Emil Perk

Emil Perk , full name Emil Gustav Albert Perk , (born January 22, 1893 , † September 15, 1952 in Berlin ) was the owner of a successful racing team in the Weimar Republic and a millionaire.

Life

Emil Perk's parents moved to Stralsund in 1889 , where the father got a job as a supervisor in what was then the workhouse . The father died on January 8, 1894, at the age of only 32, as a result of an accident at work. After the pension was exhausted, the family lived in dire poverty. The school attendance took place in Berlin. Emil Perk earned his first money as a child by delivering newspapers before school and (secretly) raising guinea pigs and white mice in the attic.

In Malchow he did an apprenticeship as a butcher. Together with another journeyman he bought a cattle, which was slaughtered and sold for a profit. He already bought the second cattle himself. His motto was No matter how small the trade, it brings in more than work. In the First World War he was drafted and had to fight France as a soldier on the German side. He was badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme and lost a knee joint.

After the war it quickly became the largest wholesale slaughterer in Berlin. Some of the cattle were bought in Bavaria, transported to Berlin alive and slaughtered in Berlin. On December 7, 1920, he passed the master's examination before the butcher's guild in Berlin. The house on the former company premises in Berlin-Weißensee (Charlottenburger Str. 78; renumbered in 1922 to No. 58) is still standing today.

At the time, it was common among butchers to transport meat by horse and cart. Every now and then there were races on the streets. This resulted in the butcher's preference for trotting. In 1918 Emil Perk acquired a license as an amateur driver for trotting races. On the side he also earned money trading trotting horses. As early as 1932, the E. Perk stable was one of the most successful racing teams of the Weimar Republic.

He initially kept his horses in the stud of the major publisher and trotter breeder Bruno Cassirer , from whom he had also acquired many successful horses, e.g. B. the very successful stallion "Anwalt", born in 1933. Besides Bruno Cassirer, many horses were bred by Leo Lewin in Breslau .

After 1933 this successful collaboration became more and more difficult, as regulations against Jewish breeders were also issued in trotting. Bruno Cassirer fled to England, where he died in 1941. The fate of Leo Lewin is not known. For Emil Perk this resulted in the fact that he was not allowed to start a number of horses in large breeding races because the breeders had no "Aryan certificate". From 1933 the OBT supervisory authority was under the control of the Reich Ministry of the Interior under the direction of Hermann Göring .

From 1934 Emil Perk himself was active as a trotter breeder. In 1937 he purchased the Vorwerk Geislershof of the former Good Staffelde in Nauen (Brandenburg) and founded the stud Geislershof . From 1937 to 1944 the stud developed into the world's second largest trotter stud. Only the stud farm of the American film chain MGM was a bit bigger. In the Third Reich, the Geislershof stud was the most successful racing team in Germany. In 1940 a film was made about the stud, but it is considered lost.

This was not so much a result of top-class race victories, but rather the mass of horses used by Emil Perk in standard races. At the time, newspapers wrote that Emil Perk could have contested an entire week of racing in Berlin alone with his own horses. Emil Perk exercised numerous functions within the trotting sport: For many years he was 2nd chairman of the trotting clubs in Berlin-Ruhleben and Berlin-Mariendorf and also 2nd chairman of the Association of German Trotting Stable Owners and Breeders. Within the OBT (Supreme Authority for Trotter Breeding and Racing) he was responsible for apprenticeship training.

In the turmoil of war in 1945 the stud was looted, the horses stolen, driven away and some of them shot. In 1945 his son Fritz Perk received an order from the Russian command to find and requisition trotter horses in order to enable the re-establishment of trotter breeding in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. The former horse racing track in Berlin-Karlshorst was converted into a trotting track. In the denazification process, Emil Perk was classified as unencumbered.

The Geislershof stud, which was confiscated by the Red Army in 1945, was initially used partially as an airfield before it was returned in 1950 by the then GDR interior minister. But it was never used as a trotting stud. After Emil Perk's death, it became an LPG, on which u. a. Pig breeding was operated. Today nothing reminds of the once glorious past.

After the war, Emil Perk had his few remaining horses started under the ownership of Fritz Perk and later under different aliases, before he started again in 1949 under "owner E. Perk". Emil Perk died unexpectedly in September 1952 in Berlin. He was just on the flight back from Munich to Berlin, where he suddenly fell into a coma from which he no longer woke up. Emil Perk suffered from diabetes and liver cirrhosis is recorded as the official cause of death .

He was considered the richest resident of Berlin.

The most famous German trotting drivers and trainers worked for Emil Perk for a time. B. some members of the Irish Mills trotting family ( Charlie Mills , Johnny Mills); Gerhard Krüger , who later became the most successful driver in the GDR; Werner Bandermann; H. Bandemer; and in 1944/45 also Johannes Frömming.

family

Perk's parents were Gustav Emil Perk (* 1861 in Kępiny , Poland; † January 8, 1894) and Hedwig Caroline Mund (* 1864 in Dębica , Poland). He had three children with two women: Fritz Perk (1920–1996) and Alfred Perk (1922–2004) from Margarethe Illgner and Hans Joachim Helmut Stähr (1938–2006) from Lisbeth Marie Stähr.

Web links

• The development of trotting in Germany