Fritz Mandl (industrialist)

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Fritz Mandl (born February 9, 1900 in Vienna ; † September 8, 1977 there ) was an internationally active Austrian industrialist who was active in the metal and armaments industry .

Life

Hirtenberger cartridge factory (around 1895)

Mandl, who later became the "King of Patrons", was the son of Alexander Mandl (1861–1943), an Austrian industrialist and general director of the Hirtenberger cartridge factory (see also: Wöllersdorfer Werke ). Alexander Mandl resigned from the Mosaic faith in 1910 . Mandl's mother, Maria Mohr from Graz , was a Catholic and the boy was raised Catholic . He graduated from the Piarist Convention in Krems , volunteered for one year in 1918 , studied chemistry and joined the Hirtenberg cartridge factory in 1920 under his father's general management.

In 1921 the Hirtenberg cartridge factory supplied Poland with armaments during the war against Soviet Russia . Communist workers set the factory on fire for this. The factory also struggled with the Treaty of Saint-Germain's prohibition on exporting weapons during the 1920s .

Young Mandl found ways to get around such difficulties. From 1924 he managed the factory (general director 1930). Later he was also the owner of the Lichtenwörther cartridge factory and the Grünbach coal mine . In 1928 he represented the Hirtenberger cartridge factory as an Austrian partner in a joint venture in Solothurn, Switzerland . The other partner, the large Rheinmetall corporation , with Krupp the second largest German arms manufacturer, was represented by the arms engineer Hans Eltze . The Solothurn weapons factory was used as a camouflage for the export of German and Austrian weapons, in particular anti-tank guns and anti-aircraft guns under Swiss labels.

In the meantime, Mandl was also involved in the political struggle. He financed the Austrofascist Heimwehr militia, which was run by his friend Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg . In 1935 he became a member of the Lower Austrian state parliament (and chairman of the Lower Austrian Federation of Industrialists ). He also used his close connections with Benito Mussolini and the Hungarian Horthy dictatorship to supply the Heimwehr with weapons. The smuggling of arms from Italy to Austria and Hungary, which was uncovered at the beginning of January 1933, went down in history as the Hirtenberg arms affair .

His wife at the time, the young actress Hedy Lamarr , later made many of his conversations with fascist personalities public. Hedy Lamarr had been married to Mandl since August 10, 1933, but left him in 1937 after banning her from acting for years after her success in Ecstasy (1933), where she was seen in nude scenes. The jealous husband kept her like a prisoner at the feudal country estate of Mandls, the Fegenberg hunting villa on the 2,054 hectare Schwarzau estate in the mountains . In addition, the couple were worlds apart from a political point of view, as Lamarr grew up in a liberal milieu. He had also asked his wife, fourteen years his junior, whom he had married on August 10, 1933 in the Karlskirche in Vienna , that she convert from the Jewish to the Catholic faith. Years earlier, his cousin, the actress Eva May , wanted to marry him, but he refused. She then committed suicide in September 1924.

Through his connections to the Heimwehr, Mandl also made friends with their chief of staff, the German major Waldemar Pabst , who had organized the double murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and had participated in several coup attempts. Mandl and Eltze transferred responsibility for the Solothurn weapons factory to them. Eltze went in 1933 after the seizure of power of the Nazi party in Germany, then later to Spain and Portugal . Mandl went to Argentina in 1938 after the Anschluss because the National Socialists considered him to be a Jew. So the two of them needed someone they could trust to take care of the Solothurn arms factory, and left the task to Pabst.

The Mandl Empire extended over several countries. He practically had a monopoly on deliveries of cartridges to Italy. In Poland he was able to buy a factory to compensate for the supplies in the Polish-Soviet war. He also owned an arms factory in Dordrecht, South Holland .

In 1938, Mandl tried to set up a cartridge factory for the Portuguese Ministry of War. The middlemen of the business were the exiled Austrian banker Friedrich Ehrenfest and the Swiss arms engineer Hans de Steiger. But the German-friendly lobby in the ministry did not want to sign a contract with the “Jew” Fritz Mandl and was able to push through a decision to partner with German companies such as Fritz Werner AG .

The failure of the business in Portugal shows the gradual decline of Mandl's political connections under fascist regimes, which, however, only reluctantly followed the path of Nazi Germany. In Italy, too, he could no longer rely on Mussolini's friendship . Even his protégé Starhemberg did not want to show gratitude to the "Jew" Fritz Mandl and published a memoir book in which he played no role.

