German explorer, civil servant, scientist and businessman. Georg Hartmann was educated at the technical college in his native city, Dresden, and studied mathematics, physics, and geography in Leipzig, obtaining his doctorate in 1889 for a thesis on the influence of drift ice on land formation in the Polar Regions. Around this period he was commandeered, as an officer in the Territorial Army regiment in Zittau, to the German Foreign Office and married Anna Woermann, daughter of the shipping line owner Adolph Woermann of Hamburg.
From 1893 until 1908 he travelled extensively in Namibia, Ovamboland, and southern Angola, in the service of three business ventures he was directing: Otavi Mines and Railways Company, Gibeon-Schuerfgesellschaft, and the London-based South West Africa Company. In 1893 he made a journey from Great Namaqualand to Cape Colony. In his report, which he produced at the time of the Nama uprising, he describes the Nama Captain, Hendrik Witbooi, as "rightfully defending his independence against the Germans". The next year, 1894, he co-founded the town of Grootfontein and made the first of three expeditions to the Kaokoveld to assess the agricultural and mining potential of the northern districts. He visited Ovamboland and southern Angola in 1900 and the Kunene, where he discovered the Kunene Cataracts, in 1901. Between 1906 and 1908 he explored Namaland, particularly the Blue Ground Craters, in search of diamonds.
Hartmann left Namibia in 1908 and bought a large estate in the village of Rathstock in Germany. During the latter part of his life, he was active in scientific matters, gave lectures, and published papers on colonial politics, sociology, and history. He compiled maps of the northern districts of Namibia and published his travels. In 1939 he sold his estate and moved to Frankfurt with his wife, who died two years later. He died in 1946 at the age of 80 as a refugee in Grammesdorf, Schleswig-Holstein. Hartmann's mountain zebra, Equus zebra hartmannae Matschie, and sites in the Kaokoveld (Hartmann Valley, Hartmann Mountain) are named after him.
