Alfred Falter

Alfred Falter

Alfred Falter (born July 25, 1880 in Ropa , Galicia , † 1954 in New York City ) was a Polish industrialist and politician.

Life and activity

Falter, a trained engineer, was one of the most important business leaders and one of the richest men in Poland between the two world wars. The main focus of his activity was in the areas of mining, steel and large finance: from 1921 to 1939 he was president and majority shareholder of Robur, the largest coal trading group in Upper Silesia . In addition, he sat on the supervisory boards of numerous Upper Silesian metallurgical and mining companies.

During the Geneva Conference of 1922, Falter served as an economic expert for the Polish government. He was also a member of the Council and the Executive Committee of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In 1928, Falter and Swedish investors founded the Polskarob shipping company , which was officially a subsidiary of Robur and was responsible for exporting coal. The company comprised seven modern merchant ships (Robur I to VII). Thanks to a favorable trade agreement, Falter was also able to lease the port facilities in Gdynia from the state for thirty-five years, for which he had to export 125,000 tons of coal per month.

From 1924 to 1939 Falter sat on the supervisory board of the Polish central bank ( Bank Polski ) and on the supervisory board of Bank Handlowy , the oldest bank in the country, in which he also held the post of vice-president from 1935 to 1939. In addition, he was president of the Central Association of Polish Industry and a member of the Upper Silesian Miners' Association. Shortly before the start of the Second World War , he was finally able to take control of the Handelsbank in Warsaw.

On the question of the organization of the economy in Poland, Falter advocated close cooperation between the state and the economy, whereby the state should not go so far in its interference that it would disrupt the development of the economy through statistic interventions and thus ultimately stifle it. In terms of foreign policy, too, he rejected a policy of confrontation and pleaded for mutual understanding, although he also practiced this himself in cooperation with German industrialists.

Falter's Jewish descent earned him and his company attacks from sections of the Polish press. The Polish press accused him of his shares in Robur only existed on paper, and that he himself was a straw man for the Jews and the Germans who had transferred the profits from Robur to Germany to the German-Jewish Friedländer concern (a shareholder in Robur) . However, checks of the company books by the Polish financial supervisory authority did not reveal any irregularities. After the National Socialists came to power in the 1930s, the German press also repeatedly launched attacks on the Polish “financial Jew” Falter. So he was in the magazine Der Weltkampf. Monthly for world politics, ethnic culture and the Jewish question in the whole world in 1936 in pillory for allegedly stealing 74 million złoty from the Polish people.

After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, Falter fled to Great Britain. From 1939 to 1940 he was Deputy Minister of Finance of the Polish government-in-exile in London.

Since Falter had succeeded in transferring his fleet of ships to the West at the beginning of the war and since he had also invested in building plots in New York in the interwar period, he was one of the few Polish industrialists who survived the Second World War as wealthy people.

After his escape, Falter was classified by the National Socialist police as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put Falter on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who would be removed from the occupation forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested with special priority.

Zbigniew Landau identifies Falter in his study of the Polish economy of the interwar period as the richest Polish capitalist before the Second World War (assets of 320 million zlotys), but limits this by pointing out that his assets are compared to those of the German coal magnates Time was relatively modest.

literature

• Jerzy Jan Lenski: Historical Dictionary of Poland , p. 136.
• Kasia Shannon: Portrait of an Entrepreneur Against Statism. Alfred Falter . In: Jutta Günther / Dagmara Jajesniak-Quast (ed.): Welcome investors or national sell-off? Foreign direct investment in East Central Europe in the 20th century , pp. 133–136.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Falter on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .