Nikolaus von Below (General)

Nikolaus von Below (1648–1707)

Nikolaus von Below (born October 29, 1648 on Gut Medenick ; † October 4, 1707 in Spandau ) was a Prussian major general of the infantry and commandant of the Spandau fortress .

Life

origin

Nikolaus came from the Pomeranian noble family von Below . He was the son of Ludwig von Below (* 1580), heir to 1/2 Pennekow and Medenick, and his wife Margarethe von Zitzewitz from the Techlipp family (* 1599).

Military career

Below attended the Knight Academy in Kolberg and joined the garrison there in 1664 in the service of Kurbrandenburg . After three years of training he came to a regiment put together under Christian Albrecht von Dohna in Küstrin for use in the Dutch War . With this regiment he became a lieutenant in 1672. He fought under Elector Friedrich Wilhelm in Alsace, then in the Battle of Fehrbellin and then in Pomerania. There he, since 1676 captain , was wounded three times when the Swedes fell out of the Anklam fortress on June 7, 1677. Hardly recovered, a hand grenade seriously injured his left foot, and this wound healed poorly. In the regiment "Dohna" Below made it to major in 1681 .

From February 1687 he served in the regiment "Graf Dönhoff on foot" as a lieutenant colonel . In the war of the Palatinate Succession against France that followed, he was present at the sieges of Kaiserswerth and Bonn , where a bomb injured his neck and head. Elector Friedrich III. von Brandenburg appointed him commandant of Spandau in 1689 and promoted him to colonel . When lightning blew up the powder tower in 1691, Below was badly wounded. In 1695 he took part in the conquest of Namur .

The Prussian king decorated Below with the order de la Générosité in 1703 and appointed him major general of the infantry in 1704. Below died on October 4, 1707 as a result of his numerous injuries. His grave is in the Nikolaikirche in Spandau .

family

Below married Marie Elisabeth Brandt von Lindau (* 1654; † after 1710) in Spandau in 1699. She was the widow of Henning Joachim von Hake (* 1644, † 1688) and until then court master of the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha . The marriage remained childless.

literature

• Anton Balthasar König : Biographical dictionary of all heroes and military figures . tape I . Arnold Wever, Berlin 1788, p. 122 ( Nikolaus von Below in the Google book search).
• Oskar Pusch : Von Below, a German family from the Baltic Sea region. Research Center East Central Europe at the University of Dortmund, Series No. 27, Dortmund 1974, Tfl. XXXXV
• Kurt von Priesdorff : Soldier leadership . Volume 1, Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt Hamburg, undated [Hamburg], undated [1937], DNB 367632764 , pp. 78-79, no. 126.