Walter Borbet

Walter Adolf Borbet (born September 9, 1881 in Schalke ; † January 4, 1942 in Bochum ) was a German engineer and manager in the steel and armaments industry.

Life

Borbet graduated from secondary school with the Abitur and then studied iron and steel engineering and mechanical engineering in Karlsruhe, Aachen and Freiberg at the mining academy . In Karlsruhe he joined the Corps Franconia in 1903 , in Aachen the Corps Borussia (today in Clausthal). After several years of employment as an engineer at Hörder mining and metallurgical association and as steelworks head of Georgsmarienhütte he arrived in 1911 as chief engineer for the Bochum Association , a major mining company in which he in 1919 Member of the Board, 1922 Chairman of the Board has been and 1924 General. After the United Stahlwerke AG was created in 1926 through the merger of numerous steel groups, including the Bochumer Verein, Borbet became chairman of the board of Ruhrstahl AG , a subsidiary of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG , in 1930 . In 1934 he continued to take over the management of Hanomag after it had been taken over by the Bochumer Verein.

After in-depth studies of the Siemens-Martin process in England, he further developed the pig iron ore variant of this process and, together with Felix Scharf, the then director of the Bochumer Verein, set up a new Siemens-Martin steelworks at the Bochumer Verein. The blast furnace process was fundamentally revised and significantly improved in many areas. In order to use fine-grained, queasy ores, Borbet investigated sintering and was the first in Germany to introduce the sintering belt for ores. His process improvement in the manufacture of pig iron and steel attracted strong international attention and imitation. In 1922 he founded the Bochum Association's Höntrop plant. A Siemens-Martin steelworks and a rolling mill for the manufacture of seamless tubes were built here, which started production in 1924 with improved costs due to the integration of the steel and rolling mill.

He was part of a group of 17 industrialists who visited the Soviet Union from February 26 to March 11, 1931 . From 1926 to 1929 and 1933 Borbet was a member of the Provincial Parliament, in 1933 of the Provincial Committee and from 1935 to 1941 of the Provincial Council of the Province of Westphalia.

Walter Borbet was initially one of the personalities in German business who actively supported Adolf Hitler , but from 1937 at the latest he came into conflict with the Nazi regime. According to his own statement, he met Adolf Hitler in 1927 and recognized him as one of the "most valuable figures in German history" at that time. Until 1929 he was a member of the German People's Party (DVP) . From mid-1932, Borbet had open election agitation for the NSDAP in the Bochumer Verein's works newspaper, the Hüttenzeitung . After the National Socialist seizure of power , he joined the NSDAP in May 1933. On May 20, 1937, he was appointed military economist . Due to the intervention in the management of the economy by state or party agencies in the form of the four-year plans, however, he came into conflict with the Nazi regime from this time on and took opposition to state and party agencies, so that in 1939 he became head of the Bochum Chamber of Commerce and the Economic Chamber of Westphalia-Lippe was recalled. His sudden death in his office in Bochum gave some contemporaries reason to suspect suicide.

Awards

• The RWTH Aachen drew Walter Borbet 1927 with the honorary doctorate of Dr.-Ing. E. h. out. The award was given for his development of Siemens-Martin steel production based on the pig iron ore process.

literature

• Borbet, Walter. In: Robert Volz: Reich manual of the German society . The handbook of personalities in words and pictures. Volume 1: A-K. Deutscher Wirtschaftsverlag, Berlin 1930, DNB 453960286 , p. 179.
• Hugo Racine:  Borbet, Walter Adolf. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , pp. 454 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Gustav-Hermann Seebold : A steel company in the Third Reich. The Bochum Association 1927-1945. Peter Hammer, Wuppertal 1981.
• Adam Tooze , Yvonne Badal (translator): Economy of Destruction. The history of the economy in NS. Siedler, Munich 2007 (first English 2006) ISBN 978-3-88680-857-1 , passim, esp. Pp. 153 ff., 406 ff., 584 f., 643. BpB (series of publications by the Federal Agency for Civic Education Volume 663) ISBN 978-3-89331-822-3 . New edition Pantheon, Munich 2008 ISBN 3-570-55056-7
• Wolfhard Weber: Walter Borbet (1881-1942). In: Wolfhard Weber (ed.) Engineers in the Ruhr area. (= Rheinisch-Westfälische Wirtschaftsbiographien , Volume 17.) Aschendorff, Münster 1999, ISBN 3-402-06753-6 , pp. 224-256.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Corps list of Franconia Karlsruhe 1839–1929 , No. 449
2. ^ Matthias Heeke: Foreign tourism in Russia 1921-1941 . Lit, Münster 2003, p. 57
3. ^ Josef Häming: The Members of the Westphalia Parliament 1826–1978 , 1978, p. 203
4. ^ Gustav-Hermann Seebold : A steel company in the Third Reich. The Bochum Association 1927-1945. Peter Hammer, Wuppertal 1981, p. 242.
5. ^ Gustav-Hermann Seebold: A steel company in the Third Reich. The Bochum Association 1927-1945. Peter Hammer, Wuppertal 1981, p. 66.
6. ^ Gustav-Hermann Seebold: A steel company in the Third Reich. The Bochum Association 1927-1945. Peter Hammer, Wuppertal 1981, p. 244.

Web links

• Adam Tooze in Netzeitung ( Memento from May 25, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Part 2
• Newspaper article about Walter Borbet in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .