Alfred Merton

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Alfred Merton (born June 25, 1878 in Frankfurt am Main , † April 4, 1954 in Bad Nauheim ) was a German entrepreneur.

He was the eldest of four sons of Wilhelm Merton , founder of the metal company , and Emma Ladenburg (* 1859 in Frankfurt), daughter of Emil Ladenburg .

Like his father and younger brother Richard , Alfred Merton attended the municipal high school in Frankfurt. In 1902 he joined the company management of the metal company and was later u. a. Chairman of the supervisory board of Metallgesellschaft and numerous subsidiaries.

After the First World War , he tried to cope with the consequences of the Versailles Treaty for the German economy. a. as a member of the board of trustees of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society . He financed u. a. largely the attempts of Fritz Haber to extract the gold contained in the seawater in order to be able to use it to fulfill the oppressive reparation payments to the victorious powers of the German Empire . In 1925 he was one of the financing founders of IG Farben.

Although he was a great patron not only for the city of Frankfurt, he was forced by the National Socialists in 1933 to give up his public office due to his Jewish descent. a. as President of the German Golf Association . In 1934 he had to emigrate to the USA. After his return from exile, he rarely appeared in public.

Mertons, who came from a Jewish family, formed a peculiar bargaining chip between the German government and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG) under Max Planck in mid-1933 . Together with Franz von Mendelssohn and Paul Schottländer , these three were allowed to stay in the “Senate” because they had promoted society for a long time and with large sums of money; To compensate for this, Planck and the other negotiators agreed with the National Socialists that further Senate members of Jewish origin, namely Leopold Koppel and Paul von Schwabach , would disappear from the committee and that the entire company of over 100 employees with a Jewish background, and also from the The National Socialists' diction " Jewish Versippten ", "cleaned" was through strict application of the Aryan paragraph . In the end, these three members of the Senate only stayed in their honorary posts for a short time until the entire society was made “ Jew-free ”. Merton was a total of 1922 to 1937 a member of the Senate of the KWG.

According to Werner Rügemer , Merton acquired citizenship of the Principality of Liechtenstein between 1933 and 1939 , as one of a total of 56 people of Jewish origin.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ursula Ratz:  Merton, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 17, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-428-00198-2 , pp. 184-187 ( digitized version ).
  2. ↑ History of IG Farben - the group that made the World War possible for Hitler, Handelsblatt of July 28, 2011, there: "Jüdische Manager"
  3. ↑ Reinhard Rürup et al. Ed .: Fates and Careers. Memorial book for the researchers expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society by the National Socialists. Wallstein, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 3-89244-797-7 , p. 37 on this complex. Merton was forced out of society at the beginning of 1937, Schottländer in 1936, Mendelssohn had died in the meantime.
  4. ↑ Dark Business. Liechtenstein, tax haven and organizer of black holes in the global financial system. , in Junge Welt , October 13, 2008, online (PDF; 64 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Merton, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH April 4th 1954
Place of death Bad Nauheim