Gebhard von Blücher

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Gebhard Leberecht Prince Blücher von Wahlstatt (born July 9, 1865 at Raduň Castle , today the Czech Republic ; † August 19, 1931 in Boscombe near Bournemouth , England ) was the 4th Prince Blücher von Wahlstatt . He was a direct descendant of the Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher .

Life

He was the son of Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher (1836-1916), 3rd Prince Blücher of Wahlstatt, and his first wife Marie Leopoldine Aloisia Symphorosa Princess of Lobkowitz (1841-1870).

After his matriculation examination (1881), the anglophile Blücher stayed for an academic year in England, where he made numerous friends. He later went to South Africa . When he returned to London in 1907 , he met his wife there. Blücher married on August 20, 1907 in London Evelyn Stapleton-Bretherton (born September 10, 1876 in Brighton , † January 20, 1960 in Worthing ), the daughter of Frederick Annesley Stapleton-Bretherton (1841-1919) and the Hon. Isabella Petre (1849-1919).

After the wedding, the couple lived on Herm Island , the smallest of the Channel Islands . Only after the declaration of war (August 14, 1914) for the First World War were the Blüchers forced to move to Germany. Blucher was not a soldier but served from 1915 as head of a Maltese - hospital train at the "volunteer nursing in wartime."

Blücher's wife Evelyn is considered an interesting person in contemporary history. After the First World War, she published her diary in London about her life as an English aristocrat and wife of a German prince during wartime in Germany, as an Englishwoman living in exile under the Prussian nobility. An episode described in it: She had been chosen by the German Kaiser Wilhelm II as godmother of the great cruiser " Blücher " and gave her first speech in German when it was launched in Kiel on April 11, 1908. But the "Blücher" was sunk on January 24, 1915 in a battle on the Dogger Bank by her own English compatriots in the Royal Navy .

Also published in cooperation with Major Desmond Chapman-Huston , the memoirs of her husband: Memoirs of Prince Blücher (Publisher J. Murray, London 1932) with a detailed description of his family history, especially an appreciation of his ancestor, the Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher.

Blücher himself had been a member of the Prussian manor house since 1917 . Here he resigned together with 15 other members of the conservative so-called "Old Fraction", which opposed the electoral reform of the Prussian three-class suffrage, and supported the efforts for equal universal suffrage promoted by the government. In January 1922 he sold the Palais Blücher at Pariser Platz 2 in Berlin to the Latvian-American banker Zimding, who in 1931 sold it to the United States, which set up their embassy there. He lived on his possessions Raduň Castle in Moravian Silesia (Czechoslovakia) and Krieblowitz Castle in Lower Silesia and England.

Notes and individual references

  1. The Austrian branch of the Order of Malta had set up such hospital trains in the course of the Franco-German War from 1870 to 1871, the German department ran two trains, one from Silesia and one from Westphalia .
  2. Princess Blücher. To English Wife in Berlin. A private memoir of events, politics and daily life in Germany throughout the War and the social revolution of 1918 , Verlag Constable, London 1919; French translation: Princesse Blücher. Une anglaise à Berlin. Notes intimes de la Princesse Blücher sur les évènements, la politique et la vie quotidienne en Allemagne au cours de la guerre et de al révolution sociale en 1918 , Payot publishing house, Paris 1922; German translation: Evelyn Fürstin Blücher von Wahlstatt. Diary with a foreword by Gebhard Fürst Blücher von Wahlstatt, Verlag für Kulturpolitik, Munich 1924.
  3. ^ Hartwin Spenkuch: Das Preußische Herrenhaus, page 267, note 42, Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1998, ISBN 3-7700-5203-X
  4. ^ Palais Blücher