Arthur von Weinberg

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Arthur von Weinberg (around 1910)

Arthur Weinberg , von Weinberg from 1908 , (born August 11, 1860 in Frankfurt am Main ; † March 20, 1943 in Theresienstadt concentration camp ) was a German chemist and industrialist . He was u. a. Shareholder of Cassella Farbwerke Mainkur , member of the supervisory and administrative board of IG Farbenindustrie AG and an important patron and founder of scientific and cultural institutions. In 1930 he became an honorary citizen of Frankfurt am Main . During the Nazi era , he was persecuted because of his Jewish descent. After the Second World War it was almost forgotten; only since the end of the 20th century has its importance as a founder and patron been increasingly recognized again.

Life

Arthur Weinberg came from a Jewish industrial family. The parents were Bernhard and Pauline Weinberg. After graduating from the model school in Frankfurt, he studied physics , chemistry , mathematics and classical philology in Strasbourg and at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich from 1877 . There he was a member of the Corps Transrhenania since 1880 . He was an excellent senior four times . Also in 1880 Arthur and his brother Carl were baptized Protestants. He was one of the largest taxpayers in Frankfurt am Main during the German Empire.

In 1882 he received his doctorate in the Munich Institute of Adolf von Baeyer under Paul Friedlaender on indigo synthesis. This resulted in his lifelong friendship with Friedlaender. In the same year he went to the light cavalry as a one-year volunteer and served in the 3rd Chevaulegers Regiment "Duke Karl Theodor" of the Bavarian Army . In 1903 he donated 5,000 marks to the Frankfurt Warrior Comradeship, of which he was a member. This Weinberg Fund was intended to support “comrades in need through no fault of their own”. A year later he donated a further 1,000 marks for the fund.

In 1908 he and his brother Carl were raised to the hereditary Prussian nobility by Wilhelm II . In 1909 he married the widowed Dutch woman Willemine Peschel, b. Huygens .

chemistry

In 1883 he joined the Cassella color works in Fechenheim as a partner and technical manager , which was then managed by his uncle Leo Gans . Together with his brother Carl, around 1900 he made the Cassella company the world's largest manufacturer of synthetic dyes . In 1907 Arthur and Carl took over the overall management of Cassella Farbwerke. Weinberg was friends with the later Nobel Prize winner Paul Ehrlich , whose research he supported.

First World War and Weimar Republic

Arthur von Weinberg (Cassella) Carl Müller (BASF) Edmund ter Meer (WEILER-ter MEER) Adolf Haeuser (HOECHST) Franz Oppenheim (AGFA) Theodor Plieninger (GRIESHEIM-ELEKTRON) Ernst von Simson (AGFA) Carl Bosch, Vorstandsvorsitzender (BASF) Walther vom Rath (HOECHST) Wilhelm Ferdinand Kalle (KALLE) Carl von Weinberg (CASELLA) Carl Duisberg, Aufsichtsratsvorsitzender (BAYER)
Arthur von Weinberg (standing, back left) on the IG Farben supervisory board, 1926

As a reserve officer , Weinberg served as leader of the 1st Squadron in the Bavarian 6th Reserve Cavalry Regiment during World War I , most recently as a major . For his achievements he was awarded both classes of the Iron Cross and the Bavarian Order of Military Merit IV class with crown and swords. In 1916 he took over the management of the chemistry department in the Prussian War Ministry . After the end of the war he returned to industry and in 1926 became a member of the supervisory board of IG Farbenindustrie AG , the largest company merger in the German Reich at the time.

Patrons and donors

Arthur von Weinberg together with his brother Carl on the morning ride at the Waldfried Stud

In his private life, Arthur von Weinberg's passion was horses. At a young age he was a successful gentleman rider. In 1891 he founded his own racing stable, which later became the famous Waldfried Stud , whose breeding lines still play an important role in German thoroughbred breeding . A total of seven Derby winners wore the blue and white striped Waldfrieder colors.

In 1909 he set up the Arthur von Weinberg Foundation and equipped it so generously that he was able to use it to finance a professorship for physical chemistry for the Physikalischer Verein, among other things . He promoted the Senckenberg Natural Research Society and was its elected director from 1909. Weinberg and his brother Carl were among the founders of the University of Frankfurt in 1914 .

