Georg Fritz

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Georg Fritz as a colonial official
Georg Fritz, 1891

Georg Fritz (born November 24, 1865 in Alzey ; † November 18, 1944 ibid) was a German finance and colonial official, secret government councilor and anti-Semitic publicist.

Life

Fritz studied forest and camera sciences at the Universities of Giessen and Munich , where he was a member of the Corps Teutonia and Franconia . After completing his studies, he went to a research facility in Rio de Janeiro as a research assistant , because immediately after completing his studies he could not get a chief forester position in Hesse . Personally, he couldn't get on with the head professor there, and he came back to Germany as a cabin boy . There he took up a second degree, that of finance. At first he worked as a financial assessor in Mainz , where he made his first contact with the Volkischer Deutschbund . Once again dissatisfied with his job, he successfully applied for a position in the colonial service - obviously through the mediation of Heinrich Claß , who was the same age and chairman of the Pan-German Association .

Colonial official

From November 1899 Fritz was the district administrator of the Mariana Islands , part of the German New Guinea colony . From his office on Saipan Island , he headed the administration, which initially consisted of three officials, commanded the police force and was responsible as a judge for civil and criminal matters. Fritz promoted the development of trade and agriculture and initiated the construction of roads, the creation of plantations and the establishment of a school. At the same time he carried out historical and ethnological research on the Chamorro people and in 1904 published a dictionary of the Chamorro language . After typhoons had caused damage to the islands of the Caroline Islands in 1905 , Fritz suggested the relocation of Carolines to the Mariana Islands. By 1911, over 1,000 Carolinians were deported to the Mariana Islands, mostly against their will .

In April 1906, he was initially transferred to Yap in the western Carolines. From April 1908, Fritz was the district administrator for the eastern Carolines ( Ponape district ) with his official seat on the island of Pohnpei . The island's population was divided into rival districts and factions; there were also considerable disputes between Catholics and Protestants. Governor Albert Hahl wanted to abolish the local system of rule that had been tolerated up to now, introduce a German local administration and accelerate the economic development of Pohnpei, among other things by building roads. The forced labor intended for road construction met with resistance from the locals; the upper class of Pohnpei saw their privileges endangered by the German plans. Fritz wanted to implement the measures amicably and in negotiations. At the same time, he requested two warships from the East Asia Squadron to intimidate the opposition. When Fritz accused Catholic missionaries of stirring up the unrest, this was frowned upon in the colonial office , as it turned political Catholicism against colonial policy. In October 1909 Fritz was replaced in Pohnpei and took over the office of his predecessor there, the district administrator Arno Senfft . In October 1910 he resigned from colonial service at his own request. Fritz 'successor in Pohnpei, Carl Boeder, tried to enforce the measures by force and thus triggered the Sokehs uprising , in which he was killed. In the 1912 book Ad majorem Dei Gloriam! Fritz named Gouverneur Hahl and District Administrator Boeder as the main culprits for the outbreak of the uprising. At the same time, Fritz claimed that the unrest could only have developed through Catholic “propaganda”. At the end of 1909 Fritz had already brought a lawsuit against the Apostolic Prefect for the Karolinen and Palau Islands , which Fritz had accused of cowardice. In March 1913, the prefect was fined for "defamatory insult under the assumption of attenuating circumstances". From the end of 1912 Fritz managed a plantation on the Indonesian island of Java for 18 months .

According to the historian Gerd Hardach, Fritz shaped the first years of German rule in the Marianas with a “ patriarchal policy” . In doing so, "Fritz [...] identified himself in a very unusual way with his job and developed a genuine interest in the local culture of the Marianas". This stands in a "strange contrast" to Fritz 'anti-Semitic "platitudes", which can also be found in his files in Saipan. Fritz 'role in the conflict in Pohnpei is judged by historians to be “competent, careful and understanding”.

Anti-Semitic publicist

In 1914 Fritz became a member of the Pan-German Association and a close collaborator of Heinrich Claß, who wrote him in his 1932 publication “Against the Current. On the development and growth of the national position in the old Reich ”(Leipzig 1932). In 1915 Fritz later published his thoughts on the "Ostjudenfrage" ("Die Ostjudenfrage. Zionismus und Grenzschluss"; cf. Ostjuden und Westjuden ) in a brochure in which he warned above all that Germany could not expand to the east by "millions." only poor, physically and morally stunted people, but racially alien, Jewish Mongols “suffer harm. It was his intention to forego such interventions in order to protect the Jews, otherwise the “most thorough weeding” of the Jews in Germany would be threatened. He campaigned for border barriers and thorough selection of immigrants as well as for diplomatic efforts to emigrate Jews. However , he strictly rejected a state of Palestine of its own , since it would develop as a source of "machinations and hostile conspiracies against our world and trade interests [...]". With the publication, Fritz pioneered a series of more or less anti-Semitic writings during the First World War. According to Uwe Lohalm, Fritz's publication was only superficially directed against the Eastern Jews, of whom very few immigrated to the German Reich at the time. "Volkish and nationalists deliberately played up the 'Eastern Jewish question' in order to bypass the war censorship to hit the Jews as a whole and the domestic political opponents associated with them," said Lohalm.

