Hermann Karoli

Hermann Karoli as a witness at the Nuremberg trials.

Hermann Karoli (born March 27, 1906 in Hahnbach , German Hamba, Sibiu district , German Hermannstadt, Transylvania / Romania ; † April 3, 1996 in Herrliberg near Zurich ) was a German SS economic functionary.

Live and act

Youth and Education (1906 to 1931)

Karoli grew up as the son of pastor Rudolf Karoli and his wife Emma , née Fleischer , in Transylvania in Romania, where the family belonged to the German minority. His brother was Richard Karoli , who like Hermann Karoli, later became an auditor.

For his studies Karoli moved to the German Reich in 1924 , where he attended the Commercial College in Berlin and the Universities of Leipzig and Innsbruck and obtained degrees as a diploma auditor, business graduate and the title of Dr. oec. left.

Career entry and period of National Socialism (1931 to 1945)

From 1931 Karoli - who acquired German citizenship in 1932 - worked in the auditing department: initially he worked in an auditing firm Voss and Meyer in Berlin , before he switched to the Deutsche Revisions- und Treuhand AG (DRuT) as an authorized signatory in 1935 . For this he initially worked as a branch manager in Hamburg before becoming the personal adjutant of Nazi economic leader Wilhelm Voss . In 1938 Karoli von Voss was assigned to take over the Czechoslovakian Petschek company after the German incorporation of the Sudeten areas , whose coal mines he integrated into the Nazi war economy. Also in 1938 Karoli was admitted to the board of directors of the DTRG, to which he belonged until 1945.

In July 1942 Karoli, who had been a member of an SS Reitersturm in Vienna since 1940 , was drafted into the Waffen SS . In April 1943 he came to the Eastern Front with the SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment "Theodor Eicke" of the SS Totenkopf Division , where he took part in the fight against Soviet partisans . After a lung shot in July 1943, he was transferred to the home base of his unit, where he was used in the kitchen for a while. In November 1943 he was transferred to Berlin for use in the SS business administration: after completing a course at the administrative service's driving school in Bad Arolsen , from the end of 1943 to the summer of 1944 he was entrusted with the auditing of the SS-related business company . After completing this task, from mid-1944 until the end of the war he was head of the auditing department in the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA) in Berlin.

Captivity and the post-war period

At the end of the war, Karoli was captured by the Allies. He was subsequently held in various internment camps and interrogated as a witness during the Nuremberg trials . In July 1947, for example, he testified as a defense witness in the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office trial . He was also asked about the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann , who was housed with him in the same prison camp.

After his release from captivity, Karoli started his own business as an auditor in 1948 with his brother: They founded the Karoli-Wirtschaftsprüfung GmbH , based in Berlin and Essen . Despite their SS past, the brothers Peter-Ferdinand Koch made “a breathtaking career” in the young Federal Republic, according to their customers. B. the successor to IG Farben . In 1971, Spiegel called Karoli one of the "most influential advisors to West German corporations".

Hermann Karoli also sat on several supervisory boards from the 1950s to 1970s : On August 31, 1962, he was elected as a major shareholder together with Harald Quandt to the BMW supervisory board and, in the subsequent supervisory board meeting, was elected chairman of the BMW supervisory board as the successor to Alfons Wagner . He held this position for almost ten years, until July 1972. Opalstrumpfwerke GmbH Margaritoff & Schaffer were among the other companies on whose supervisory board Karoli was a member .

family

Karoli had been married to Susanne Seeberg since 1943 , with whom he had a son and a daughter. His son Michael Karoli was the guitarist of the German Krautrock band Can .

Fonts

• Public or private economy. Attempt to fundamentally delimit public economic activity with subsequent transfer of the principles found to the economic life of Romania. 1931. (Dissertation to obtain a doctorate, Innsbruck, May 1931)
• Load balancing and annual financial statements viewed from a commercial and tax law perspective. 1954. (with Richard Karoli and Kurt Mathews)

literature

• Jan Erik Schulte : Forced Labor and Extermination. The economic empire of the SS. Oswald Pohl and the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt 1933-1945. Paderborn 2001, ISBN 3-506-78245-2 .
• August Ludwig Degener: Who is who? The German Who's Who. Vol. 33, p. 657.
• Peter-Ferdinand Koch: The financial affairs of the SS. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-455-11285-4 .

Web links

• Examination of Hermann Karoli, board member of the Deutsche Treuhands- und Revisionsgesellschaft, on July 10, 1947, as well as interrogations on September 17, 1947 and November 20, 1947. In: Archives of the Institute for Contemporary History . Munich, signature ZS-1084 1948/56 ( online , PDF, 3.22 MB; minutes of Karoli's interrogations during the Nuremberg trials).
• Hermann Dr.rer.pol. Karoli. In: BMW history. BMW AG, accessed on May 18, 2014 (dossier on Hermann Karoli in the BMW Group Archive). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Siebenbürgische Zeitung of April 30, 1996, p. 23.
2. ↑ Peter-Ferdinand Koch: Human experiments. The deadly experiments of German doctors. 1996, p. 165.
3. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from July 9, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Introduction to NMT Case 4 - USA v. Pohl et al on www. nuremberg.law.harvard.edu  
4. ^ Peter-Ferdinand Koch: The Third Reich in Documents. Vol. 2, 114.
5. ↑ Der Spiegel of February 17, 1965 .
6. ↑ Help or takeover? In: Die Zeit of September 7, 1962 .
7. ↑ Peter-Ferdinand Koch: Secret Depot Switzerland. How banks make money from the Holocaust. 2000, p. 163.