Early Years
Pohl was born in Duisburg-Ruhrort as the son of blacksmith Hermann Otto Emil Pohl and his wife Auguste Pohl (née Seifert); he was the fifth of a total of eight children. After graduating from school in 1912, he became a full-time sailor in the Imperial Navy, being trained in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven as well as the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. During World War I, he served in the Baltic Sea region and the coast of Flanders. Pohl also attended a navy school, and became paymaster on 1 April 1918; most of his time in the navy from then on was spent in Kiel. On 30 October of the same year, he married.
After the end of the war, Pohl attended courses at a trade school, and began studying law and state theory at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel; he dropped out of university soon again though, and became paymaster for the Freikorps "Brigade Löwenfeld", working in Berlin, Upper Silesia and the Ruhr basin. In 1920, like many others involved in the Lüttwitz-Kapp Putsch, he was accepted into the Weimar Republic's new navy, the Reichsmarine. Pohl was transferred to Swinemünde (now in Poland) in 1924.
Read more about this topic: Oswald Pohl
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“To me, old age is always fifteen years older than I am.”
—Bernard Baruch (1870–1965)