Friedrich Karl Flick

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Friedrich Karl Flick (born February 3, 1927 in Berlin ; † October 5, 2006 in Auen am Wörthersee ) was a German - Austrian entrepreneur and billionaire .

Life

Friedrich Karl Flick was the son of the entrepreneur Friedrich Flick (1883–1972) and his wife Marie Schuß (1890–1966). From the age of ten he grew up in Upper Bavaria, on the Sauersberg farm near Bad Tölz. After graduating from high school in Bad Tölz in 1944 , he was not drafted into the Wehrmacht, but completed an internship at the then family-owned Maxhütte before enrolling at the University of Munich in the field of economics and business administration in the winter semester 1945/46 . He completed his studies in 1951 with a degree in business administration and in 1965 submitted the dissertation The quality competition in the market economy system at the University of Cologne , with which he received his doctorate on February 26, 1965.

In 1957 he began to work in his father Friedrich Flick's company. He was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials in 1947 for war crimes, crimes against humanity, forced labor, deportation to slave labor and looting and membership in a criminal organization and was released in 1950 after three years in prison. With the help of his son Friedrich Karl, he managed to restore his industrial empire , consisting of steel companies in Bavaria , the Siegerland and Sauerland , the paper manufacturer Feldmühle , the Buderus and Dynamit Nobel companies , by the end of the 1960s . Friedrich Flick shifted his main interests from the steel industry to the processing industry and in this context acquired a significant stake in the share capital of Daimler-Benz .

In 1962, Friedrich Karl Flick became the sole personally liable partner of the holding companies in the paper and chemical sector and vehicle construction. His older brother Otto-Ernst brought an unsuccessful trial against his father, who had revoked his general power of attorney in 1958 . With the payment of a large cash settlement in 1966 to brother Otto-Ernst and (1975) his sons Friedrich Christian and Gert-Rudolf, they left the company. The long-standing personally liable partner Eberhard von Brauchitsch also left in 1970. After the death of his father in 1972, Friedrich Karl Flick inherited most of the family assets, a considerable part of which was due to the exploitation of forced labor during the National Socialist era (in fact, the workforce of the Flick companies existed during the war Half of slave labor) and paid off his niece Dagmar and the two named nephews. As the sole owner of the Friedrich Flick KGaA holding , he owned 330 companies with an annual turnover of 18 billion  DM and over 300,000 employees.

This also included a large stake in Daimler-Benz shares valued at almost DM 2 billion, which he sold to Deutsche Bank in 1975 . Thanks to the approval of the Ministry of Economic Affairs , no taxes had to be paid on the profits made. At the time, this special permit was justified by the fact that Flick had reinvested most of the proceeds from the sale of the industrial insurer Gerling and WR Grace for economic purposes. In 1983 it was discovered that between 1969 and 1980 25 million DM had flowed as party donations to the parties represented in the Bundestag. The suspicion of corruption arose . No charges were brought against Friedrich Karl Flick himself in the Flick affair , since Eberhard von Brauchitsch, as his re-appointed general manager, had “looked after the Bonn landscape” ( metaphor for corruption ). Hans Friderichs and Otto Graf Lambsdorff as well as von Brauchitsch were sentenced to probation and fines as former or incumbent FDP economics ministers . Lambsdorff and Bundestag President Rainer Barzel resigned from their posts.

In 1984 Friedrich Flick Holding achieved a worldwide turnover of 22 billion DM with only 43,000 employees. In 1985 he sold the rest of his companies to Deutsche Bank for 5.4 billion DM (around 2.7 billion euros).

The daughters Alexandra and Elisabeth (married to the Austrian Alexander Auersperg-Breunner) come from his second marriage to Ursula Reuther. In 1990 Flick married the 30 years younger Austrian Ingrid Ragger, who came from the Lavant valley, daughter of a carpenter, met each other as a receptionist on the Arlberg, with whom he had twins Victoria-Katharina and Karl Friedrich in 1999. In 1994 he settled in Austria and in the same year took Austrian citizenship . In Austria he founded the Flick Foundation. He was a passionate hunter, had his own hunt in Oppenberg in Styria and lived, among other places, on Lake Wörthersee , where he died on October 5, 2006 with his family. Friedrich Karl Flick is an honorary citizen of the large community Deutsch Jahrndorf in Austria.

