Alfred Leonhard Tietz

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Alfred Leonhard Tietz (born June 8, 1883 in Stralsund ; † August 4, 1941 in Jerusalem ) was a German-Jewish merchant and department store entrepreneur. He was the eldest son of the department store founder Leonhard Tietz .

SA member in front of the Tietz department store in Berlin during the boycott of the Jews on April 1, 1933
Parkstrasse 61 - Villa Tietz 1909

Life

The Tietz family dynasty was widely ramified. After graduating from commercial school in Cologne, Alfred Leonhard worked as an apprentice in his father Leonhard Tietz's department store , where he was promoted to authorized signatory in 1907. As early as 1910 he was a member of the company's board of directors.

In 1909 he married the daughter of a Jewish wholesaler from Berlin, Margarete Caecilie Dzialoszynski . After the death of his father in 1914, Alfred took over the Leonard Tietz AG department store group with 5,000 employees at the age of 31 . The main administration of the multi-department store was relocated to Cologne in 1891. In 1929, under Alfred's leadership, the Tietz Group already owned 43 branches with 15,000 employees.

During the First World War , Alfred Tietz was called up for military service. During this time, his wife took on numerous charitable and social tasks in Cologne. After the war, Alfred Tietz continued to expand the company despite difficulties in hyperinflation . The couple were among the respected liberal representatives of Cologne Jewry. Alfred Tietz was a member of the German Industry and Trade Conference and was on the board of numerous charitable organizations such as the Jewish Hospital and the Board of Trustees of the Jewish Asylum .

Shortly after Adolf Hitler's " seizure of power " , on April 1, 1933, there was a call for a boycott of Jewish businesses. Tietz himself initially remained a member of the board, but against the background of the SA terror against several branches and in view of the bank threat to terminate all credit lines, he was forced to resign from the board of the company in the same month in order to gain the "Aryan board majority " required as part of the Aryanization “To enable. He therefore asked his “Aryan” friend Otto Baier to take over the management of the department store group. Tietz resigned on April 3, 1933 from the honorary board, on September 25, 1934 from the supervisory board of the group. He and his partner Julius Schloss had to sell their shares, the price of which had fallen from 300% to 11% in the course of the smear campaign, to the new majority owners. Since then, Commerzbank , Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank have acted as owners of the group, which was renamed “West-Deutscher Kaufhof ” in July 1933 .

Escape

Alfred Tietz fled in 1933 with his wife Margaret for fear of anti-Semitic actions, first of Cologne in the to 1935 under the supervision of the League of Nations standing Saar . In 1934 he emigrated to Amsterdam , where his mother Flora and three children had already fled in April 1933. Due to fortunate circumstances, immediately before the Wehrmacht marched into Amsterdam, he was able to escape with the last ship to leave for Palestine , where he died on August 4, 1941 in Jerusalem.

Villa Tietz

Father Leonhard Tietz already lived in a noble villa with a large park in the villa colony of Cologne-Marienburg , Parkstraße 61. The property was built around 1909 and was inhabited by Alfred and his family after his father's death. When he fled, the villa was initially uninhabited; in 1940 it was acquired by consul Gustav Valentin Roosen for a transfer fee of 100,000 RM. However, it did not last long because it burned to the ground on October 24, 1944 due to the war. After the city of Cologne arranged for a reconstruction, the headquarters of the British soldiers channel British Forces Broadcasting Service moved here on February 1, 1954 and set up both radio studios and a record archive there.

The property consisted of two buildings, which were connected by a concrete corridor. One of the two houses housed the offices, the other the studios and the record archive. Up until 1986 there were cupboards in the corridor with shellac records that were sold to a collector. A wide wooden staircase in the entrance hall connected the floors. The control room between the studios was a former bathroom. The military station stayed here until October 1990 and then moved to a barracks site in Herford .

Honors

Memorial plaque for Margarete and Alfred L. Tietz (front left) in the Jewish cemetery in Cologne-Bocklemünd

In the Jewish cemetery in Cologne-Bocklemünd a plaque commemorates the couple Margarete and Alfred L. Tietz.

On March 18, 2019, on the initiative of the Rhineland Cologne section of the German Alpine Club , the artist Gunter Demnig laid stumbling blocks in front of the former residential building Parkstrasse 61 and at his place of work at Gürzenichstrasse 2 in memory of Alfred Leonhard Tietz and his family.

  • Stumbling block for Alfred Tietz in front of the Kaufhof , Gürzenichstrasse 2

  • Stumbling block for Alfred Tietz in front of Parkstrasse 61

  • Stumbling blocks for the Tietz family in front of Parkstrasse 61

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joseph Walk (ed.): Short biographies on the history of the Jews 1918–1945. Edited by the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. Saur, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-598-10477-4 , p. 366.
  2. ↑ Tietz advertising poster. Landschaftsverband Rheinland, accessed on February 24, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Walther Killy (Ed.): Dictionary of German Biography , Volume 10, 2006, p. 42
  4. ↑ Barbara Becker-Jákli: The Jewish hospital in Cologne: the history of the Israelite asylum for the sick and the elderly from 1869 to 1945 . Emons, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-89705-350-0 , p. 229; 237 ff .
  5. ↑ Karl-Maria Karliczek, Kriminologische Erkundungen ... , 2004, p. 114.
  6. ^ Barbara Becker-Jákli: The Jewish Cologne past and present . Emons, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-89705-873-6 , p. 147 .
  7. ^ Barbara Becker-Jákli: The Jewish cemetery in Cologne-Bocklemünd: history, architecture and biographies . Ed .: NS Documentation Center of the City of Cologne. emons, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-95451-889-0 , p. 82 f .
  8. ↑ dav-koeln.de: German Alpine Association - Fourth Stumbling Stone Laying for Former Jewish Members , accessed on March 24, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Tietz, Alfred Leonhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Jewish merchant and department store entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH June 8, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Stralsund
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 1941
Place of death Jerusalem