Nevertheless, Mandl tried to improve his relations with Nazi Germany. He let it be known that his involvement in the Austrofascist militia was not meant against the German Anschluss, but against the socialists . He also spread that he was the son of his mother's extramarital affair with a Catholic bishop and therefore not a Jew. And finally he called on the Hirtenberger workers to vote in a plebiscite for the connection.

But Mandl did all of this from a safe distance in Switzerland . At the same time he had founded a Swiss company that acquired all the assets of the Hirtenberger and Mandls. The Nazi authorities could therefore not expropriate him without creating a political problem with Switzerland. They negotiated with Mandl at the Dolder Hotel in Zurich , released his father Alexander Mandl and granted him a substantial monthly pension .

Fritz Mandl's grave at Hirtenberger Friedhof (May 18, 2010)

In Argentina , Mandl exchanged letters with Goering's office to assess the possibility of a joint venture for the production of iron. When Great Britain did not surrender in the autumn of 1940, Mandl realized that the transport of iron across the Atlantic was too unsafe and broke off the correspondence. Mandl invested in the election campaign of Juan Perón , the Industria Metalúrgica Plástica Argentina (IMPA), a factory for small arms in the Almagro district of Buenos Aires and Cometa , a bicycle factory in San Martín (Buenos Aires) . Mandl's liaison officer in Argentina was Colonel Rudolfo Jeckeln. Mandl used the services of Johann Wehrli & Co. AG . Mandl's friend Mussolini intervened for him with Adolf Hitler , which led to the following arrangement: Mandl was given 170,000 pounds sterling and 1,240,000 Reichsmarks for the task of managing the company, and his father was released from German hostage custody.

In 1944, Mandl bought a property near Córdoba , today's Castillo de Mandl .

At the instigation of the US Embassy in Buenos Aires, Mandl was arrested and deported on March 27, 1945. Mandl's shares in companies in Argentina were nationalized and combined as arms factories.

Mandl returned to Austria in 1955, took over the Hirtenberger factory again, died in 1977 and was buried in the Hirtenberg cemetery.

literature

  • Lajos Kerekes: Dusk of a Democracy. Mussolini, Gömbös and the Heimwehr . Europa Publishing House. Vienna-Frankfurt-Zurich 1966.
  • Georg Gaugusch : The Mandl family in: Adler, Zeitschrift für Genealogie und Heraldik, 21. (XXXV.) Volume (2001-2002) p.2-10 (2001).
  • Fritz Hanauska: Heimatbuch der Marktgemeinde Hirtenberg . Market town of Hirtenberg, Hirtenberg 1980.
  • Josef Mentschl:  Mandl, Fritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 16 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Edith Linder: The Hirtenberg arms affair 1933. An internal and external political conflict for Austria . Thesis. University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck 1997.
  • Klaus-Dieter Mulley (Ed.): Storeys - Scandals - Barbed wire. Workers and armaments industry in Wöllersdorf, Enzesfeld and Hirtenberg . Self-published by the union of railway workers, local group Ebenfurth Pottendorfer Linie, Ebenfurth 1999, ISBN 3-9500563-1-6
  • Ramón Bill: Solothurn Arms Factory. Swiss precision in the service of the German arms industry . In: Series of publications by the Cantonal Museum Altes Zeughaus Solothurn . Issue 14. Solothurn 2002.
  • Peter Hug: Swiss armaments industry and war material trade during the time of National Socialism. Corporate strategies - market development - political surveillance . Publications of the Independent Expert Commission Switzerland - Second World War, Volume 11. Chronos-Verlag. Zurich 2002. ISBN 3-0340-0611-X , ISBN 978-3-0340-0611-8 .
  • Marie-Theres Arnbom : Friedmann, Gutmann, Lieben, Mandl and Strakosch - five family portraits from Vienna before 1938 . 2nd, unchanged edition. Böhlau, Vienna (among others) 2003, ISBN 3-205-99373-X .
  • Ruth Barton: Hedy Lamarr - the most beautiful woman in film . (English). Screen classics. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington (Kentucky) 2010, ISBN 978-0-8131-2604-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arnbom: Friedmann , p. 32 f.
  2. ↑ Contemporary history: The "Patronenkönig" and Lamarr husband Fritz Mandl . In: profil.at . December 13, 2017 ( profil.at [accessed December 17, 2017]).
  3. ↑ Anna Staudacher: "... announces the departure from the Mosaic faith". 18,000 resignations from Judaism in Vienna, 1868–1914. Names - Sources - Dates. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main / Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-631-55832-4 , p. 389.
  4. ^ Arnbom: Friedmann , p. 36.
  5. ^ Arnbom: Friedmann , p. 37.
  6. ↑ Hanauska: Hirtenberg , p. 369.
  7. ↑ Josef Krips, Harrietta Krips (ed.): You can't make music without love ... memories . Böhlau, Vienna (inter alia) 1994, ISBN 3-205-98158-8 , p. 453.
  8. ↑ Barton: Lamarr , p. 49.
  9. ↑ Peter Pilz: Die Panzermacher - the Austrian armaments industry and its exports . Austrian texts on social criticism, volume 10. Verlag für social criticism, Vienna 1982, ISBN 3-900351-10-4 , p. 46.
  10. ↑ Peter Böhmer, Ronald Faber: The Austrian financial administration and the restitution of seized assets 1945 to 1960 . Publications of the Austrian Commission of Historians, Volume 5. Oldenbourg, Vienna (among others) 2003, ISBN 3-7029-0469-7 , ISBN 3-486-56695-4 , p. 102 ff., P. 132 ff., P. 332 f .
  11. ↑ Uki Goñi: Odessa - the real story. Escape aid for Nazi war criminals . Translated from the English by Theo Bruns and Stefanie Graefe. Association A, Berlin / Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-935936-40-0 , p. 143.
  12. ↑ La voz 25 de febrero de 2007 Los secretos del castillo de Fritz Mandl
  13. ↑ El Castillo de Mandl - History (English)
  14. ↑ La Cumbre: El Castillo Mandl (Spanish)
  15. ^ Bryce Wood: The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy . University of Texas Press, Austin 1985, ISBN 0-292-71547-1 , p. 89 online.
  16. ↑ Permalink Austrian Library Association .
  17. ↑ Permalink Austrian Library Association .
  18. ↑ Permalink Austrian Library Association .
  19. ↑ Permalink Austrian Library Association .
  20. ↑ Permalink German National Library .