Slave labor

Friedrich Karl Flick refused (like his father until his death) to pay compensation to the forced laborers of the Flick group during World War II. According to a statement by the former BDI President Hans-Olaf Henkel in the ARD Tagesschau on October 6, 2006, Friedrich Karl Flick was one of the very few entrepreneurs in Germany who did not participate in the compensation fund for forced laborers during the Nazi era. The Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" was established in August 2000 by the Federal Government and the Foundation Initiative of German Business in equal to ten billion German marks equipped to compensate for former forced laborers of the Nazi regime. It is a foundation under public law created by federal law with its seat in Berlin.

capital

There are different details about the exact amount of Flick's fortune, which included villas in Düsseldorf , Munich , Seeshaupt , Palm Springs , New York , Kreuzlingen ( Ebersberg Castle ), Carinthia and Styria , or that of the Flick Foundation established in Austria. According to his own statements, he invested ten percent of the sales proceeds in real estate, the rest in European, American and Asian stocks and bonds. In June 2005 the Austrian business magazine Trend estimated it at 6.5 billion euros, which would have made Flick the richest Austrian at the time. The German manager magazine in turn estimated the assets of the Flick Foundation at 5.5 billion euros, which according to the report, together with the Otto family , ranks fifth on the list of the richest Germans .

Desecration of the grave

Mausoleum for Friedrich Karl Flick at the local cemetery in Velden am Wörther See

Several unknown perpetrators desecrated Friedrich Karl Flick's grave in the family mausoleum in Velden am Wörthersee between November 12 and 14, 2008. The stainless steel coffin and corpse were stolen . In addition, the two zeros of the date of death (2006) have been removed from the grave plate.

Due to a lack of information, the investigation was terminated in August 2009 by the competent Austrian public prosecutor's office. Mid-November 2009, a year after the fact, outlawed the offense of grave desecration under Austrian law.

On November 29, 2009, the coffin and body reappeared in Hungary ; the police arrested parts of the alleged kidnapping group of the Flick body in Budapest . According to the Austrian and Hungarian police, the thieves wanted to extort six million euros from the family of the deceased. The alleged mastermind, a 41-year-old lawyer from Budapest, and a henchman were arrested, and four other suspects are still under investigation. After the forensic investigation, the coffin was returned to the Flick family and buried again on December 3, 2009. New security systems at the mausoleum should prevent further desecration of the graves in the future.

Awards

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Matter of opinion: glamorous billionaire and richest Austrian . Text for picture 10/11. derstandard.at, November 23, 2006, accessed October 21, 2016.
  2. ↑ Edda Graf: Nature gives me strength. In: Krone Zeitung Bunt, October 16, 2016, p. 20 ff
  3. ↑ Federal Law Gazette: BGBl. 2000 I 1263
  4. ↑ Hans Leyendecker  : One last riddle about Friedrich Karl Flick . On sueddeutsche.de , November 19, 2008; found on November 19, 2008
  5. ↑ Stolen Flick corpse: Prosecutor breaks off investigation . In: Spiegel Online , August 29, 2009
  6. ^ Günther Fischer: Flick: Robbed grave - no coffin and no corpse . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 18, 2009
  7. ↑ Arrests in Budapest: Stolen Flick corpse found again on Welt Online , November 30, 2009
  8. ^ Renewed burial - Flick rests again in crypt , December 3, 2009 at Welt Online
  9. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)

Web links

 Wikinews: coffin and corpse stolen  - message
personal data
SURNAME Flick, Friedrich Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Austrian entrepreneur and billionaire
DATE OF BIRTH February 3, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 5, 2006
Place of death Floodplains near Schiefling am Wörthersee , Carinthia