Mehmed Şükrü Pasha

Mehmed Şükrü Pasha

Mehmed Şükrü Pascha , also Schükri Pascha (* 1856 in Erzurum , † June 5, 1916 in Istanbul ) was an Ottoman general .

Life

In 2016 restored memorial stone for Schükri Pascha as hero of Adrianople from 1913 in the garden of the Lindenhof in Kurort Hartha

Mehmed Şükrü Pasha was the only son of the adjutant - Major Mustafa Bey. He attended the cadet school in his hometown and after the death of his father in 1876 came to Istanbul, where he entered the military academy and in 1880 graduated from the artillery school as a first lieutenant .

In 1883, on the recommendation of War Minister Ali Saib Pascha, he was sent to Germany to complete his studies because of his special talent for mathematics and successfully completed courses in the troops and at the engineering and artillery school. Eventually he even became an honorary adjutant of the German Emperor Wilhelm I.

In 1887 he returned from Germany as a major and then worked until 1897 as a teacher at the artillery school and with various guards and artillery regiments . During this period he rose rapidly, becoming a colonel in 1889 , major general and inspector for armaments and ammunition in 1894, and lieutenant general and imperial adjutant the following year . From 1903 he held the newly created rank of commanding general, wrote textbooks on artillery and cavalry training as well as ballistics and was known in the army for his strict approach to service.

As commander of the artillery in Edirne , he was suspected by secret agents of a planned attack on the local commander-in-chief Arif Pascha in 1905 , but was able to justify himself brilliantly and was only transferred to Saloniki . His promotion to Marshal , which had been postponed again and again, took place at the beginning of 1908. Nevertheless, in the critical summer days of the same year, he stood up for the reintroduction of the constitution with Abdülhamid II . After the Young Turkish Revolution he was demoted to general as part of the general downsizing of civil servants and, in the following years, held the functions of inspector of the Landwehr and the commander of the Dardanelles fortresses. In May 1909 he was Deputy Military Commander in Aleppo as Brigade General and in this function received a letter of thanks from the German Colmar General Colmar von der Goltz that he had maintained the calm in Aleppo, which he replied via the local German consulate .

Act

His hour came after the outbreak of the First Balkan War , when he was appointed Commandant of Adrianople (Edirne) in October 1912. Contrary to the ideas of the Ottoman government, which had only expected a month-long defense, he managed to hold the city until the armistice was concluded on December 3, 1912. When the hostilities were resumed on February 4, 1913, he continued to defend Edirne with heavy casualties and could not be forced to surrender until March 26, 1913 by the allied Bulgarian and Serbian troops. The following day, Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria , whom he had known personally from earlier, appeared in the conquered city, received him, solemnly returned his sword and afterwards held him in Sofia in honorable captivity, while the French public in particular took him celebrated enthusiastically. In May 1913 he gave an interview to foreign journalists as a celebrated hero of Adrianople ( Edirne Müdafii ) about the events in Edirne.

During the siege of Edirne, he had expelled the leading Young Turkish functionary Talât Bey for defeatist propaganda from the city. The Young Turks retaliated by receiving the Pasha at the train station on October 25, 1913 when the commander of Istanbul Cemal Bey returned from captivity in order to prevent rallies by the population as much as possible and to humiliate him and had them brought quickly to his house. He became a member of the Senate afterwards, but did not appear in public until his death.

Remember him today & a. the Şükrü Pasha Memorial and Balkan Wars Museum in Edirne and a memorial stone in the garden of the Lindenhof in Kurort Hartha .

literature

• Imhoff, Major General: Mehmed Schukri Pascha. The hero of Adrianople . In: Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), December 18, 1912.
• Mahmud Mukhtar Pasha: My leadership in the Balkan war in 1912 . Ernst Siegfried Mittler, 1913, p. 14.
• Anonymous: Schükri Pasha. In: Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), March 27, 1913, p. 2 ( digitized version ).
• Central Committee of the German Associations of the Red Cross (Hrsg.): Contributions to war medicine . Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1914, p. 188.
• Gottlob Egelhaaf: History of the Most Recent Times. From the Peace of Frankfurt to the present . Krabbe, Stuttgart 1915, p. 662.
• Theodor Schieder (ed.): Handbook of European history . Volume 6. Union Verlag, Stuttgart 1973, p. 580.
• Hans-Jürgen Kornrumpf: Mehmed Şükrü Pascha . In: Mathias Bernath, Karl Nehring (Ed.), Gerda Bartl (Red.): Biographical Lexicon for the History of Southeast Europe . Volume 4. Oldenbourg, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-486-42421-1 , p. 225 f.
• André Kaiser: Restoration of the cemetery plaque in Fördergersdorf and the two memorial stones in the garden of the Lindenhof in Kurort Hartha , in: Around the Tharandter Forest , Official Gazette of the City of Tharandt, 18th year, 15th September 2016, p. 41 f.
• André Kaiser: On the 100th anniversary of Schükri Pascha's death - memorial stone in the garden of the Lindenhof Kurort Hartha , in: Around the Tharandt Forest , Official Gazette of the City of Tharandt, 18th year, 15th October 2016, p. 25

Individual evidence

1. ^ Secret report from the Consul General in Aleppo (Tischendorf) to the Reich Chancellor (Bülow) dated June 5, 1909
2. ↑ Schükri Pascha surrenders to the reporters
3. ↑ Şükrü Pasha Memorial and Balkan Wars Museum