Fritz Klein (captain)

Fritz Klein (* 1877 ; † 1958 ) was a German officer who undertook commando operations against the British in Persia and Iraq during World War I. Occasionally he was referred to as the German Lawrence of Arabia .

Klein was the son of an industrial entrepreneur from the Siegerland. He chose a military career and at the same time went abroad. In 1904 he went on a trip around the world. In 1910 he took a leave of absence from the military and spent one year each at the German embassies in Rio de Janeiro , Cairo and Tehran (where he learned Persian). He initially served in France during World War I and was wounded in 1914. He was a captain then . He volunteered for an expedition intended to encourage Persian and Arab tribes to revolt against the English and to attack the oil pipelines in Persia and the Middle East. He was subordinate to the Foreign Office and was a major in the Ottoman Army . 70 German specialists, including the archaeologists Conrad Preusser, Walter Bachmann and Hans Lührs, engineers and merchants, took part, as well as former Muslim prisoners of war and around 300 Austrian prisoners of war who escaped from the Russians. The starting point was Aleppo in autumn 1914 . However, the Turks represented their own interests, and the tribes in Iraq, in turn, wanted nothing to do with Turkish domination. He met high Shiite dignitaries in Kerbala , who suspiciously demanded large sums of money due to the lack of German troops. From autumn 1915 he was also active in Persia (where the archaeologist Friedrich Sarre was a liaison officer), where in April 1915 it was also possible to interrupt oil pipelines (with which the British fleet was supplied), but not the Persians on the side of the Central Powers to pull. Later in the war he was subordinated to the Turks and lost his relatively independent command. While he was initially able to prevent the massacre of Armenians in his command district, he later failed to do so. To supply the Turkish fleet on the Euphrates and Tigris, he also opened a coal mine, and he fought against locust plagues and plague outbreaks (vaccinations in Baghdad). In Persia he tried to incite the population to a holy war (jihad) against the Entente. Initially, he acted on his own initiative, but from July 1915 the Foreign Office set up its own German Persia mission, which among other things fought the Russians in the north. However, they suffered a defeat at the Kangavar Pass in February 1916 and Klein returned to Germany in 1916.

After the war he wrote philosophical works. The historian Veit Veltzke was later able to evaluate Klein's estate (as well as Klein's war diary and official correspondence in the Foreign Office's archives).

His adjutant Edgar Stern-Rubarth (1883–1972) was later a journalist (editor-in-chief at Ullstein and in Wolff's Telegraph Office), who emigrated to England as a Jew in 1936 and published memories of the expedition (Lawrence playing on the other side). He had studied Romance studies and was at times an advisor to Gustav Stresemann.

literature

• Veit Veltzke (Ed.): Playing Lawrence on the other Side. The Klein Expedition and the German-Ottoman Alliance in World War I , Nicolai Verlag, Berlin 2014
• Veit Veltzke: Among the sons of the desert . The German expedition Klein in World War I , Nicolai Verlag, Berlin 2014.

Web links

• Rolf Brockschmidt: The German Lawrence of Arabia. Fritz Klein: The Emperor's Jihadist , Tagesspiegel January 3, 2015 (exhibition in the Prussian Museum Wesel)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Review by Oliver Stein