Alfred Pott

Alfred Pott (* 1882 in Witten / Ruhr; † 1951 in Essen ) was one of the most influential managers of his time.

Life

After attending the secondary school in Hagen and the higher mechanical engineering school in Dortmund , Alfred Pott studied chemistry at the technical universities in Darmstadt (1902–05) and Karlsruhe (1905/06). In 1907 he joined the Dr. C. Otto & Comp., Bochum-Dahlhausen, and then worked in an affiliated engineering office on the planning of new coking plants and by-product recovery plants. In 1917 he became the sole director of the coking plants and colliery laboratories of the Stinnes concern. In 1912 Alfred Pott married Clare Mommer, who was the same age. The marriage remained childless.

In the 1920s, together with the chemist Hans Broche (1896–1963), Pott developed a new process for liquefying coal , the “Pott-Broche process”. Together with Albert Vögler (1877-1945), the general director of VESTAG, the United Stahlwerke AG (VSt), Alfred Pott developed the concept of a large-scale supply of long-distance gas in order to use the gas produced in the coking plants economically. To this end, in 1926 both founded the corporation for coal utilization (AGKV) as a joint venture of the Ruhrgebietszechen, which was renamed Ruhrgas AG in 1928 and was managed by Pott until 1935. With a pipeline network of 857 km in length and 385 employees, Ruhrgas AG made a turnover of 13 million Reichsmarks in 1930. Within a few years, the company developed into Germany's leading long-distance gas company.

In 1938, Pott moved to Gleiwitz as the general representative of Count Nikolaus von Ballestrem (1900–45) in order to reorganize the largest private mining company in Upper Silesia based on the model of Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG. While Vögler served the National Socialists and as Wehrwirtschaftsführer (WeWiFü) was decisively involved in the organization of the German armaments industry, Pott seems to have avoided conflicts with the NSDAP by moving to Upper Silesia . After the war he was classified as a fellow traveler. From 1947 until his death, Pott lived again in Essen with his wife Clare. There he worked, among other things, as chairman of the supervisory board of National-Bank AG, which was founded in 1921 as the bank of Christian trade unions .

Clare Pott († 1962) decreed the establishment of a charitable foundation named after her husband and her. The Alfred and Cläre Pott Foundation , based in Essen, was founded in 1966 and has been administered in trust by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft since 1984 .

literature

• Manfred Rasch: "Pott, Alfred" in: Neue Deutsche Biographie 20 (2001), p. 658f.
• Alfred and Cläre Pott Foundation (ed.): 50 years of the Alfred and Cläre Pott Foundation. Essen 2016.
• The Alfred and Cläre Pott Foundation, in: German Foundation Center (ed.): Donate culture - The culture of donation. Annual report of the German Foundation Center 2016/17, Essen 2017, pp. 19–21, ISSN 0723-6530.
• Dietmar Bleidick: Die Ruhrgas 1926 to 2013: Rise and End of a Market Leader (Series of publications on the journal for corporate history, Volume 30), Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2017, ISBN 978-3-11-054007-9 .

Web links

• Article about Alfred Pott in the Neue Deutsche Biographie
• Website of the Alfred and Cläre Pott Foundation

Individual evidence