Moritz von Bissing

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Colonel General Moritz Freiherr von Bissing

Moritz Ferdinand von Bissing (born January 30, 1844 in Ober Bellmannsdorf ; † April 18, 1917 in Vilvoorde , Belgium ), raised to the Prussian baron status in 1858 , was a Prussian colonel general in the First World War .

Life

family

Moritz came from the old noble family von Bissing , who probably came from Swabia . He was the son of the landowner Moritz von Bissing (1802–1860), master of the Ober- and Nieder- Bellmannsdorf estates, and his wife Dorothea, née Freiin von Gall (1800–1847).

The father was elevated to the Prussian baron status on July 17, 1852. He was the son of Colonel Hans August von Bissing and his wife Auguste, née von Gröna, an illegitimate daughter of Prince Friedrich Albrecht von Anhalt-Bernburg . The mother was the daughter of the Prussian lieutenant colonel , who also worked as police director, Christian Freiherr von Gall and his wife Charlotte Dorothea von Reibnitz .

Bissing married Myrrha Wesendonck on August 22, 1872 in Dresden (* August 7, 1851 in Zurich ; † July 10, 1888 in Munich ), the daughter of the businessman Otto Wesendonck (1815-1896) and the businessman's daughter Agnes Mathilde Luckemeyer (1828-1902 ), who later became known as Mathilde Wesendonck - Mathilde called her her husband - as a writer and friend of Richard Wagner . His eldest son was the later Egyptologist Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing (1873-1956).

After the death of his first wife, he married Alice von Countess von Königsmarck (* October 24, 1867), a daughter of Count Carl von Königsmarck, in Plaue / Havel in 1890 .

Work as a soldier

The Bavarian Provost Cardinal Bettinger in front of the Brussels Cathedral in 1916. On the left his secretary Michael Buchberger , on the far right Baron Moritz von Bissing, Governor General of Belgium

In 1865 Bissing became a second lieutenant , in 1882 he served as Rittmeister in the King's Hussar Regiment (1st Rheinisches) No. 7 in Bonn and in 1883 he joined the General Staff . In 1887 he became the personal adjutant of Crown Prince Wilhelm , and in 1888/89 after his accession to power he became a wing adjutant . From May 20, 1893 to August 31, 1894, Bissing commanded the 4th Guards Cavalry Brigade , in the meantime rose to major general and advanced to general of the cavalry until January 27, 1902 . From May 18, 1901 to December 11, 1907, Bissing was Commanding General of the VII Army Corps in Munster . Subsequently, in approval of his resignation request, he was put up for disposition with the statutory pension .

From 1908 he lived in retirement at Gut Rettkau near Groß Gräditz in the district of Glogau (Lower Silesia), where he devoted himself to welfare and youth care. With the outbreak of World War I , Bissing was reactivated as a ZD officer and initially acted from August 2 to November 23, 1914 as the commanding general of the Deputy General Command of the VII Army Corps, and in December 1914 as Colonel General à la suite of the regiment of the Gardes du Corps .

On November 24, 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II appointed the 70-year-old Bissing Governor General for the German Government General of Belgium , the head of government of occupied Belgium. He succeeded General Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz . Bissing ruled fairly rigorously after the conquest of Belgium, which was accompanied by numerous war crimes committed by the German military against the civilian population. On January 1, 1915, he forbade the reading of the pastoral letter of Cardinal Merciers, who had critical words against the Germans in his intended text. His brutality was also shown in the fact that he believed the death sentence passed on October 11, 1915 in Brussels against the British nurse Edith Cavell to be appropriate and confirmed it. After the occupation of Belgium, Cavell had secretly nursed wounded Allied soldiers to health in her hospital before their arrest, and then helped them escape to the Netherlands and Great Britain. In addition, Bissing approved the execution of Gabrielle Petits on April 1, 1916. Petit had disclosed military secrets to the Allies. Another example is the execution of Omèr Lefèvre, a telegraph worker, on May 15, 1916. There were looting and deportations. 120,000 Belgian citizens were sent to Germany for forced labor, 3,600 of them died in Germany.

Bissing also promoted the partition of Belgium as part of the Flemish policy in Flemish and Walloon areas. German-friendly propaganda among the Flemish majority in Belgium was intended to arouse sympathy for Germany in the population so that the Flemish regions could be annexed to the Reich after the war . This split and weakened the Belgian state.

In April 1917, Bissing had to give up his post in Brussels because of a lung disease and died a few days later. From 1910 until his death in April 1917 he was a member of the Prussian manor house . Bissing was buried in the Invalidenfriedhof in Berlin . The grave has not been preserved.

Bissing was the founder of the " Association of Model Settlements for War Disabled ". In 1916, Bissing donated a plot of land from the Count's property from the Count Spee's foundation , which had previously been assigned to him. The Rheinisch-Bissingheim settlement was to be built on this site. Construction of the Bissingheim settlement in Hagen began around the same time. In the course of the incorporation in Hagen, the Damaschkehof in Bissingheim was renamed Bissinghof.

Fonts

  • Masses or part of the cavalry command . ES Mittler & Sohn, Berlin 1900.
  • Cavalry in advance, pursuit and reconnaissance . in: “Military weekly paper No. 10 ”, page 279f., Berlin 1902.
  • Dinant. A memorandum (edited in 1916) . Roland-Verlag, Munich 1918.

Honors

Orders and decorations

Honorary doctorate

  • December 2, 1915: Honorary doctorate from the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster (Dr. rer. Pol. Hc)

Other honors

  • In a stained glass window in the St. Pankratius Church in Buldern , which was donated in 1905 by officers of the 4th Cuirassier Regiment from Munster, Bissing is depicted in the window arch as St. Mauritius (1905).
  • Probably in the course of his retirement from active military service in Münster , he was made an honorary member of the "Turngemeinde Münster" (February 19, 1908).
  • He was posthumously named after the Bissingheim housing estate in Duisburg in recognition of his support (“Bissing Foundation”, Berlin) (1920).
  • The street “ Bissingzeile ” was named after him in Berlin-Tiergarten (November 7, 1936).

  • Myrrha Wesendonck, later Baroness von Bissing

  • Announcement by Colonel General and Governor General Moritz Freiherr von Bissing on April 20, 1915 in Brussels

  • Tomb in the Invalidenfriedhof (destroyed)

literature

Web links

Commons : Moritz von Bissing  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Judith Cabaud: Mathilde Wesendonck et le rêve d'Isolde. Arles 1990.
  2. ^ Military weekly paper . No. 160 of December 17, 1907, p. 3617.
  3. ^ Laurence van Ypersele: Belgium. In: Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz (eds.): Encyclopedia First World War. Paderborn 2009, p. 45ff.
  4. ^ Laurence van Ypersele: Belgium. In: Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz (eds.): Encyclopedia First World War. Paderborn 2009, p. 45ff.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Ranking list of the Royal Prussian Army and the XIII. (Royal Württemberg Army Corps for 1914 , Ed .: War Ministry , Ernst Siegfried Mittler & Sohn , Berlin 1914, p. 354
predecessor Office successor
Colmar von der Goltz Governor General of Belgium
1914 - 1917 		Ludwig von Falkenhausen
personal data
SURNAME Bissing, Moritz von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bissing, Moritz Ferdinand von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Prussian officer, most recently colonel general in World War I.
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1844
PLACE OF BIRTH Upper Bellmannsdorf
DATE OF DEATH April 18, 1917
Place of death Vilvoorde , Belgium