Walter Kriege

Life

Walter Adolf Florens Hermann Kriege was born in Paraguay in 1891. His father, Johannes Kriege (1859-1937), was a German diplomat who during the early 1890s worked as the German Consul in Asunción.

After taking part in the First World War Kriege completed his studies in jurisprudence at Berlin, where he obtained his doctorate. Between 1921 and 1923 he worked at the Reichsbank (German Central Bank). Between 1923 and 1944 he worked in the Prussian Justice Ministry, later transferring to the national State Justice Ministry. In April 1940 he was appointed Ministerial Director in the Justice Ministry, a post he retained till his arrest in July 1944. It subsequently emerged that a year after his appointment, on 23/24 April 1941, Kriege was one of several top government lawyers called to a special meeting at Hermann Göring's palatial offices in Berlin at which participants were informed about the government's new (and subsequently controversial) Enforced Euthanasia policy. Between 1939 and 1944 Kriege also served as the president of the Senior Maritime Trophies Court (Oberprisenhof).

Walter Kriege was nominated a member of the planned Goerdeler Shadow Cabinet as Secretary of State at the Justice Ministry or, according to another source, as Justice Minister. However, the planned government never came to power because the assassination plot against Germany's incumbent chancellor failed. Instead, Walter Kriege was arrested. Unlike many of those arrested at this time he was released a few months later, however, in November 1944.

War ended in May 1945 and what remained of Germany was divided into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the four principal victorious powers. Later, in May 1949, three of the four occupation zones would be bundled together and re-founded as the German Federal Republic (West Germany). Between 1946 and 1949 Walter Kriege worked as deputy president of the "German Finance Council", located within the US occupation zone at Stuttgart, also holding the directorship of the "Finance Administration Office" ("Verwaltung für Finanzen") which in 1949 would mutate into the West German Finance Ministry. With the foundation of West Germany the country's new Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, was keen to appoint Walter Kriege as his Administrative Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. The post was a particularly ambiguous one, because West Germany was established under terms established by the country's sponsors in the so-called Occupation statute of April 1949, which greatly qualified the autonomy of the new country and expressly excluded foreign policy from the Adenauer government's areas of responsibility. In the event neither Kriege nor Paulus van Husen, to whom the post was offered, accepted it, and during the early years of his chancellorship Konrad Adenauer ran his Foreign Ministry himself. Kriege himself took a bank directorship, probably before being formally offered the foreign ministry post, as President of the "Land Bank" ("Landeszentralbank") of North Rhine-Westphalia, a post he retained till his death just over two years later.