Carl Wentzel

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Carl Wentzel before Freisler (1944)
Cenotaph for Carl Wentzel on Hallesches Stadtgottesacker

Carl Wentzel (born December 9, 1876 in Brachwitz near Halle ; † December 20, 1944 in Berlin-Plötzensee ) was a German farmer and agricultural entrepreneur who was accused of complicity in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 , which is why he was sentenced to death .

Life

family

The Wentzel family immigrated from the Magdeburg area to the Halle area at the end of the 18th century . Carl Wentzel's grandfather - Carl E. Wentzel - founded and built the Langenbogen sugar factory in 1848 . From 1858 he acquired land in Stedten , Amsdorf , Eisdorf and Teutschenthal . He also bought three lignite mines, including the Henriette mine near Eisdorf with an annual output of around 150,000 tons of lignite. Wentzel's father expanded his grandfather's agricultural property.

After studying agriculture, Carl Wentzel took over his father's manor Teutschenthal near Halle (Saale) , which he expanded into a large-scale business with around 9,000 hectares by the beginning of the Second World War. Among other things, he bought 3,000 acres from Eisdorf, Schraplau , Stedten and Höhnstedt .

His marriage to Ella von Zimmermann, the heiress of Johann Gottfried Boltze's agricultural company in Salzmünde , also led to the expansion of Wentzel's operations . These included u. a. a storage area for the grain trade of the Mansfeld district and rich clay deposits in the surrounding area. Since 1847 the company was mainly active in agriculture.

Act

Wentzel was particularly committed to building housing for his employees. After the First World War he represented Germany at international sugar conferences. He achieved this position through his outstanding importance in the development and promotion of the sugar beet culture and the seed industry.

Wentzel developed a horizontally and vertically structured economic system with numerous processing branches in his companies. Its sugar production reached up to 10,000 tons annually. At the end of the 1920s, he kept around 48 bulls, 1,150 cows, 190 heifers , 170 calves, 9,500 sheep, rams and lambs, and 1,550 pigs. Since 1921 he ran a seed breeding establishment for breeding wheat.

Wentzel was one of the largest employers in his region. He employed around 18,000 people in his farms and around 22,000 in the processing plants.

Consequences of the Nazi regime

Carl Wentzel before the People's Court

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he was involved in drawing up the four-year plan to improve agricultural production. There he got to know Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and also the general director of the Oberhausen Gutehoffnungshütte , Paul Reusch . In 1935, Reusch set up a discussion group that included large industrialists, large farmers (such as Wentzel) and other influential figures from science and politics. In this discussion group, problems of economic and political development were discussed above all. Wentzel made his estate available several times as a conference venue. Goerdeler also visited one of these meetings in November 1943 and spoke to those present about economic policy plans in the event of a regime change. These conversations - reported to the Gestapo by a stranger - were the immediate reason for the conviction of Wentzel in connection with the assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944. Wentzel was not directly involved in the assassination plans, but he was accused of being in to have been involved in the overturn plans.

Wentzel was arrested ten days after the attack. Later his wife Ella was also arrested. The SS group leader and major general of the police, Ludolf-Hermann von Alvensleben , whose family estate Schochwitz had long been leased to Wentzel, was behind Wentzel's arrest . The notoriously highly indebted Alvensleben used the opportunity to accuse Wentzel to dissolve the lease and to settle permanently in Schochwitz.

The People's Court , chaired by Roland Freisler, sentenced Carl Wentzel to death on November 13, 1944 . The sentence was carried out by hanging on December 20 in Berlin-Plötzensee prison . A memorial plaque for Carl Wentzel is on the Stadtgottesacker in Halle (Saale) , as his ashes were scattered in Plötzensee. His wife Ella was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp . The family was completely expropriated.

Expropriation of property and retention of inventory

Teutschenthal Castle

After the US occupation forces had overturned the judgment against Wentzel and the expropriation, the family was again expropriated as part of the land reform after 1945. Initially, the castle was leased to the Saxony-Anhalt property and life insurance company . The newly formed state of Saxony-Anhalt , however, declared the lease agreement invalid and took over the Teutschenthal Castle itself. The value of the castle inventory was estimated at 170,000 Reichsmarks in 1941 by an inventory list that included 82 paintings, 23 graphics and 60 pieces of furniture . After the war, 20 paintings, four sculptures, various engravings and around 30 pieces of furniture could be recorded in a second inventory list in the castle in 1946. The value of these remaining pieces was estimated at 97,985 marks.

The state of Saxony-Anhalt handed over the inventory of the castle largely on loan to museums and state institutions, some items were left on loan from property and life insurance . The insurance company was incorporated into the German Insurance Company (DVA) of the GDR in 1952 . After German reunification, DVA was taken over by Allianz AG . All objects on the first inventory list from 1941 can be found in the Internet database for lost and sought-after artworks, LostArt . Today the grandchildren live again in the family estate of Schloss Teutschenthal, which was returned to them after 1990 due to the expropriation by the Nazi regime.

Functions in business

  • Chairman of the Association of Central German Raw Sugar Factories in the Halle-Rositz-Holland Group
  • Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Rositzer Sugar Refinery ( Zuckerfabrik Rositz )
  • Chairman of the supervisory board of the Halle sugar refinery
  • Chairman of the supervisory board of Zucker-Vertriebsgesellschaft Halle-Rositz-Holland AG
  • Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Zuckerkreditbank AG
  • Chairman of the mining board of the union of the Bruckhof-Nietleben mining association (Halle an der Saale)
  • Member of the supervisory board of Braunkohlen- und Briquettwerke Roddergrube AG
  • Member of the supervisory board of Darmstädter und Nationalbank AG , Berlin
  • Member of the supervisory board of Hallescher Bankverein Kulisch, Kämpf & Co. KGaA , Halle an der Saale
  • Chairman of the Board of Directors of Saatgutverkaufsgesellschaft mbH , Berlin
  • Chairman of the Board of Directors of Lochow-Petkus GmbH , Berlin

literature

  • Georg Wenzel: German business leader . Life courses of German business personalities. A reference book on 13,000 business figures of our time. Hanseatic Publishing House , Hamburg / Berlin / Leipzig 1929, DNB 948663294 .
  • Hermann Etzrodt: The Wentzel family. Eisleben 1937.
  • Hubert Olbrich : Carl Wentzel-Teutschenthal (1876-1944). On the fate of a great life's work in the course of specifically German history. Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-7983-0244-8 .
  • Erich Neuss: Life picture of a German farmer. Typescript, 1955. (in the holdings of the Halle City Archives)
  • Peter Steinbach / Johannes Tuchel : Lexicon of Resistance 1933-1945. Publishing house CHBeck . Munich. 1994. pp. 206 f.
  • Swantje Karich: Look right. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from January 19, 2007.
  • Lore Pfeiffer-Wentzel: A very brave heart. My life between arbitrariness and happiness. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle (Saale) / Leipzig 2011, ISBN 3-89812-737-0 .
  • Eva Scherf: rise and fall. Carl Wentzel and his agricultural company. Hasenverlag, Halle (Saale) 2018, ISBN 978-3-945377-32-1 .
  • Andreas von Mettenheim : Carl Wentzel-Teutschenthal 1876–1944. An agricultural entrepreneur in the resistance . Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2019 (publications of the German Resistance Memorial Center. Series A; 14), ISBN 978-3-86732-327-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. Family tree of the von Zimmermann family ( Memento of the original from April 27, 2016 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / buro-klieken.de

Web links

Commons : Carl Wentzel  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files