August von Knieriem

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August von Knieriem during the Nuremberg Trials

August von Knieriem (born June 11, 1887 in Riga , † October 17, 1978 in Heidelberg ) was a German lawyer and business leader.

Career

Knieriem, son of a higher regional judge, attended school in Hamburg and Lübeck . He then studied law at the Eberhard Karls University and in 1905 became a member of the Corps Suevia Tübingen . He received his doctorate in 1908 for Dr. iur. He then worked as an assessor at Lloyds in London and as a partner in a law firm in Hamburg. After taking part in the First World War as a soldier from 1914 onwards, in 1915, due to an injury, he moved to the raw materials department of the War Ministry as a consultant. After the end of the war, he worked for BASF in the nitrogen syndicate from 1919 , changed from there to the legal department in 1922, became a deputy member of the Board of Management in 1923 and finally headed the company's legal department.

As a specialist in antitrust law , he was involved in the merger of companies to form IG Farben , where he became a deputy member of the board in 1926 and a full member of the board from 1932 to 1945. From 1937 Knieriem was chairman of the legal committee and one year later belonged to the central committee of the board. As an administrative lawyer, Knieriem was IG Farben's negotiating partner for the Wehrmacht for the purpose of establishing a secret chemical weapons production facility. He was on the board of Anorgana , a subsidiary of IG Farben that worked on the production of poison gas. In mid-1944, in view of the coming defeat of the German Reich , Knieriem drafted plans to split up the company's structure. The IG Farben management wanted to influence the Allies' plans after a victory.

From 1942 he was a member of the NSDAP . He was a member of the Academy for German Law and chairman of the committee for the law of intellectual creation. Knieriem was married and had three children.

After his arrest in August 1945, Knieriem was acquitted in the IG Farben trial on July 30, 1948, for lack of evidence on all charges concerning him (looting and enslavement). He was involved in the reconstruction of BASF. According to information in the Braunbuch , Knieriem was later chairman of the supervisory board of "IG-Farben-Industrie AG i. L. “in Frankfurt am Main .

Publications

  • August von Knieriem: Nuremberg. Legal and human problems. Foreword by Eduard Wahl . Klett, Stuttgart 1953. (= August von Knierim: The Nuremberg Trials . Henry Regnery Company, Chicago 1959; discussed in: Nicholas R. Doman, The Nuremberg Trials Revisited, American Bar Association Journal 47 (1961), 260–264)

literature

  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 (= Fischer 16048). 2nd Edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
  • Norbert Podewin (Ed.): Braunbuch. War and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and in Berlin (West). Reprint of the 1968 edition (3rd edition). Edition Ost published by Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-360-01033-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 129 , 660
  2. ↑ a b c Wollheim Memorial - Biography August von Knieriem .
  3. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. 2007, p. 319.
  4. ^ National Council of the National Front of Democratic Germany, Documentation Center of the State Archives Administration of the GDR (ed.): Braunbuch. War and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. State, economy, administration, army, justice, science. 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Staatsverlag der DDR, Berlin 1968, [ online ( memento from November 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive )].
personal data
SURNAME Knieriem, August of
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer and business leader
DATE OF BIRTH June 11, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH 17th October 1978
Place of death Heidelberg