Cornelius Freiherr von Berenberg-Gossler

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Cornelius Freiherr von Berenberg-Gossler (born March 2, 1874 in Hamburg ; † September 29, 1953 there ) was a German banker and owner of Berenberg Bank from 1913 to 1953 .

Life

He was a member of the Hanseatic Berenberg / Goßler family and the second eldest son of the banker Johann Freiherr von Berenberg-Gossler (1839-1913) and his wife Juliane Amalie Donner (1843-1916), grandson of the banker Heinrich Gossler (1805-1879) and great-grandson of the senator Johann Heinrich Gossler (1775–1842). His older brother was the banker, senator and ambassador John von Berenberg-Gossler (1866-1943).

Cornelius von Berenberg-Gossler joined Berenberg Bank as a partner at his father's side as early as 1897. Since 1907 Consul General of the Kingdom of Bavaria , he took over the management of the bank with the death of his father in 1913, after his older brother had already been excluded from the company succession by his father in 1908 due to the assumption of a senatorial office in the Hanseatic city.

For health reasons he was exempt from military service, but at the beginning of the First World War in 1914 he registered with his car as a motorized unit for aid deliveries to the front and later worked for the Red Cross in Vilnius . After the collapse of the German Empire in 1918, he joined the German People's Party (DVP). Together with u. a. Max Warburg , Rudolf Blohm and Hermann Münchmeyer the Younger , he founded the Hamburger Bank from 1923, which brought out gold-backed means of payment and thus the first money of stable value after the inflation . Cornelius Berenberg-Gossler acted as chairman of the supervisory board, while his brother John acted as chairman of the board. After the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929 and the worldwide crisis in the banking industry , Berenberg-Gossler connected his house to Danatbank in 1930 , but only one year later, following the bankruptcy of the largest borrower and the subsequent insolvency of Danatbank, had to Release Berenberg shares again. In 1932 he withdrew Berenberg Bank from active banking.

After the Reichstag election of March 5, 1933 , Berenberg-Gossler planned to join the NSDAP . When asked, the branch director of the Dresdner Bank in Hamburg, Paul Salomon, assured him that none of the Jewish friends would feel hurt and encouraged him to do so "because people who are not anti-Semitic should join the party". Because the plan to counter anti - Semitism within the party proved to be an illusion, his party membership lasted only a short time. On August 8, 1934, shortly before the referendum on the head of state of the German Reich , he resigned. In his written justification, he cited the disregard for civil liberties, the regime's hostility to the church and, above all, anti-Semitism. Among the entrepreneurs in Hamburg, he was one of the staunch opponents of National Socialism.

In 1935, Cornelius von Berenberg-Gossler brought his son Heinrich into the bank as a partner. Until 1948, however, Berenberg Bank only acted as a holding company, in which the company's holdings were combined, including two smaller private banks that were active in the asset management business.

When in 1938 the National Socialists wanted to rent his villa built in 1881 in Gosslerpark and accommodate a Nazi training center, he had a company certify that the building was "ready for demolition" and remove the house in 12 days. He also stood up for his numerous friends among the Jewish merchants and bankers in Hamburg. In doing so, he showed little consideration for himself. For example, in 1939, in direct negotiations with Karl Wolff , Himmler's adjutant , he achieved the release of Fritz Warburg , Max Warburg's brother , who had been in Gestapo custody since the November pogrom of 1938 . He helped Richard Kauffmann, the owner of the Rée company, escape to London . In his private life, Cornelius Freiherr von Berenberg-Gossler lived withdrawn and expressed his rejection of the Nazi regime in his diary.

In 1948, as a result of the law establishing the bizone , Berenberg took over the Hamburg branch of Norddeutsche Kreditbank from Bremen , which in return received shares in Berenberg Bank and reopened it the day after the currency reform in the building at Alten Wall 32.

After a short, serious illness, Cornelius von Berenberg-Gossler died on September 29, 1953 at the age of 79 in his house in Hamburg-Niendorf .

He had been married to Nadine Clara, née von Oesterreich, since May 24, 1898. The children Clara-Nadja, married. von Sprecht (1899–1977), Johann Constantin Cornelius (1901–1942), Cornelia Nadja Julia (1905–1992), Heinrich Cornelius Johann (1909–1997), Cornelius Paul Hellmuth (1911–1988) and Nadia (1916–2005)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the reference to this fact ( memento of the original from November 17, 2015 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. on the Berenberg website (accessed November 7, 2015). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.berenberg.de
  2. ↑ on Paul Salomon see the short biography on the website www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de ( accessed October 30, 2015).
  3. ↑ Cornelius von Berenberg-Gossler's diary, entry March 11, 1933, quoted from Martin Zähringer: The organized persecution of the Jews was foreseeable (discussion by Frank Bajohr, Beate Meyer and Joachim Szodrzynski (eds.): “Threat, Hope, Skepticism”), Deutschlandradio Culture , article from December 29, 2013 (accessed April 20, 2016).
  4. ↑ This usually means freedom of belief , freedom of the press , assembly , association and freedom of property.
  5. ↑ C. von Bernstorff, H. von Bernstorff, E. Eckardt: Only change is constant , p. 220 f; Renate Hauschild-Thiessen: Cornelius Freiherr von Berenberg-Gossler and the Third Reich , in: Hamburgische Geschichts- und Heimatblätter , Volume 12 (1988), Issue 1, pp. 14–32, here pp. 17–21, there also the times on membership in the NSDAP.
  6. ^ Frank Bajohr : "Aryanization" in Hamburg. The displacement of Jewish entrepreneurs 1933–1945 , Christians, 2nd edition, Hamburg 1998, p. 273.
  7. ↑ Interview of the grandson Dieter von Specht with the NDR
  8. ↑ Warburg was released in May 1939. See Frank Bajohr: “Aryanization” in Hamburg. The displacement of Jewish entrepreneurs 1933–1945 , Christians, 2nd edition, Hamburg 1998, p. 81 and p. 256, ISBN 3-7672-1302-8 ; Ingo Köhler: The "Aryanization" of private banks in the Third Reich. Repression, elimination and the question of reparation , Beck, Munich 2005, p. 336, ISBN 3-406-53200-4 .
  9. ^ M. Pohl: Hamburger Bankengeschichte , p. 159; The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 . Volume 2. German Reich 1938 – August 1939 . Arranged by Susanne Heim . Oldenbourg, Munich 2009, p. 340 , footnote 7, ISBN 978-3-486-58523-0 .
  10. ↑ C. von Bernstorff, H. von Bernstorff, E. Eckardt: Only change is constant , p. 226 f; on his activities in general R. Hauschild-Thiessen: Cornelius Freiherr von Berenberg-Gossler and the Third Reich , in: Hamburgische Geschichts- und Heimatblätter , Volume 12 (1988), Issue 1, pp. 14–32.
  11. ^ Family tree of Austria

literature

  • Bernhard Koerner: German gender book . tape 19 . Starke, Görlitz 1911, p. 34-35 .
  • Genealogical manual of the nobility , volume 16, Freiherrliche Häuser B II, CA Starke Verlag, Limburg (Lahn) 1957.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Berenberg-Gossler, Cornelius Freiherr von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gossler, Cornelius Berenberg; Berenberg-Gossler, Cornelius; Berenberg-Gossler, Cornelius von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German banker
DATE OF BIRTH March 2, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg
DATE OF DEATH September 29, 1953
Place of death Hamburg