Carl Krauch

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Krauch in a laboratory at Bayer 1942
Krauch during the Nuremberg Trials . The “von” and the “K.” in the name tag are incorrect

Carl Krauch (born April 7, 1887 in Darmstadt ; † February 3, 1968 in Bühl ) was a German chemist , industrialist, military economic leader in the National Socialist German Reich and a war criminal convicted by a US military tribunal in the IG Farben trial .

Life

The son of the chemist Carl Krauch senior studied chemistry and botany at the University of Giessen and Heidelberg University from 1906 . During his studies in 1906 he became a member of the Alemannia Gießen fraternity . After receiving his doctorate from Robert Stollé in 1911 , he worked as a research assistant at the University of Giessen. From 1912 he was employed by BASF . Krauch was a soldier after the outbreak of World War I , but returned to BASF in 1915 as "indispensable" and worked in the Oppau and Leuna plants . In 1919 he received power of attorney and in 1922 became managing director of the ammonia factories in Merseburg . His successful management in the reconstruction of the nitrogen plant in Oppau, which was completely destroyed by a catastrophic explosion in 1921, proved to be a career jump . He brought the 10,000 workers required for the construction through agreements with companies all over Germany and in a very short time of three months it was possible to start production again. As a thank you, he was promoted to the Board of Management of BASF.

After the formation of IG Farben in 1925, he became a deputy member of the board in 1926 and, from 1934, a full board member . He held this office until 1940, when he succeeded Carl Bosch as chairman of the IG Farben supervisory board . From 1929 he headed the newly created division of high pressure chemistry and was involved in the founding of the Joint American Study Company (Jasco) in 1930 .

At IG Farben in Berlin , he headed the switching center W from 1935 and was thus responsible for the coordination between IG Farben and the responsible armaments authorities. From 1936 to 1938, Krauch was head of the research and development department at the Office for German Raw Materials. In 1937 he became a member of the NSDAP . From 1939 he was President of the Reich Office for Economic Development in the four-year plan and since 1938 military manager and general agent for special issues relating to chemical production in the four-year plan. In these positions he was instrumental in working out the express plan with which Germany was made ready for war in autumn 1939. From 1939 he was a member of the Presidium of the Reich Research Council and a member of the supervisory board of Continental Oil AG . In 1939 Adolf Hitler awarded him the Iron Cross for his "victories on the battlefield of German industry". On June 5, 1943, Krauch was awarded the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross .

From 1937 onwards, Krauch pushed the German armament , especially with powder and explosives ( Eibia ), and was thus a “key figure in the interweaving of the Nazi state and IG Farben”.

The University of Heidelberg awarded him an honorary doctorate and the University of Berlin made him an honorary professor. He was also a senator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and a member of the German Academy of Aviation Research and, since 1942, a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

Edmund Geilenberg , the organizer of the mineral oil safety plan , worked together with Carl Krauch, who was appointed to the chemical industry for the production of synthetic gasoline in June 1944 as “general agent for special issues in chemical production”. The concept, which was also called the Geilenberg program, was supposed to help secure Germany's basic supply of fuel for war purposes after the Allies had successfully bombed the unprotected fuel works in May 1944.

After the end of the war, Krauch was placed under house arrest by the US Army . In the IG Farben trial in 1948 he was sentenced to six years in prison for enslavement of concentration camp inmates . He was released early from the Landsberg War Crimes Prison in 1950 and was then a member of the supervisory board of the IG successor company Chemische Werke Hüls AG . Krauch was a witness in the 1st Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial .

Krauch was married and had five children. His son Carl Heinrich Krauch (born Sept. 14, 1931 in Heidelberg; † Aug. 15, 2004 in Namibia) later took over the management of Hüls AG. Another son was the systems analyst and conceptual artist Helmut Krauch (born May 2, 1927 in Heidelberg; † Oct. 14, 2010 ibid).

Literary figure

In 1950, the playwright Friedrich Wolf created the character of Privy Councilor Mauch in the script for the feature film Der Rat der Götter, modeled on Krauch.

In the film Fathers and Sons (1986) , Bruno Ganz plays the character Heinrich Beck, in which the personalities of Carl Bosch and Carl Krauch are united and thus their special relationship is discussed.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Until 1914 he published as Karl Krauch, from 1931 as Carl Krauch.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Hermann Weiß (Ed.): Biographisches Lexikon zum Third Reich , 1998, p. 276f.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Wollheim Memorial: Biography Carl Krauch
  4. ^ Joseph Borkin, The crime and punishment of IG Farben, André Deutsch 1979
  5. ↑ a b c 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 2007, pp. 335f.
  6. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, p. 336.
  7. ↑ Martin Guse: The Liebenau Powder Factory 1938 to 1945 - An overview (PDF; 128 kB)
  8. ^ Members of the HAdW since it was founded in 1909. Carl Krauch. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, accessed June 29, 2016 .
personal data
SURNAME Krauch, Carl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Krauch, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist, industrialist, Nazi functionary, convicted war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Darmstadt
DATE OF DEATH 3rd February 1968
Place of death Buhl