Heinrich August Meißner

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Heinrich August Meißner as Pascha

Heinrich August Meißner (born  January 3, 1862 in Leipzig ; †  January 14, 1940 in Istanbul ) was a German engineer and railway builder and from 1904 an Ottoman pasha .

Life

Meißner was the son of the Leipzig lawyer and notary Heinrich August Meißner and his wife Eulalia nee Tridon. The father died shortly after the son was born, and the mother moved with him to Dresden . Here he attended the Annenrealgymnasium . After a short military service with the Royal Saxon Rifle Regiment "Prince Georg", he studied civil engineering from 1881 to 1885 at the Technical University of Dresden specializing in railway construction , as well as earthworks , tunneling and hydraulic engineering .

His career aspiration was practical railway construction. Since this flourished in the Ottoman Empire, this was soon his declared goal. He learned the official Turkish language while still a student , and an uncle on his mother's side, Victor Tridon, the son of the painter Caroline Franziska Sattler , who worked as an engineer in Constantinople, made it easier for him to get started. After a short stay as an assistant at the chair for railway construction at the Polytechnic in Prague in 1886, he moved to Turkey in 1887 and was employed by the state Ottoman railway.

Here he managed the construction of various routes in the country over the next few years. In 1896 he was appointed scientific director for railway construction. When the planning of the Hejaz Railway , the pilgrimage route to Mecca, began in the late 1890s , Meißner was entrusted with the management of the project, which he held until 1908. In 1904 he was awarded the title Pascha.

In 1910 Meißner moved to the Anatolian Railway Construction Company , which was responsible for building the Baghdad Railway . From 1912, he was in charge of building the railway from Baghdad to the north. One of the most important construction companies was Philipp Holzmann AG . But Meißner also involved other German companies in his projects. The rails were supplied by Friedrich Krupp AG , and the locomotives came from Borsig , Hanomag , Henschel , Maffei and Richard Hartmann in Chemnitz.

During the First World War , under the commander-in-chief of the 4th Ottoman Army, he built a railway line from Syria to Egypt for the planned Turkish advance against the British protectorate . 365 km of railway line were completed.

In 1918 Meißner had to leave Turkey and went back to Germany for a few years. In 1923 he was an advisor to the Albanian Ministry of Construction in Tirana . In 1924, however, the Turkish government called him back to Turkey as a "consultant for construction and railway maintenance". He devoted himself to the reconstruction of the partially destroyed railway lines. The Baghdad Railway was continued. After retiring as a railway builder, he was given a chair in railway construction at the Istanbul Technical University . He could no longer see the final completion of the Baghdad Railway, he died a good six months earlier before the first train traveled the entire route from Constantinople to Baghdad. His grave is in the Protestant foreigner cemetery in Feriköy (Istanbul).

Meißner was married to Lucy Tinghir (1868–1945).

Railway projects

Heinrich August Meißner held leading positions in the construction of the following railway lines in the specified years

Honors (selection)

  • Awarded the title of Pasha (1904)
  • Honorary doctorate from the Dresden University of Technology (1924)
  • Mecidiye Order

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Meißner, Heinrich August
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meißner-Pascha, Heinrich August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German engineer and railway builder and Ottoman pasha
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1862
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH January 14, 1940
Place of death Istanbul