Friedrich von Lindequist

Friedrich von Lindequist

Wilhelm Friedrich (Fritz) Ferdinand Olof von Lindequist (born September 15, 1862 in Wostevitz on Rügen ; † June 15, 1945 at Gut Macherslust near Eberswalde- Finow) was a colonial official of the German Empire .

origin

His parents were the farmer Olof von Lindequist (* July 23, 1824 - November 30, 1902) and his wife Anna Hoffmann (* August 28, 1834 - November 9, 1909). His brother Arthur Axel Heinrich August (October 17, 1855 - November 1, 1937) became a Prussian major general.

First offices

Lindequist became a Prussian government assessor in the colonial department of the Foreign Office in 1892 . At the end of 1893 he came to German South West Africa . He served there as an employee of the governor and later governor Theodor Leutwein and headed the newly created regional office in Windhoek , which was responsible for the administration of a third of the colony. From the following year he also held a judge's office, in 1896 he rose to the rank of permanent representative of Leutwein in the rank of government councilor . From 1900 Lindequist worked as head of administration at the German Consulate General in Cape Town , and two years later he became Consul General there.

Governor in German South West Africa

In November 1905 Lindequist succeeded Lothar von Trothas as governor of German South West Africa in the final phase of the Herero uprising . Previously, he had made it a condition that von Trotha also had to withdraw command of the protection force , which then happened. Lindequist saw the uncompromising attitude of Trothas as an important reason for the escalation of the uprising. Lindequist was the first civilian governor of the German colony . The previous governors were also commanders of the protection force. In 1906 Lindequist received an honorary doctorate from the University of Greifswald .

The last fighting between the protection force and the defeated insurgents ended under Lindequist. Through the mediation of missionaries, he tried to get the Herero refugees back , whom he considered necessary as labor to increase agricultural production. First he had the returnees interned in concentration camps. On March 31, 1907, the state of war officially ended.

In the spring of 1908, Lindequist put a new “indigenous ordinance” into force, which, among other things, prohibited the Herero from owning cattle and land and obliged them to always wear a brass stamp for personal identification. In addition, they were only allowed to settle in specially approved regions, and the tribal structures were deliberately smashed. The most important goals of this regulation were the most effective exploitation of the labor of the locals as well as their "discipline".

As a further economic initiative, Lindequist had the Karakul sheep settle and continued the expansion of railway lines by African slave laborers . The internal expansion of the administrative and social structures in German South West Africa also proceeded under Lindequist. A state police force and several agricultural associations were founded.

All in all, the European settlers under Lindequist were given increased opportunities to have a say in the administration of the colony through the newly created Board of Governors from October 1906.

In addition, Lindequist designated a first game reserve in northern Namibia in 1907 , the forerunner of today's Etosha National Park .

On May 20, 1908, Lindequist officially resigned from office. Allegedly he gave up his post with reference to the extermination policy towards the Africans under protest and wanted to retire as an asparagus farmer at Gut Macherslust near Eberswalde . “In any case, no blood will be shed unless I cut my own finger,” he is reported to have said. In 1908 he first undertook a research trip through German East Africa , which was supposed to clarify the possibilities of settlement with Germans.

Late work

As early as 1907 Lindequist was appointed Undersecretary of State in the Reich Colonial Office. The timing of his role as governor is unclear today. On June 10, 1910, he was appointed as the successor to Bernhard Dernburg as State Secretary and thus head of the office. On November 3, 1911, Lindequist resigned in protest against the Franco-German Morocco-Congo Treaty .

During the First World War , the former colonial official was "General Delegate for Voluntary Nursing in the East".

From 1914 to 1933 Lindequist was deputy chairman of the German Colonial Society . Between 1920 and 1934 Lindequist was President of the German Fleet Association and led him through the difficult years of the Weimar Republic, during which the association, which was influential in the Wilhelmine Empire, increasingly disappeared into insignificance and shrank to just under a tenth of its original membership.

In 1917 von Lindequist helped found the Fatherland Party ; in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich he became an important representative of patriotic rights and colonial revisionism . In the Third Reich he belonged to the "Colonial Council" of the Reich Colonial Association and, as chairman of the general advisors , he was a member of the Colonial Political Office created by Hitler .

Honors

In Namibia, the road leading past the Ink Palace , the Namibian Parliament, and the eastern entrance to the Etosha National Park are named after him. In the German municipality of Sellin (island of Rügen), the path that leads to the Villa Haus Lindequist , which he built , bears his name.

family

Lindequist married on August 20, 1909 in Neu-Buckow Helene Esther Dorothea von Heydebreck (born September 3, 1877, † 1945). The couple had several children:

• Fritz-Olof († August 18, 1910)
• Annalene (born August 11, 1910)

literature

• Horst Founder:  Lindequist, Friedrich von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , p. 601 ( digitized version ).
• George Steinmetz: The devil's handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa: Precoloniality and the German Colonial. University of Chicago Press, 2007
• Sebastian Diziol: "Germans, become members of the fatherland!" The German Naval Association 1898-1934. Solivagus Praeteritum, Kiel 2015, pp. 533–715. ISBN 978-39817079-0-8 .
• Gothaisches genealogisches Taschenbuch der Briefadeligen houses, 1916, tenth year, p.598

Web links

Wikisource: Friedrich von Lindeqiust: The Colonies. From: Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Ed. by Siegfried Körte, Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell and others 3 volumes. R. Hobbing, Berlin 1914.  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Friedrich von Lindequist in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Friedrich von Lindequist in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ by Lindequist, Friedrich. German East Africa as a settlement area for Europeans, taking into account British East Africa and Nyassaland . Duncker & Humblot, Munich, 1912.
2. ↑ Sebastian Diziol: "Germans, become members of the fatherland!" The German Fleet Association 1898-1934. Solivagus Praeteritum, Kiel 2015, pp. 533–715. ISBN 978-3-9817079-0-8 .
3. ^ Founder 1985: 601.

predecessor	Office	successor
Bernhard Dernburg	State Secretary in the Reich Colonial Office in 1910 and 1911	Wilhelm Heinrich Solf