Friedrich Emil Krauss

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Friedrich Emil Krauss (born March 29, 1895 in Neuwelt ; † April 7, 1977 in Stuttgart ) was a German industrialist and inventor.

Life

Education and family

The son of the trained plumber and later factory owner Louis Krauss was born in what is now the Neuwelt district of Schwarzenberg and moved with his family to Schwarzenberg four years later. There he attended the Selektenschule and completed an apprenticeship as a plumber. Afterwards he first attended the secondary school in Chemnitz , left it in 1912 despite very good performance and earned his money as a worker in Westphalia and the Rhineland. After his brother, who was supposed to take over his father's factories, fell in 1914, Krauss returned to his homeland and initially worked in his father's company. In 1919 he married Käthe Gertrud Mäschel, who gave birth to two daughters, Käthe in 1921 and Irmgard in 1922. After the quick divorce, the two daughters lived in their father's house and were raised by a nanny. His villa, commissioned in 1928/29, was expropriated in 1946 and burned down two years later. The building, rebuilt on the foundation walls, now houses a hotel.

Krauss as an industrialist and inventor

Father's metal goods factory in Schwarzenberg (around 1910)

In 1919 Krauss took over the business management of his father's Krausswerke metal goods factory , which at that time had over 200 employees. The company's main sources of income were the “Krauss” steam washing machine with a perforated drum, developed in 1902, and a hot-dip galvanized “ public bathtub ”. In 1922 Krauss developed the “ Turna-Krauss ” washing machine, which can be heated with coal, gas or electricity, and the “Zentri” spin dryer. By 1937 he had been granted 500 patents; the most important about washing machines, spin dryers and explosion-proof motorcycle tanks, numerous smaller ones about familiar household items like the pedal bin. By 1945 the Krausswerke had over 1000 employees. 200 foreign forced laborers were employed here during the Second World War.

On April 30, 1937, Adolf Hitler gave the Krausswerke the designation "National Socialist Model Company". As such, the Krausswerke were already actively involved in arms production from 1935.

Cultural and political activity in the Third Reich

Krauss was appointed as a member of the NSDAP and in 1934 as their district culture warden in the Schwarzenberg administration . Together with the Annaberg NSDAP district culture warden Max Günther, he tried to maintain the traditions of the Ore Mountains, in particular carving. As district culture warden, he organized the German nativity show in Aue , which took place from December 1 to 31, 1934. During this show, the Krauss pyramid , which he had devised and built in 1933/1934 in collaboration with the workforce of the Krauss factories, was presented to the public for the first time.

On October 2, 1936, Krauss became its chairman when the Heimatwerk Sachsen was founded . As a close - at least political - friend of Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann , he was supposed to align and control all cultural endeavors in Saxony in line with the NSDAP.

Krauss organized the Feierohmd show in Schwarzenberg for Heimatwerk Sachsen . This Christmas exhibition of Erzgebirge folk art, which took place from November 28, 1937 to January 19, 1938, had 330,000 visitors. According to Krauss, the show was a symbol [...] for the fact that nowhere else does folk art flourish as an expression of genuine love for one's homeland as it does here in the Ore Mountains. In 1940 Krauss was elected chairman of the Saxon Homeland Security Association. In the Krausshalle in Schwarzenberg, named after him, he organized several controversial singing. He opened the third festival of this kind on June 15, 1940 with the following words: “The song of the homeland has a thousand stanzas and each is a commitment to the Führer, the people and the fatherland. The soldiers sing, the homeland sings, a victorious, strong, believing people sings. "

On April 17, 1937, Friedrich Emil Krauss was made an honorary senator of Greifswald University , a honor that was bestowed on him because of his active support for physical research and because he "clearly recognized the importance of research for the major tasks in the new empire". At the request of the mechanical department of today's Dresden University of Technology , Krauss received an honorary doctorate.

Imprisonment and relocation after the end of the war

On August 20, 1945, Krauss was expropriated as a war and Nazi criminal on the basis of SMAD order 64 by the Soviet occupying power, arrested and interned one after the other in the special camps in Bautzen , in Jamlitz-Lieberose , Buchenwald and Hohenschönhausen . On June 14, 1950, Krauss was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment in the Waldheim trials . After his release after nine years in a camp and penitentiary, he was expelled to the Federal Republic and founded a design office in Baden-Baden . From 1958 to 1973 he worked as an industrial consultant at Buderus in Wetzlar .

The Krauss-works were as VEB Erzgebirgische washing equipment factory Schwarzenberg of VVB subordinated MEWA. Until 1990, the company was subject to the state-owned combine Foron Household Appliances Karl-Marx-Stadt. From 1990, an industrial park with various companies was built on the company's property.

