August von Finck senior

August Georg Heinrich von Finck , (often called August von Finck senior ; * July 18, 1898 in Kochel am See , † April 22, 1980 in Möschenfeld ) was a German banker . He was the son and successor of Wilhelm von Finck . August von Finck was one of Adolf Hitler's early admirers and, with his then private bank Merck Finck & Co, took over numerous banks as part of the Aryanization of Jewish property. Among these were the banks J. Dreyfus & Co. from Berlin and SM v. Rothschild from Vienna.

Life

August Georg Heinrich von Finck was the son of banker Wilhelm von Finck , raised to the Bavarian hereditary nobility in 1911 , who founded the Merck Finck & Co banking house in 1870 and later, together with others, the Munich Reinsurance Company and Allianz-Versicherungs AG . After attending a secondary school, Finck received an education in banking.

Since the older brother Wilhelm had died in the First World War , Finck and his two sisters became partners in the bank after their father's death in 1924. In line with this position, he joined the supervisory boards of numerous industrial companies, partly as a board member, partly as chairman of the supervisory board, including a number of insurance companies such as the Münchner Rückversicherungs-Gesellschaft, Allianz- and Stuttgarter Lebensversicherungsbank, Allianz and Stuttgarter Verein Versicherungs-AG, Bayerische Versicherungsbank , Hermes Kreditversicherung Berlin, Securitas Revisions- und Treuhand AG Munich, Süddeutsche Bodencreditbank , etc. He also sat on numerous supervisory boards and specialist committees.

Finck belonged to a group of industrialists who met with Adolf Hitler in the Berlin Hotel Kaiserhof in mid-1931 and promised the NSDAP to provide 25 million Reichsmarks in the event of a left-wing coup. He was one of the participants in the secret meeting of industrialists with Hitler on February 20, 1933 , at which an election fund of 3 million Reichsmarks was decided for the NSDAP.

After the " seizure of power " by the National Socialists , he became a member of the NSDAP in 1933. Since 1933 he sat on the General Council of the Economy , was also a member of the Senate of the German Academy and was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Munich House of German Art and a member of the Presidium of the Academy for German Law . After the annexation of Austria took Finck in 1938 as part of the Aryanization of Jewish property, the private bank SM v. Rothschild in Vienna. Their owners Louis Nathaniel de Rothschild then sat 14 months in the Vienna Gestapo headquarters in solitary confinement before the National Socialists, the country was able to leave for the USA only after transfer of ownership of the entire Austrian family property. At the same time, Finck had taken over the Berlin branch of the private bank J. Dreyfus & Co. during the Aryanizations in the German Reich . Its co-owner Paul Wallich was forced to liquidate his own house in May 1938 and, due to lack of livelihood, committed suicide six months later - the day after the November pogroms .

In 1945, due to the denazification regulations , Finck lost his two most important posts as chairman of the supervisory board of Münchner Rückversicherung and Allianz Versicherungs AG, while the bank was managed by a trustee and flourished again. In 1948 Finck, who had joined the NSDAP in 1933, was classified as a follower. In 1951 he was again deputy chairman of the supervisory board of Munich reinsurance. Finck devoted particular attention to the defense against land reform measures after the war and the further increase in his property, which in 1970 was estimated at around 2,000 hectares on the Munich periphery alone and comprised a total of around 4,000 hectares, 1,200 of which were used for agriculture.

In addition to the parent company, the DSK-Bank (Deutsche Spar- und Kreditbank) , a public limited company, was founded in the summer of 1965 together with the RTG auditing company. In the sixties, Merck Finck & Co grew through acquisitions and investments in the private banking sector and gained additional offices in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf.

Finck was first married in 1927 until the divorce in 1942 with the merchant's daughter Margot, née von Rücker (* 1906); there are three children from this marriage. The eldest son Wilhelm (born October 29, 1927, † 2003) lived in Düsseldorf and administered other family interests. His second-born son August von Finck junior (* 1930) was personally liable partner at Merck Finck & Co. until the sale of his shares in the bank in 1990. The daughter Eleonore (1931-2014) carried her mother's maiden name.

In his second marriage in 1953 Finck married the doctor Gerda Mau, from this marriage came the sons Gerhard von Finck (born June 13, 1954) and Helmut von Finck (born April 12, 1959).

