Lothar Persius

Karl Ludwig Lothar Persius (born April 19, 1864 in Kyritz , † August 31, 1944 in Ascona ) was a German naval officer . As a critic of Alfred von Tirpitz 's fleet policy , he retired from active service in 1908 and worked as a journalist and author . He was considered an expert on naval issues and developed into a pacifist .

Life

The son of the lawyer Paul Persius attended the Victoria-Gymnasium in Potsdam , which he left in 1882 to join the Imperial Navy as a midshipman in 1883 . He received his training on the training ship Niobe and took part in a world tour on the corvette Elisabeth from 1884 to 1886 . In 1888/1889 he served in the Mediterranean on the frigate Moltke . In 1892/1893 Persius served on the corvette Luise , and in 1893/1894 on the frigate Gneisenau . On the Gneisenau he traveled to South America, the West Indies (Caribbean) and the United States. In 1897 he was a lieutenant captain and deputy commander of the Aviso Wacht . Persius served a total of 22 warships, five of which still had sails. In 1902/03 he was first officer on the large cruiser Hansa of the Victoria Louise class . In 1903/1904 Persius, now Korvettenkapitän , was in command of the small cruiser Seeadler , which was deployed on the East Asian station during this time .

In the spring of 1904, Persius began to work under a pseudonym for the weekly newspaper Ostasiatischer Lloyd . Since his pseudonym was quickly revealed, he had to stop working after two contributions. At the beginning of 1905 Persius' command was terminated and he took over the position of head of the ammunition depot in Diedrichsdorf near Kiel. He now began to publish regularly and worked for the Army and Navy yearbooks . Here he criticized Tirpitz's fleet plans in anonymous articles and advocated submarines as defensive weapons. In early 1908 his authorship came to light through an indiscretion. He was banned from writing and his transfer as commandant of a training ship was refused. He submitted his farewell, but was declared incapacitated by what he believed to be a medical report. So he retired from active service, but was promoted to sea captain on October 18, 1908 . He subsequently retained his rank, his pension entitlement, and the right to wear a uniform, despite multiple court cases of honor brought against him because of his continued criticism of Tirpitz.

Persius worked briefly for the Fleet Association , but left with the establishment of a new board that supported Tirpitz's policy. He also made himself unpopular in the officers' corps when, in December 1908, members of the Progressive Party prevented the increase in table and fair fees in the Reichstag with information material from Persius . Persius began to work as a journalist for various newspapers: from 1907 to 1911 mainly for the conservative Kreuzzeitung , but also for the left-wing Red Day . Persius' book Unterseeboote an die Front! Published in 1911 under the pseudonym Submare was a particular success with the public . , in which he episodically described a war with submarines against the German fleet. In March 1912 he joined the editorial team of the liberal Berliner Tageblatt , to which he was to belong until his retirement in 1920.

In the summer of 1918 Persius also worked on the world stage . After the First World War , he welcomed the planned demilitarization of Germany, the abolition of conscription and the signing of the Versailles Treaty with its disarmament provisions. He became involved in the German League for Human Rights , in which he was also represented on the board, but which he left in 1926 after allegations that the league was financed by foreign government agencies. In 1925 he published a white book on the Black Reichswehr . He wrote for the Weltbühne until the summer of 1930 and occasionally for the Berliner Tageblatt until 1931 . Persius emigrated to Switzerland by 1933 at the latest .

Fonts (selection)

How it came (1919)

• Sketches from German sailing life , 1898
• Sea and marine creatures , Oldenburg 1910
• Submarines to the front , 1911
• The collapse: the sea battle near Borkum and Helgoland , Minden in 1913.
• Naval information book: guide in the field of war and merchant fleets and adviser for the career , Berlin 1914
• The Tirpitz legend , Berlin 1918
• The naval war , Charlottenburg 1918
• "How it came about" that the impetus for the revolution came from the fleet , Berlin 1919. Digitized by the Central and State Library Berlin, 2017. URN urn: nbn: de: kobv: 109-1-12291095
• Tirpitz, the gravedigger of the German fleet , Berlin 1919
• Why the fleet failed , Berlin 1925
• People and ships in the Imperial Fleet , Berlin 1925
• Our old Navy , Stuttgart o. J.

literature

• Persius, Lothar . In: Kürschner's German Literature Calendar , Volume 46, 1932, ISSN  0343-0936 , Sp. 1056f.
• Peter Steinkamp: Captain at sea a. D. Lothar Persius. A naval officer as a critic of German naval policy (1864–1944) . In: Wolfram Wette (ed.): Pacifist officers in Germany 1871–1933 . Donat, Bremen 1999, ISBN 3-931737-85-3 , ( Series History & Peace 10), pp. 98-109.

Web links

• Literature by and about Lothar Persius in the catalog of the German National Library