Walter Kriege

Walter Kriege (15 March 1891 – 1 December 1952) was a German jurist who also had a political role in the 1940s.

Life Walter Adolf Florens Hermann Kriege was born in Paraguay in 1891. His father, Johannes Kriege (1859–1937), was a German diplomat who in 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 1923 and 1944, he worked in the Prussian Justice Ministry and later transferred to the national State Justice Ministry. It subsequently emerged that a year after his appointment, on 23/24 April 1941, Kriege was one of several high-profile government lawyers called to a special meeting at Hermann Göring's palatial offices in Berlin at which the participants were informed about Nazi Germany's new and subsequently-controversial Action T4 policy of enforced euthanasia. Between 1939 and 1944, Kriege also served as the president of the Senior Maritime Trophies Court (Oberprisenhof). However, the planned government never came to power because the 20 July plot failed to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Germany's incumbent chancellor. Instead, Kriege was arrested, but unlike many others who were then arrested,

The post was particularly ambiguous because West Germany has been established under terms established by the country's sponsors in the so-called Occupation statute of April 1949, which greatly qualified the new country's autonomy and expressly excluded foreign policy from the Adenauer government's areas of responsibility. In the event, neither Kriege nor , to whom the post was offered, accepted it. For the early years of his chancellorship, Adenauer ran his Foreign Ministry himself.

Kriege himself took a bank directorship, probably before he had been formally offered the foreign ministry post, as president of the "Land Bank" (Landeszentralbank) of North Rhine-Westphalia, a post that he retained until he died just over two years later.

Kriege was the nephew of the architect Richard Saran, the grandson of Bremen Mayor John Daniel Meier and the cousin of the journalist Mary Saran. He was also a relative of the early socialist Hermann Kriege.