Friedrich Spennrath

Friedrich Spennrath (born August 8, 1888 in Aachen , † January 22, 1959 in Berlin ) was a German government official and manager. From 1947 to 1955 he was chairman of the board of the AEG , chairman of the joint committee of the German commercial economy and president of the Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce .

Life

Spennrath was born in 1888 as the son of the director of the municipal trade schools, Josef Spennrath (1852–1902), and his wife Maria Ross (1857–1926) in Aachen. After graduating from high school in 1907, he studied construction and transport at RWTH Aachen University . In 1911 he graduated with a Dipl.-Ing. from.

Spennrath later worked as a government construction trainee. In 1914 he became a government master builder in the Reich Railway Directorate in Cologne . From 1919 and 1921 he was a member of the German-Belgian border setting commission. In 1921 he became a government building officer and for six years alderman of the city of Aachen. He was responsible for railways, civil engineering, housing and transport.

On April 13, 1927, Spennrath was elected alderman for the city of Cologne and remained so until 1931. In his office he was responsible for railways and public utilities, general workers' affairs, waste incineration, vehicle fleets, unemployment welfare and emergency work. His projects included the introduction of bus transport on a larger scale, the reorganization of rail traffic, the construction of the Zugweg electricity plant and the Weiler waterworks, the introduction of long-distance gas supply and the organization of productive unemployment welfare in Cologne. Spennrath had been friends with Konrad Adenauer ever since .

In 1931 Spennrath became a board member of AEG in Berlin and headed the railways department. From 1947 to 1955 he was chairman of the board of the AEG and from 1950 to 1957 president of the IHK Berlin. Spennrath played a leading role in planning the supply of Berlin through the Berlin Airlift . Spennrath was also a member of the Berlin ERP Advisory Committee convened in 1950 by the US city commandant, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor , which was supposed to maintain liaison with the ECA special representation for Germany and the Federal Ministry for Affairs of the Marshall Plan ; The Berlin ERP Advisory Committee first submitted a general economic report at the end of March 1950 with suggestions for the use of the ERP funds. Spennrath held other positions at the two AEG subsidiaries Telefunken and Hydrawerk AG, Allgemeine Lokalbahnen und Kraftwerke AG , Bayerische Zugspitzbahn AG, Finow Kupfer- und Messingwerke AG , Kupferwerke Ilsenburg AG Berlin, Osram GmbH and the Schultheiss-Brauerei AG and was President of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce, President of the German World Economic Society as well as a member of the Executive Committee of the BDI .

Since there were difficulties in forming a government in Berlin after the elections to the Berlin House of Representatives in December 1950, Spennrath intervened actively with the request for an intervention to continue the grand coalition to Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on January 7, 1951; on January 18, 1951 Ernst Reuter was re-elected mayor. In March 1952, a research advisory board for questions relating to the reunification of Germany was formed in Bonn. It included Friedrich Ernst , Friedrich Spennrath and Friedrich-Karl von Zitzewitz-Muttrin , as well as Herbert Wehner from the SPD and Ludwig Rosenberg from the DGB . After 1956 Spennrath was a member of the supervisory board of AEG and other companies such as B. Hydrawerk AG.

In connection with the popular uprising of June 17, 1953 in the GDR, Spennrath was referred to by the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, Walter Ulbricht , as a “representative of the most aggressive circles of monopoly capital and Junkerism”.

On June 14, 1954, the “People's Movement for the Reunification of Germany” was constituted in Bad Neuenahr; The board of directors of the Federal Board of Trustees consisted of Thomas Dehler , Walter Freitag , Jakob Kaiser , Erich Ollenhauer and Friedrich Spennrath and saw themselves as a non-partisan association of leading personalities from politics, business and intellectual life, “to deepen the idea of ​​reunification, the solidarity between the separate parts To strengthen Germany and to show the people of Central Germany and abroad, through joint action, the will of the German people to reunify. "

In 1955, Spennrath submitted a building application to the Prüm District Office for an elaborately planned building, the Adenauervilla in the Eifler Kammerwald, which was supposed to serve as a retirement home for the Federal Chancellor at the time; According to the building file, the architect was Heribert Multhaupt - Adenauer's son-in-law. According to press releases, construction was stopped in 1956 and has remained unfinished to this day.

Awards

• 1951 honorary doctorate from TU Berlin .
• Sept. 1953 Federal Cross of Merit (Grand Cross of Merit with Star)
• 1956 Federal Cross of Merit (Large Cross of Merit with Star and Shoulder Ribbon)

The Spennrathbrücke in Berlin-Moabit was named after Friedrich Spennrath; this leads over the approximately 250-meter-long Westhafen connecting canal between the Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal and the Westhafen.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Friedrich Spennrath in the Munzinger archive , accessed on January 20, 2012 ( beginning of article freely accessible)

Web links

• List of board positions
• Page no longer available , search in web archives: minutes of Friedrich Spennrath and the Political Adviser of the American military authority Ambassador Murphy