[1][2][3] Johannes Daniel Jakob Kriege was born in Lüdinghausen, a midsized town then in Prussia's Province of Westphalia, located between Münster to its northeast and Dortmund to its south.
[3] In 1887, he received his first diplomatic posting and was appointed as the German acting vice-consul in Amsterdam, which may have been when he first got to know Pieter Cort van der Linden, who would become the Dutch prime minister during the First World War during which Kriege described him as having long a personal friend.
On 31 January 1917, he held a secret meeting in Amsterdam with his old friend van der Linden, the Dutch prime minister, and explained the background to the still-secret German government decision to resume its controversial submarine campaign against the British and their allies.
The Dutch government was assured that the German side continued to value good commercial relations with the Netherlands but was also warned of the dire consequences if it succumbed to Anglo-American pressure to enter the war against Germany.
Notably in 1918, he was the senior German government mandate holder in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which formally excluded Russia from participation in the alliance against Germany.
His eldest son, Walter Kriege (1891-1952), also became a high-placed government lawyer and played a political role during the early years of the German Federal Republic.