Krauss died on April 7, 1977 in Stuttgart. His urn was transferred to his parents' grave in Schwarzenberg in 1990. The Waldheim judgment was overturned on June 11, 1992. On November 29, 2019, the state directorate of Saxony determined on the basis of the archived material that Mr. Krauss was not concerned with spreading National Socialist ideas, but primarily with the preservation and promotion of Erzgebirge folk art, “within the scope of his possibilities also took a stand against the National Socialist tyranny ”and“ campaigned intensively for people who were persecuted or disadvantaged by the Nazi regime. ”

Works

  • (Ed.) "Happy things around the workbench of a factory manager", private print, 2000 num. Copies, Schwarzenberg 1923
  • (Ed.): Praise of the Ore Mountains. By poets, soldiers and statesmen , Schwarzenberg 1941, private print
  • "Feierohmdradle" - an Erzgeb. Game in three pictures, private print with 13 drawings by Joachim Lutz , Mannheim 1939
  • "From Kraussschmied to Kraussware" - for the 50th anniversary of Krausswerke, private printing
  • "Festive days at the Kraussklempnern" for the company's 50th anniversary in 1937
  • "Klöppelspitzenbuch", private print
  • "Praise of the Ore Mountains", private print 1941
  • "The silver bell" - songbook of the Kraussklempner
  • "Songs of the tinsmiths", private print
  • "Feierohmdgeschichten", private print 1939
  • "Cribs in the Erzgebirge", private print 1934
  • "The Blue Bathtub Book", private print 1932
  • "Das Heiligohmdlied", private print
  • "Children's song for Christmas", private print, music: Christian Lahusen
  • "Christmas in the Mountains", 1943
  • "Impressions of a French traveling through Saxony", private print

Honors

  • 1935 Honorary Master of the German Crafts
  • 1937 Honorary Senator of the University of Greifswald
  • 1937 Golden DAF badge
  • 1937 honorary citizen of the city of Schwarzenberg
  • 1938 "Der Bergdank" badge of honor from the Erzgebirgsverein
  • 1945 Honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Dresden
  • Badge of achievement for vocational training of the German Labor Front
  • Appointment as Reich Labor Judge

literature

  • Käthe Fischer-Krauss: Life is a praise to home - My father Friedrich Emil Krauss , Medium Lahr, 1997.
  • Götz Altmann : From the spoon forge to the Krauss factories. In: Ulrich Hess, Michael Schäfer (ed.): Entrepreneurs in Saxony: Rise, Crisis, Fall, New Beginning. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig, 1998, pp. 193-204. ISBN 3-933240-21-2
  • Friedrich Emil Krauß - industrialist and promoter of the Erzgebirge folk art. In: Manfred Bachmann (Hrsg.): Small chronicle of great masters - Erzgebirge we are proud of. Part 1, printer and publisher Mike Rockstroh, Aue 2000, pp. 57–59.
  • Anita Tonar, Harald Wunderlich: Economic history of the city of Schwarzenberg. Rockstroh, Aue, 2000. ISBN 3-933625-05-X
  • Roland Jaeger: Kraussware in a photo. The private prints of the manufacturer FE Krauss, Schwarzenberg / Saxony. In: Manfred Heiting, Roland Jaeger (Hrsg.): Autopsy. German-language photo books 1918 to 1945. Volume 1. Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, 2012, pp. 386–405. ISBN 978-3-86930-412-0
  • Lenore Lobeck: Friedrich Emil Krauß (1895–1977): an entrepreneur from the Ore Mountains. In: Zeitschrift des Forschungsverbund SED-Staat, (2015), Issue 37, pp. 35–61. ISSN  0948-9878

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.parkhotel-schwarzenberg.de/geschichte.htm
  2. ^ Bringing an upswing , Neues Deutschland from December 10, 1997
  3. ^ Bringing an upswing , Neues Deutschland from December 10, 1997
  4. ↑ Mike Schmeitzner, Francesca Weil: Saxony 1933-1945: the historical travel guide. Ch. Links Verlag, 2014. p. 35
  5. ↑ a b Freie Presse, local edition Schwarzenberg, June 6, 2007, p. 15
  6. ^ Gareth Pritchard: Niemandsland: A History of Unoccupied Germany, 1944-1945. Cambridge University Press, 2012
  7. ↑ Mike Schmeitzner, Francesca Weil: Saxony 1933-1945: the historical travel guide. Ch. Links Verlag, 2014. p. 35
  8. ^ Gareth Pritchard: Niemandsland: A History of Unoccupied Germany, 1944-1945. Cambridge University Press, 2012
  9. ↑ Mike Schmeitzner, Clemens Vollnhals, Francesca Weil: From Stalingrad to the SBZ: Saxony 1943 to 1949. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016. P. 42
  10. ↑ Götz Altmann - From the spoon forge to the Krauss works (1998) p. 203.
  11. ↑ Glückauf, No. 9/1940, p. 89.
  12. ↑ Dr Himmel is e Lichterbugn - Friedrich Emil Krauss , MDR documentation, series of CVs , 2002
  13. ↑ Quoted from: https : // www. freiepresse.de/erzgebirge/schwarzenberg/heimatfreunde-gedenken-krauss-artikel10762792

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Krauss, Friedrich Emil
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German industrialist and inventor
DATE OF BIRTH March 29, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuwelt (Schwarzenberg)
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1977
Place of death Stuttgart