Claß and Fritz tried to define the term “all-Jewish”. While Claß contrasted the term with the “pan-German”, Fritz drew up the image of “ international Jewry ” in the Deutsche Zeitung at the end of June 1917 , which he sharply criticized and castigated as “the real 'corrosive effect' in politics, economy and culture”. In a second article by this Pan-German body of the association, he once again addressed the danger of mass immigration by Eastern Jews and called for legal regulations to contain it. Otherwise a complete "reorientation towards Judaism in general and its civic equality" would have to take place. He meant that the Jews living in Germany should be given "foreigner status".

In September 1918, at the request of Konstantin von Gebsattels , Fritz became deputy chairman of the Pan-German "Committee for the Jewish Question". The committee proposed by Claß was intended to create the basis for anti-Semitism to be finally included in the Pan-German program and used as a means of political warfare. Due to the November Revolution, the committee no longer met. As a reaction to the revolution, the Pan-Germans strove to found an anti-Semitic organization aimed at mass action, which was to bring together the anti-Semitic groups that already existed. Together with Claß, Gebsattel and Karl Lohmann, Fritz formed the committee, which met for the first time on February 18, 1919, and which organized the founding of the German National Guard in September 1919.

In 1920 Fritz published the three-volume Deutschvölkische Jahrbuch in Weimar in the Alexander Duncker publishing house. Until 1927 he was managing director of the Deutsche Zeitung (DZ). In his contributions, Fritz belonged to the minority within the DZ who in the second half of the 1920s referred to women as “servants of men”: “Women are sex beings with body and soul; as wife and mother, they fulfill their purpose in life and find them his luck with it ”, so Fritz, who at the same time ascribed the man's ingenious intellect and“ death-despising will to act ”. He saw the women's movement as a “sign of popular degeneration”. According to the DZ editor Ilse Hamel , Fritz's positive reviews of anti-feminist publications led to disputes in the editorial office and to protests from women's organizations.

In the early 1930s, Fritz worked for the magazine Die deutsche Werbung . Colonies published in 1934 ? The colonial fate of the German people - historically as a doctrine - politically as a task , Fritz criticized colonialism overseas. In the National Socialist publication he advocated that all German colonization should take place in Eastern Europe. In 1935 he settled again in his hometown Alzey, where he died and was buried.

Fonts (selection)

  • Chamorro grammar . In: Communications from the seminar for oriental languages ​​at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, 6, 1903, pp. 1–27.
  • Chamorro dictionary . Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1904.
  • The Chamorro. A history and ethnography of the Mariana Islands . Ethnologisches Notblatt 3,3 (1904), pp. 25-110. English translation by Scott Russell 2001.
  • Corps Teutonia to Giessen. 1839-1935 . Münchow'sche Universitäts-Druckerei Otto Kindt, Giessen 1939.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Hansheinrich Friedländer: Corp table of the Corps Teutonia Giessen 1839-1999 . Giessen 1999, p. 217.
  2. ↑ a b c Gerd Hardach: King Copra. The Mariana Islands under German rule 1899–1914. Steiner, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-515-05762-5 , pp. 76-78.
  3. ↑ Gerd Hardach: The German rule in Micronesia. In: Hermann Joseph Hiery (ed.): The German South Sea 1884-1914. A manual. Schöningh, Paderborn 2001, ISBN 3-506-73912-3 , pp. 508-534, here p. 522.
  4. ↑ Thomas Morlang: Rebellion in the South Seas. The uprising on Ponape against the German colonial rulers in 1910/11. Ch.links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-604-8 , p. 160.
  5. ↑ Hardach: King Copra. 1990, p. 81, with reference to Paul M. Ehrlich: The clothes of men. Ponape Island and German colonial rule, 1899-1914. Dissertation at Stony Brook University 1978, p. 149, and Peter John Hempenstall: Pacific islanders under German rule. A study in the meaning of colonial resistance. Australian National University Press, Canberra 1978, ISBN 0-7081-1350-8 , p. 98.
  6. ↑ Quoted in Bergmann: Fritz, Georg. 2009, p. 263.
  7. ↑ a b c d e Uwe Lohalm: Völkischer Radikalismus. The history of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund. 1919-1923. (Hamburg Contributions to Contemporary History, Volume 6). Leibniz, Hamburg 1970, ISBN 3-87473-000-X .
  8. ^ Bergmann: Fritz, Georg. 2009, p. 263.
  9. ↑ Georg Fritz: The eternal feminine attracts us. DZ, No. 222a, September 22, 1927. Quoted by Christiane Streubel: Radical Nationalists. Agitation and programs of right-wing women in the Weimar Republic. (History and Gender, Volume 55). Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-593-38210-5 , p. 374.
  10. ^ Streubel: Nationalists. 2006, pp. 163, 165.
  11. ↑ Hardach: King Copra. 1990, p. 82; Dirk HR Spennemann : German Language Sources on the Mariana Islands. An Annotated Bibliography. (English, accessed January 6, 2013)
personal data
SURNAME Fritz, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German tax officer, secret government councilor and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH November 24, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Alzey
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1944
Place of death Alzey