Theodor von Hassel

Life

Family provenance and early years

Theodor Berthold Paul Hassel was the second son of Prussian Army officer Friedrich von Hassel (1833–1890) and Elise Helene Christiane Hassel (born Thormann) (1846–1896). His father's military career meant a childhood disrupted by frequent relocation. On 22 March 1887 Friedrich Hassel was ennobled by the emperor, in recognition of his long military service. One result was that his family name changed from "Hassel" to "von Hassel".

In 1878 Theodor was accepted into the Prussian Academy for Officers' sons in Groß-Lichterfelde, just outside Berlin. In 1885 he switched to Cathedral School in Magdeburg, passing his School final exams (Abitur) in 1887. That same year he joined the Prussian army as an officer, serving in the Queen's Fusilier Regiment (Schleswig-Holstein) No.86, under the command of von Kusserow. The third battalion of the regiment was stationed in Sønderborg Castle in the area where two and a half decades earlier his father had served with distinction during the Franco-Prussian War. During this period Theodor won a medal for jumping into the water in the harbour at Copenhagen and rescuing a child who had fallen in. For a time he served as a sailing instructor with the Sonderburg Sea battalion before returning, in 1900, to his earlier duties.

Africa

In 1903 von Hassel enrolled as an Oberleutnant in the Protection Force for German East Africa, thereby resigning from the German Imperial Army. On reporting in Dar es Salaam in May 1903 he was promoted to the rank of "Hauptmann", a junior officer rank, though initially as a supernumerary officer without a posting. There followed a period of instruction covering the relevant legal framework applicable to the Protection Force and basic familiarisation with Swahili. At the end of August 1903 he became a commando with the Third Company based along the coast to the south in Lindi. In November 1904 he took over command of the Twelfth Company in Mahenge, an inland location in the southern part of the German East Africa colony. Mahenge was in the heart of the region affected by the Maji Maji Rebellion. At the end of August 1905 several thousand rebel warriors arrived at the garrison. The ensuing battle took the form of a siege in which von Hassel, his group of sixty native soldiers, a few hundred loyal tribesmen massively outnumbered, authorised the use of the defenders' two machine guns. The attackers were fought off only with difficulty: many were killed.

During a lengthy period of home leave back in Germany, von Hassel met Emma Jebsen at a ball in Apenrade and married her in October 1906. His bride was the youngest daughter of the shipowner-politician Michael Jebsen. (At that time, and indeed until 1920, Apenrade was in Germany.) On 10 January 1907 they arrived together back in Dar es Salaam. Kurt von Schleinitz, appointed commander of the East African Protection Force in May 1907, awarded von Hassel with the prestigious Order of the Red Eagle in recognition of his contribution to the suppression of the Maji Maji Rebellion. Von Hassel was now given command of the Fifth Company, based in Masoko near Neu-Langenburg, still in the inland southwestern part of the German colony.

The couples' first child, Gertrud, was born in Dar es Salaam on 10 May 1908. Gertrud later became an artist. It was partly in order to avoid Malaria that Emma von Hassel spent most of her second pregnancy staying with her parents in Apenrade, where their first son, Friedrich, was born on 16 April 1910. By this time von Hassel had already left the Protection Force in 1909, setting himself up as a farmer in German East Africa. He set up what he called the "New Apenrade Farm" ("Farm Neu-Apenrade") in the Wilhelmstal (valley) in the Usambara Mountains, close to the frontier with what later became Kenya and a couple of hundred miles to the north of Dar es Salaam. Coffee was the main crop. It was near the coffee farm, at the missionary station at Gare, that their second son Kai-Uwe was born on 21 April 1913.