In addition to the university, the municipal institutions he sponsored included the Städelsche Kunstinstitut , the municipal indoor swimming pool and the Wegscheide children's village . Weinberg negotiated the first nationwide collective agreements for the chemical industry and set up numerous social facilities for employees and their families, for example company apartments, a company health insurance fund, company pension schemes, grants and allowances. He and his wife made several donations for the children's sanatorium in Bad Orb, founded and run by Wilhelm Hufnagel . This funding made it possible to build the "Willeminenhaus", named after Weinberg's wife .

time of the nationalsocialism

Picture by Arthur von Weinberg and memorial plaque

After the National Socialists came to power , Weinberg had to give up his honorary posts and leave the committees of IG Farbenindustrie. In enforcement of the Aryan paragraphs , he was deleted from his corps' list of Philistines in 1935 .

After the November pogroms in 1938 , he was forced to sell his Villa Haus Buchenrode in Frankfurt-Niederrad , built in 1908, to the city for a fraction of its value and to cede the proceeds of the sale to the city's treasury as an arbitrary Jewish property tax . Contemporary witnesses report that the then Lord Mayor Friedrich Krebs and other National Socialist officials forced their way into the park and sent the almost eighty-year-old Arthur von Weinberg, widowed since 1935, to the park with the sentence “The Jew must get out” to prepare for the forced sale of the house. In 1939 the music school was housed there.

Weinberg moved in with his adopted daughters, first with Charlotte and later with Countess Mary Spreti at Schloss Pähl am Ammersee in Bavaria . In 1937 he had given them the Waldfried Stud. At the instigation of the Gauleiter of the Munich-Upper Bavaria district , Paul Giesler , he was arrested on June 2, 1942. Deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, he died there after a cholecystectomy at the age of 82. Like thousands of other victims in Theresienstadt, his ashes were poured into the Eger .

Honors

Arthur-von-Weinberg-Steg
Stumbling stone for Arthur von Weinberg

A memorial stele of the Leopoldina in memory of nine members of the academy who were murdered in the concentration camps of the National Socialists or died of the inhuman and cruel conditions of the camp imprisonment also commemorates Arthur von Weinberg. On May 12, 2012, the artist Gunter Demnig laid a stumbling block for Arthur von Weinberg on the site of his former Villa Haus Buchenrode .

The Arthur-von-Weinberg-Steg between Fechenheim and Offenbach-Bürgel , the Arthur-von-Weinberg-Straße in Frankfurt-Kalbach-Riedberg , the Arthur-von-Weinberg-Park in Frankfurt-Niederrad and the Arthur- von-Weinberg-Haus, formerly the "Old Physics" of the Goethe University and the Physikalischer Verein.

Honorary positions

Weinberg family grave in Frankfurt's main cemetery
  • Co-founder and board member of IG Farben AG (dismissed as such in 1937)
  • Chairman of the German-Italian Chamber of Commerce
  • President of the Emil Fischer Society for the Promotion of Chemical Research
  • Director of the Senckenberg Natural Research Society
  • Chairman of the patronage association for the Frankfurt City Theaters
  • With his brother Carl Weinberg was one of the founders of thoroughbreds - stud "Waldfried".

literature

Web links

Commons : Arthur von Weinberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Arthur von Weinberg: Lord in the Poelzig building, prisoner in Theresienstadt. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . February 5, 2007, archived from the original ; accessed on June 18, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 115 , 45.
  3. ^ Kai Drewes: Jewish nobility. The ennoblement of Jews in Europe in the 19th Century , Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 3-593-39775-7 , p. 394, note 36.
  4. ^ Henning Roet de Rouet: Frankfurt am Main as a Prussian garrison. From 1866 to 1914. Societäts Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-95542-227-1 , p. 135.
  5. ↑ Paul Friedlaender and Arthur Weinberg, Ber. German Chem. Ges. 15 , 1421 , 2103 , 2679 (1882) and 18 , 1528 (1885) .
  6. ^ Obituary by A. Weinberg for his friend Friedlaender in 1924 in the reports of the German Chemical Society.
  7. ↑ a b c d Winfried Hofmann, Herbert Neupert , Heinz Schreck, Christian Theusner: History of the Corps Transrhenania 1866–1990 . Munich 1991.
  8. ^ Henning Roet: Frankfurt as a garrison town between 1866 and 1914. With a special view of the town's war clubs. S. 115. In: Robert Bohn, Michael Epkenhans (Ed.): Garrison towns in the 19th and 20th centuries. Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 3-7395-1016-1 , pp. 109–118.
  9. ↑ J. Blumenthal, Dr. med. Wilhelm Hufnagel, his family and Bad Orb Children's Hospital , in: Center for Regional History (Gelnhausen), 39th year, 2014, p. 69.
  10. ↑ Leopoldina erects a stele in memory of Nazi victims (2009) .
  11. ↑ SENCKENBERG - New names for houses steeped in history. Retrieved June 13, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Weinberg, Arthur von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weinberg, Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist and honorary citizen of Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH March 20, 1943
Place of death Theresienstadt concentration camp