Remarks

  1. ^ Ludwig Mandl becomes co-owner from 1887. After his death in 1893, the shares passed to his nephew, Siegmund Mandl. His nephew, Dr. Alexander Mandl, comes to Hirtenberg around 1894 . - Hanauska: Hirtenberg , p. 210 f.
  2. ↑ The couple's city domicile was in the Palais Ofenheim , Schwarzenbergplatz 15, Vienna-Innere Stadt  - Arnbom: Friedmann , p. 53.
  3. ↑ Mandl was married five times, with some legal uncertainty. Mandl's wives in chronological order:
    • Hella Strauss (actress, a Viennese beauty for whom Mandl paid alimony until 1938). - Barton: Lamarr , p. 57 and Jim Ottaviani: Dignifying science. Stories about women scientists . (English). GT Labs, Ann Arbor (Michigan) 2003, ISBN 978-0-9660106-4-0 , p. 122,
    • Hedy Kiesler Lamarr (Probably cancellation of the marriage at the instigation Mandl's 1938 racial grounds Other versions: 1937 request to the Lamarr. Roman Rota to cancellation because of rejection of Rome divorce in Nevada and, according Lamarr, in Paris..) - Barton: Lamarr , P. 56. In the later Mandl / Schneider divorce proceedings, Mandl claimed that he had never been legally affiliated with Schneider because Lamarr's divorce would not have been properly carried out. According to Mandl's lawyers, however, the divorce took place in Texas but was not recognized by the Vatican . - Barton: Lamarr , p. 57,
    • Hertha Schneider von Werthal (née Wrany; marriage 1939, divorce 1951) - Barton: Lamarr , p. 57 and Josef Mentschl:  Mandl, Fritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 16 f. ( Digitized version ).,
    • Gloria Vinelli (married 1951 in Mexico City) - Barton: Lamarr , p. 57,
    • Monika Brücklmeier (daughter of Eduard Brücklmeier ) - Sophie Lillie : What once was. Handbook of the expropriated art collections of Vienna . Czernin, Vienna 2003, p. 744.
  4. ↑ camera position.
  5. ↑ The cartridge factory came under temporary management in 1955 . In 1957 it was formally reconstituted. A new stock corporation was entered in the commercial register under the title Hirtenberger Patronen- und Rohrwerke AG . Chairman of the Supervisory Board: Fritz Mandl (whose son, Fritz Mandl jun., Joined the company in 1966). - Hanauska: Hirtenberg , p. 219.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Mandl, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH September 8, 1977
Place of death Vienna