Curt Mast

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Curt Mast (born March 26, 1897 in Wolfenbüttel ; † August 19, 1970 ) was a wine wholesaler and vinegar manufacturer, medium-sized entrepreneur and namesake of the Jägermeister spirit brand in Wolfenbüttel near Braunschweig in Lower Saxony .

Life

Kurt (since 1918: Curt) Mast was the eleventh of twelve children of the vinegar manufacturer Wilhelm Mast and his wife Emma Fricke. At the age of 16 he took over the small, heavily indebted factory of his sick father, who had founded the company in 1878. After the First World War , he expanded the company's activities with his brother Wilhelm as a partner to trade in French wines, but, like his father, experimented with the composition of liqueurs.

Before 1945

Curt Mast was a member of the German People's Party (DVP), ran several times on this party's electoral lists and came as a successor to the city council of Wolfenbüttel for the first time in 1928. In early April 1933, he joined, in his words, from 1947, as a "guest student" of the Nazi Party faction, since he is the only, national not the NSDAP deputy could not form a faction. Curt Mast joined the NSDAP shortly afterwards on May 1, 1933 with membership number 3.183.016. In 1934, according to his own statements, he withdrew from the city council and was allegedly banned for life. In fact, he was still a member of the insignificant city council in 1935 and still referred to himself in 1944 as a "party member". He tried to reorganize the company with the semi-bitter liqueur he had developed under the trade name "Hubertusbitter". In this context he got into a dispute with his brother Wilhelm, who was forcibly but driven out of the company on favorable terms and followed his Jewish lover to South America. Günter Mast , his nephew , confirmed that Mast changed the trade name to “Jägermeister” in 1935 and took the name from the new Reich hunting law of July 3, 1934 . Curt Mast registered the name “Jägermeister”, the label and the Hubertushirschkopf in 1935 as trademarks. It is unthinkable that the term "Jägermeister" was used without permission from Hermann Göring , the "Reichsjägermeister". The passionate hunter Mast also undoubtedly knew Göring, whose preferred hunting grounds included the forests around Wolfenbüttel and Braunschweig with the Buchhorst . In the Buchhorst, Göring owned the Reichsjägerhof "Hermann Göring" , which was built in 1935 and to which he had a separate siding laid. Goering also held hunting parties in the Lichtenberg forests, where Mast also had his hunting ground.

Thanks to the successful distribution of his spirits, Mast was able to invest and unscrupulously pursued his economic interests. In 1941 Mast bought Ivan and Alfred Esberg's land at Langen Herzogstrasse 46 in Wolfenbüttel from the Reich , and the NSDAP district leadership relocated the ten Jewish residents of the area there in the summer of the same year. It has not been researched where the residents were moved to. Ivan Esberg, who survived in exile, led a lawsuit against Mast after the Second World War , which ended in a settlement. Esberg and Mast are even said to have become friends. Curt Mast stood up for his political opponent Otto Rüdiger in 1944 when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp . There is no doubt that Mast, who does not seem to have been a staunch National Socialist and was at times a member of the Freemason Lodge Wilhelm zu den Drei Pillar in Wolfenbüttel, behaved opportunistically towards the Nazi system in the interests of his company. During the war he was able to earn good money with the "Jägermeister" called "Göring schnapps" by the soldiers.

After 1945

By denying his NS membership and with a "clean bill of health" from Otto Rüdiger, who he rescued from the concentration camp, Mast was classified by the denazification chamber as an opponent of National Socialism, even a resistance. Immediately after Wolfenbüttel was captured by the American army, he again played a major role in local politics, was a co-founder and later the gray eminence of the Wolfenbüttel CDU, chairman of the bourgeois faction in the city council and from 1952 to 1968 a member of the district council. He became an important local politician in the Wolfenbüttel area. In 1968 he ran in vain for a direct mandate to the Lower Saxony state parliament. In 1947 he converted his company into W. Mast GmbH , whose co-partners were his wife and two children, while a sole proprietorship that he personally owned kept the liqueur recipe, the buildings and the means of transport. After his death, the GmbH was reorganized into the W. Mast limited partnership in 1970 and converted into Mast-Jägermeister AG, an unlisted stock corporation, in 1987. In 2010/2011 the company was reorganized into Mast-Jägermeister SE , a stock corporation under European law. The shares are privately owned by the Findel-Mast family. A Curt Mast Foundation, which promotes monument preservation and cultural issues in the region, was established by Annemarie Findel-Mast, Curt Mast's daughter, in 2003.

Honors

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ NSDAP membership , accessed on July 20, 2009.
  2. ↑ The spirit in the bottle: Der Tagesspiegel v. August 24, 2003.
  3. ^ Dietrich Kuessner : Jews, Church and Bishops in Wolfenbüttel. Lecture as part of the series "Wolfenbüttel under the swastika" on November 9, 1998 in the Wolfenbüttel town hall. Available Online: Church From Below , accessed July 20, 2009.
  4. ^ Letter from Mast for Otto Rüdiger , accessed on July 20, 2009.
  5. ↑ Office of the Federal President
personal data
SURNAME Mast, Curt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Wolfenbüttel
DATE OF DEATH 19th August 1970