)).
  8. ↑ Harry Nehls: A present for Minutoli? In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 5, 2001, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 92-95 ( luise-berlin.de ).
  9. ↑ At least that is how his mother portrayed it in her 1939 memoir: Louise Sophie von Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg: Behind the Scenes at the Prussian Court. John Murray, London 1939, p. 247.
  10. ↑ Figure
  11. ↑ Harry Nehls: Review of Gerd-H. Zuchold: The "Klosterhof" in the park of Glienicke Palace in Berlin. Berlin 1993. In: Yearbook for Brandenburg State History 45 (1994), p. 233 f., Here p. 234.
  12. ↑ Jürgen Julier : In memory of Friedrich Baron Cerrini de Montevarchi Potsdam 1895 - Imlau 1985. In: Glienicke Palace: residents, artists, parkland: Glienicke Palace, August 1 to November 1, 1987 . Administration of the State Palaces and Gardens, Berlin 1987.
  13. ↑ Schinkel's furniture back in Glienicke , accessed on September 11, 2016.
  14. ↑ Private correspondence from members of the Prussian royal house and the ducal houses of Anhalt-Dessau and Schleswig-Holstein . zvab.com; accessed on September 5, 2016.
  15. ^ According to Volker Koop : In Hitler's Hand. Special prisoners and honorary prisoners of the SS. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20580-5 , p. 63. According to other information, he was admitted to the camp for violating Section 175 .
  16. ^ Military weekly paper 90 (1905), p. 2491.
  17. ↑ This and the other medals according to seniority list of officers of the Royal Prussian Army and the XIII. (Royal Württemberg) Army Corps . Mittler, Berlin 1914, p. 143 ( digitized version ).
personal data
SURNAME Prussia, Friedrich Leopold von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Prussia, Franz Joseph Oskar Ernst Patrick Friedrich Leopold von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German nobleman and painter
DATE OF BIRTH August 27, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1959
Place of death Lugano