Fred C. Koch

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Fred Chase Koch [ fɹɛd t͡ʃeɪs kɔʊk ] (* 23. September 1900 in Quanah , Texas , USA; † 17th November 1967 at the Bear River near Ogden (Utah) , United States) was an American chemical engineer and entrepreneur, one oil refinery started from which later became Koch Industries, the second largest privately held company in the United States . In the 1930s he played a key role in upgrading the Soviet Union to an oil- producing country through the construction of refineries and in building a large refinery in Hamburg for the production of aviation fuel .

Origin, education and family

Fred C. Koch was born in Quanah, Texas, the son of the Dutch immigrant Harry Koch, who published the weekly Quanah Tribune-Chief and ran a printing company. Fred graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1922 as a chemical engineer. In 1932 he married Mary Robinson, who was now quite wealthy, seven years his junior, after having known each other for only a month. They had four sons: Frederick (* 1933-2020), Charles (* 1935) and the twins David (* 1940-2019) and William (* 1940).

As a father, Koch was very strict and frequently beat his sons. On the advice of a psychologist, they were sent to various boarding schools at a very early age.

Entrepreneurial career

Fred Koch began his career with the Texas Company in Port Arthur , Texas, and then became Chief Engineer with the Medway Oil & Storage Company on the Isle of Grain in Kent , England. In 1925 he founded his own company in the USA.

After he invented an improved method of oil refining in 1927 , the big oil companies viewed him as a competitor and sued him in 1929 for alleged patent infringement . The litigation dragged on for 15 years. Although Koch was eventually awarded $ 1.5 million in a settlement after proving that one of the judges involved had been bribed , he has since viewed the American legal system as corrupt and useless.

Given the difficult situation in the USA, Koch was open to offers from overseas. In fact, he received a request from the Soviet Union , where he was known as a business partner from his time in England and wanted to use his expertise in setting up their own oil refineries. He was initially skeptical and, in particular, had no confidence that the Soviets would keep the agreed payments. When they were ready to pay him in advance, he accepted the offer in 1930, and his company Winkler-Koch then enabled the construction of 15 oil refineries , with which the Soviet Union rose from a mere Röhol supplier to an independent oil industrial country. Koch received $ 500,000 for this, while in the capitalist West hardly any profits could be made due to the global economic crisis . This lucrative business came to an end in 1932 when the Soviets decided to copy the technology they now knew as their oil industry expanded. However, Koch remained involved as a technical consultant.

In 1934 the American businessman and well-known Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis turned to Winkler-Koch with a similar request . He wanted to acquire an oil tank farm in Hamburg and expand it into a large refinery, for which he had already received a personal permit from Adolf Hitler . Under Koch's direction, the third largest refinery of the Third Reich was built there in 1935 and at the same time one of the few that could produce aviation fuel . This was of great importance to Hitler's war plans. Koch remained connected to Nazi Germany, traveled there often in the following years, and in 1938 wrote in a letter to his former business partner Charles de Ganahl that he admired developments in Germany as well as in Italy and Japan. When the United States entered World War II against these three countries in 1941, Koch was brought in to support the production of aviation fuel for the Air Force . In 1944, the refinery he helped to build in Hamburg was destroyed by American bombers.

In the USA, Koch built up a company that, in addition to oil refineries and pipelines, also ran cattle. When he died in 1967, annual sales were estimated at $ 177 million.

politics

Koch's political views were evidently strongly influenced by his experiences in the Soviet Union. Some of his acquaintances there fell victim to Stalin's "purges" , and a watchdog shocked him with the announcement that the USA would soon be conquered. He later regretted having helped strengthen that regime, and his son David said his father always said that governments were bad. However, Koch saw a role model in Nazi Germany, which he compared to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in his letter to de Ganahl mentioned above . Roosevelt promotes laziness and dependence on the government, while Germany shows how to overcome this by calling on people to work hard. For his first two sons he hired a very strict Hitler admirer from Germany as an educator.

In 1958 Koch was involved in the founding of the arch-conservative John Birch Society , which became known primarily through the spread of conspiracy theories such as the fact that the United States was being infiltrated in secret by communists and that the incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower was also a communist agent. Koch often attended and generously supported the Society's events in Wichita. In 1960 he self-published the book A Businessman Looks at Communism ("A businessman looks at communism"), of which he said he distributed more than one and a half million copies. In it he stated that the two major parties, the Protestant churches, public schools, universities, trade unions, the armed forces, the Foreign Ministry, the World Bank , the UN and modern art are tools of the communists. He praised Benito Mussolini's suppression of the communists, while he attributed great importance to the “ black man ” in the communists' plan to lure blacks from the countryside into the cities through social policy measures, where they would spark a vicious racial war. In this context he traveled through the States and gave lectures. He drew the attention of the FBI , which in a report classified his theses as "completely absurd".

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Koch placed full-page advertisements in the New York Times and the Washington Post , in which he assigned the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to a communist conspiracy and toured him to join the John Birch Society. (Conversely, on the day of the assassination, some Texan members of this society had in a full-page advertisement accused Kennedy of supporting the "spirit of Moscow.") In 1964, Koch supported Barry Goldwater's nomination as Republican presidential candidate , who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and advocated segregation , but was defeated in the election by the Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson .

After a conviction for tax evasion, which imposed high back payments on him, Koch developed a violent aversion to taxes, combined with the fear that he would have to sell the company because of the taxes. Therefore, he developed various strategies of tax avoidance . He converted part of his fortune into a charity fund, which he could transfer to his sons without inheritance tax , provided that all profits had to be donated to charity for 20 years .

death

Fred Koch died of a heart attack in 1967 while hunting on the Bear River near the Great Salt Lake . At the time, he was considered the richest man in Kansas .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Fred and Mary Koch Foundation: Biography ( Memento from November 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016, ISBN 978-0-3855-3559-5 , pp. 33-36.
  3. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. pp. 27f.
  4. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. p. 28.
  5. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. pp. 29-31 and 384.
  6. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. p. 48.
  7. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. pp. 31-33 and 38.
  8. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. pp. 38-40.
  9. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. pp. 40f.
  10. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. p. 42.
  11. ↑ Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. pp. 48f.
personal data
SURNAME Koch, Fred C.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chef, Fred Chase (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH September 23, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Quanah , Texas , USA
DATE OF DEATH 17th November 1967
Place of death near Ogden (Utah) , USA