Land reform affair

The public-shy Finck got into the columns of the press when the Bavarian state parliament dealt with the incidents of the land taxes Finck in the course of the land reform after the war. In May 1970, a committee of inquiry was set up to clarify whether the partial return of land reform land to Finck and his sister Elisabeth Winterstein by the Bavarian Landessiedlung GmbH and the compensation scheme established by the Ministry of Agriculture between the state and the land surrenders is right, or whether the Bavarian State has been damaged by it. The SPD had claimed that the state had suffered a financial loss of at least 40 to 50 million marks in favor of Finck and his sister. The investigation committee was also supposed to investigate the behavior of the Bavarian state settlement as a non-profit settlement carrier in the construction and sale of rural homes. The committee did not come to a unanimous opinion. The CSU found in a “majority report” almost everything had been properly received, the SPD stated a long series of illegality in its “minority report”. The former SPD member of the state parliament and later Munich mayor Kronawitter (quote about Finck: "Every morning when Mr. von Finck wakes up, he is a million richer. It is already in the Bible: The Lord gives his people asleep." ) used details from the minority report in the election campaign and got into a lengthy legal dispute with Finck.

For many years a legal dispute over a " Panorama " broadcast from January 18, 1971, which dealt with the land reform matter, occupied the courts. Panorama boss Peter Merseburger and two editors had originally been sentenced to replace high advertising expenses for a defense campaign by Finck, but the Federal Court of Justice overturned this decision. However, the NDR was finally (1976) condemned to read out corrections and Finck was granted compensation for pain and suffering, the amount of which the Munich Higher Regional Court set at 25,000 DM. In a legal dispute over the creation of a riverside path on the Kochelsee by the property of Finck and other lake neighbors, the private owners attacking this project got right in court. At that time, the future president of the Berlin Academy of the Arts and graphic designer Klaus Staeck also got involved in the debate. From it was a graphic with the Kochelsee plot in the background and the text “The sky belongs to everyone, the earth to a few. Private! No entry! Baron August von Finck ”.

Companies

In 1972, under the compulsion of the Publicity Act, Finck was forced to disclose his business results and investments for the first time. In the period of June 17, 1977, an overview of the major holdings of the Merck Finck & Co bank and the family was printed. In 1979 the consolidated balance sheet had a volume of around DM 2.25 billion.

When the financial statements for 1973 were explained in June 1974, a reorganization under company law was announced, namely by including "Agricola Verwaltungsgesellschaft KG" in the group of now eight personally liable partners. It acts as a kind of family holding company. Finck and his sons put their shares in the bank into the Agricola. On the other side is the Winterstein group (that is, the family circle of sister Elisabeth Winterstein). In future, a general partner at Agricola must always be a personally liable partner of the bank, which means that no descendant can part with the bank without considerable disadvantages in terms of the severance payment. Bank interests are to be held together in this way. The property remained outside of this construction.

See also

• Finck (entrepreneurial family)

literature

• GESELLSCHAFT / AUGUST VON FINCK: Nine zeros . In: Der Spiegel . No. 21 , 1970 ( online - May 18, 1970 ).
• August von Finck , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 49/1980 of November 24, 1980, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Henry Ashby Turner (Ed.): Hitler from close range, Notes of a Confidante 1929–1932 , Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna 1978, p. 372 ff.
2. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 150.
3. ↑ http://www.br-online.de/wissen-bildung/collegeradio/medien/geschichte/hitlers_aufstieg/bildarchiv/slidewindow.html?5 ( Memento from April 14, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Hitler and the banker August von Finck
4. ^ Roman Sandgruber : Rothschild. Glory and decline of the Viennese world house. Molden Verlag, Vienna, 2018 ISBN 978-3-222-15024-1 .
5. ↑ Christa Zöchling: Myth Rothschild: The fairytale rise of a ghetto Jew. In: profil.at. profil news magazine , October 13, 2018, accessed on November 28, 2018 . 
6. ↑ Köhler, Ingo: The "Aryanization" of the private banks in the Third Reich . In: Series of publications on the journal for corporate history , Volume 14, 2nd edition, 2008, pp. 305 ff.
7. ↑ COMPANY / AUGUST OF FINCK in Der Spiegel on May 18, 1970
8. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. The sky belongs to everyone, the earth to a few, 1974