Franz Semer

Franz Joseph Semer (born March 25, 1881 in Menden ; † October 1929 in Berlin-Charlottenburg ) was a German businessman and banker .

Live and act

Early years

Semer was a son of the Sauerland businessman Peter Semer and his wife.

Little reliable information is available about Semer's activities up to 1921. According to a report in the newspaper Montagmorgen from 1924, he lived as a hardware dealer in Brussels until the First World War . During the war years he is said to have devoted himself to the trade in the drug Salvarsan , which is banned in Germany .

Around 1919 Semer came into contact with the center politician Matthias Erzberger , with whose help he founded a company called “Allgemeine Handelsgesellschaft”. As it turned out later, there were major irregularities in the administration of this company. The trading company was able to generate more than 100,000 gold marks in profit from the fraudulent administration of the Benedictus Foundation alone.

Semer was since November 26, 1918 with Elsa Brandis (born February 23, 1897 in Braunschweig), a great niece of the Breslau bishop Cardinal Adolf Bertram . His wife filed for divorce in May 1924.

Political and business activity in the vicinity of the Center Party

At the turn of the year 1919/1920, Semer introduced himself as a personality to the Catholic circles of Berlin and in particular to the Center Party by organizing a collection for the acquisition of the house at Rauchstrasse 21 in the Tiergarten district, which the papal nuncio Eugenio Pacelli as the seat of the at that time in the Reich capital established nunciature was made available. In this regard, Semer succeeded in receiving funds from August Thyssen , Peter Klöckner and Louis Hagen, among others . In recognition of his achievements in establishing the nunciature, the Vatican awarded him the rank of papal secret chamberlain.

In March 1921, Semer founded a new company, “Handels- und Diskont AG”, which was also based in Berlin and of which he became chairman of the supervisory board. At the same time he came out publicly when he acquired the majority of shares in Germania AG, in which the daily Germania , the central organ of the Center Party, appeared. The background was that Matthias Erzberger, who had held the majority of the shares up to this point in time, received one of his two large blocks of shares in Semer as a result of a process that he led at the time and who therefore did not want to use his name in Germania AG transferred to his steward. The second block of shares was transferred to Erzberger's State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Finance Stephan Moesle .

At the beginning of 1924 Semer was involved in a (politically motivated) process that forced him to leave Berlin, where he lived in the villa district of Nikolassee, because of dubious stock transactions and irregularities in his “Handels- und Diskont-AG”, of which he was chairman of the supervisory board . The scandal had serious social consequences for him: his wife filed for divorce from him in May 1924. Since 1927 he was also no longer listed in the papal “Annuario Pontifico” as “Cameriere”.

Semer also sold his stake in Germania as a result of the scandal of 1924: In May 1924, he sold it to Franz von Papen , the manorial estate leaseholder and center deputy in the Prussian state parliament , which made him the new majority shareholder in Germania AG. In public, Semer fell into twilight in 1925: At that time it became known that he had even played a double game with Erzberger in 1921: while he was acting as Erzberger's "confidant", he had secretly supplied Erzberger opponent Karl Helfferich with material that he had all in one Litigation with Erzberger had used against this.

Marriage and offspring

Semer's marriage to Else Brandis resulted in sons Norbert (born September 12, 1919) and Raimund Semer (born February 10, 1921).

literature

• Jürgen Arne Bach : Franz von Papen in the Weimar Republic. Activities in politics and the press 1918-1932 , Düsseldorf 1977.
• Wolfram Pyta : Franz von Papen - cross-border commuter between entrepreneurship and politics . In: Manfred Rasch (Hrsg.): Nobility as entrepreneurs in the bourgeois age . Münster 2006, pp. 289-307.
• The savior of Germania. From the life of a political Raffke . In: Monday morning of January 28, 1924.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Landesarchiv Berlin: List of names of the death register of the registry office Charlottenburg III for the year 1929, p. 491 (death certificate no. 1929/2238) .
2. ↑ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Semer_franz_heiratsurkunde_1918.pdf .
3. ^ Institute for Personal History in Bensheim: Archive for Family History Research , Vol. 10-11, 2006, p. 98.