Otto Meissner

Otto Lebrecht Eduard Daniel Meissner (13 March 1880, Bischwiller, Alsace – 27 May 1953, Munich) was head of the Office of the President of Germany during the entire period of the Weimar Republic under Friedrich Ebert and Paul von Hindenburg and, finally, at the beginning of the Nazi government under Adolf Hitler.

Life

The son of a postal official, Meissner studied law in Strasbourg from 1898 to 1903, where he also became a member of the Strassburg Student Youth Fraternity (Burschenschaft) Germania. Later he also studied in Berlin and earned his Doctor of Laws in 1908, at the age of 28, in Erlangen, Bavaria. Afterwards, he became a bureaucrat for the national railroad, the Reichsbahn, in Strasbourg. Between 1915 and 1917 he participated in the First World War in an infantry regiment. Up to 1919 he was more active behind the front, first in Bucharest, Romania, then in Kiev, and finally as a German business agent for the Ukrainian government.

Thanks to his good contacts, in 1919 Meissner became "Acting Advisor in the Bureau of the President" (who at that time was the social democrat Friedrich Ebert), and by 1920 rose to the position of "Ministerial Director and Head of the Bureau of the President." Ebert named Meissner to the post of State Secretary in 1923. He continued in that post under Ebert's successor Paul von Hindenburg.