D. Herzog Seifried
One of the most colorful and reprehensible characters in the tropical German colonies was D. Herzog Seifried, known as 'Brut' Seifried for his business practices, his taste in champagne, and his aftershave lotion.

From his start, peddling limestone dust from native quarries as medicated foot-powder in fungus-plagued coastal Ouargistan, he built an international business empire that came to encompass interests as diverse as shipyards, elevator-shoe inserts, asbestos mosquito netting, condensed pig's-milk, galvanic marital therapy devices, pine-chip breakfast cereal, hair-restorer, internal surgery home study courses, sculpt-by-number kits, goat glands, and, of course, munitions.

As a major supplier of arms to the German colonial troops in Ouargistan, the Seifriedschutzenbangenwerke supplied the raw materials for some of the Vaterland's most resounding military disasters - the legendary sand-filled artillery shells at the battle of Tinduk, the zinc gunbarrels at El Qabongh, the llama-mounted cavalry at Pambisset, the fish-glued ram of the battleship Kaiserdunken, the fiasco of the unraveling loincloths for the Gundabongo askaris, the burlap heliographs of the Winkenblinkentruppen at Vierflusher, the 44-bead rosaries of the chaplains in the field hospitals, and the cardboard drumheads that disintegrated at the critical moment in the rainstorm at Inakan. He was also reputed to be a supplier of young European women to the harems and less respectable establishments of the slavetrading Arab states on the Anakanipanistan coast. A man of creativity, brilliance and amazing energy, it was said of Seifried that he would rather gefiddle you out of ten pfennigs than make an honest kroner off you, just for the artistic achievement of it. Seifried was a tireless promoter of German imperialism, some say because of a sense of Teutonic romanticism and grand vision, others say because it provided him with an ongoing market for zinc gunbarrels.

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