Günther Quandt

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Günther Quandt (1941)

Günther Quandt (born July 28, 1881 in Pritzwalk , Ostprignitz district , † December 30, 1954 in Cairo ) was a German industrialist from the Quandt family .

He was the father of Hellmut, Herbert and Harald Quandt . His first wife Antonie Ewald died in 1918. His second wife Magda Ritschel , Harald's mother, married Joseph Goebbels two years later after the divorce in 1929 .

biography

Until the First World War

Günther Quandt (center) with his brothers Werner and Gerhard in 1890.
Emil and Günther Quandt in 1900.
Antonie "Toni" and Günther Quandt when they got engaged in 1905.

Günther Quandt was born on July 28, 1881 as the son of the cloth manufacturer Emil Quandt (1849–1925) in Pritzwalk. (Emil Quandt had married into the Draeger family - cloth factory Gebr. Draeger / founded 1860.)

After attending the Luisenstädtische Oberrealschule in Berlin , Günther Quandt completed several years of apprenticeship in various branches of the textile industry at home and abroad. He married Antonie Ewald (1884–1918) in 1906. In 1908 the couple's first son - Hellmut (1908–1927) - was born.

In 1909 Günther Quandt was already a co-owner of the Draeger Brothers' cloth factory. In 1910 the second son - Herbert - was born. A year later, in 1911, Günther Quandt became co-owner of the Friedrich Paul cloth factory in Wittstock / Dosse . His wife died of the Spanish flu in 1918 .

First World War and Weimar Republic

After the outbreak of the First World War , Günther Quandt was active in the management of raw materials that were essential to the war effort. In 1915 he became head of Reichswoll-AG , his group of companies was the main supplier to the army.

After the First World War, Quandt worked as a consultant in the Reich Ministry of Economics of the Weimar Republic and worked for the “Reichsstelle für Textilwirtschaft”. It was not until 1922 that he resigned from the civil service, returned to Pritzwalk and merged the works in which he had already been involved in the "Draeger-Paul-Wegener Works" (Pritzwalk and Wittstock) (after the Second World War: Gebr. Draeger GmbH , Stuttgart ).

On January 4, 1921, Günther Quandt married 19-year-old Magda Ritschel (1901–1945). Ten months later, on November 1, 1921, son Harald was born.

From 1922 Günther Quandt and August Rosterg became more and more involved in the potash industry , especially in Wintershall AG, which was founded in 1921 . In addition, he succeeded in acquiring the majority of shares in the Accumulatoren Fabrik Aktiengesellschaft Berlin-Hagen (AFA) founded by Adolph Müller , the largest manufacturer of batteries and accumulators in Europe at that time - including for battery systems for submarines . (In 1958 the AFA in Berlin was renamed VEB Berliner Akkumulatoren- und Elementefabrik and in 1962 the factory in Hagen was renamed VARTA Batterie AG ).

In 1928 Quandt took control of Berlin-Karlsruher Industrie-Werke AG . During the First World War, the company was called Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken AG (DWM) and was a traditional armaments manufacturer. The victorious powers of the First World War had banned the company from producing armaments, but Günther Quandt insisted that arms would soon have a “great future” in Germany again.

Nazi Germany

Quandt and NSDAP

Quandt belonged to a group of industrialists who met with Adolf Hitler in the Berlin Hotel Kaiserhof in mid-1931 and provided the NSDAP with 25 million Reichsmarks in the event of a left-wing coup . Also in 1931 he became a member of the Society for the Study of Fascism , which acted as a link between conservative circles and the NSDAP. He was a participant in the secret meeting of industrialists with Hitler on February 20, 1933 , at which campaign aid of 3 million Reichsmarks was decided for the NSDAP. After the " seizure of power " by the Nazis, Günther Quandt adapted himself (donations from the AFA to the NSDAP; joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933, membership number 2.636.406) - and profited. Quandt's companies became important suppliers to the armaments industry , he himself became a model industrialist, and in 1937 was appointed military economist . During the Second World War , the AFA main plant in Hagen was the "control center" for other AFA plants in Hanover , Vienna and Posen . In addition to the battery systems for submarines and micro-submarines, the company mainly produced special batteries for torpedoes and for the V2 “wonder weapon” . Batteries for armored vehicles, radio and radar equipment as well as for combat aircraft were also manufactured.

"Military cloth, accumulators, dry batteries, firearms, ammunition, light metal - those who manufacture all of this are rightly called military economic leaders " (so Das Reich ). "Your most outstanding quality, however, is your belief in Germany and in the Führer, " said Hermann Josef Abs from Deutsche Bank Günther Quandt in a laudation in 1941. Quandt's AFA followed the German troops and was soon active in Riga , Cracow and Lemberg .

Operation of concentration camps

In the Quandts' factories, prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners were employed in forced labor , at the AFA plant in Hagen, beginning in the late summer of 1940, with French prisoners of war.

As a result of the increased recruitment of German workers for military service, the simultaneous forced production of submarine batteries, torpedo batteries and batteries for the V2 “miracle weapon”, the number of forced laborers and prisoners of war increased continuously and in 1944 made up around 40% of the total workforce of up to 5800 workers. In the DMW plant in Karlsruhe there were around 4,500.

From the summer of 1943, prisoners from the Stöcken concentration camp (accumulator works) ( satellite camps of the Neuengamme concentration camp ) were deployed in the AFA branch . Around 1,500 concentration camp prisoners, who were housed in the camp on the factory premises, operated the battery production in a partially lead-poisoned environment (see lead poisoning ). Another external concentration camp was housed on the premises of the Hanover plant, including an execution site.

The Hanover-Stöcken (Continental) concentration camp in Hanover was another satellite camp of the Neuengamme concentration camp, which existed for only a short time from the beginning of September 1944 with around 1000 Polish Jews . The warehouse was located next to the Continental factory. The prisoners had to work eleven hours a day in the rubber production for the manufacture of tires, which is essential for the war effort.

In 1944, prisoners from the Mauthausen concentration camp were deployed to the Vienna-Floridsdorf branch . In the AFA subsidiary Pertrix in Berlin-Niederschöneweide , around 500 female concentration camp inmates have been forced to work with caustic acids since 1944.

These working conditions demanded an average of 80 deaths per month, which were planned in advance and consciously calculated as expected “ fluctuation ”.

In November 2007, the North German Radio published the film Das Schweigen der Quandts on television . According to the film, hundreds of forced laborers who were no longer able to work and who worked in the Quandts' accumulator factory in Hanover-Stöcken and were housed in a neighboring satellite camp of Neuengamme concentration camp, were deported to Gardelegen in April 1945 . There they were victims of the massacre in the Isenschnibber barn on April 13, 1945 .

post war period

Grave slab of Günther and Harald Quandt in the Bad Homburg forest cemetery

Günther Quandt hid in Leutstetten on Lake Starnberg at the end of the war , while his son Herbert and other leading AFA employees had already moved into alternative quarters in Bissendorf near Hanover at that time and were thus able to continue business. He was arrested on July 18, 1946 for his role in the war economy and interned in the Moosburg camp. After his release in January 1948, he was classified as a fellow traveler in a court case in July 1948 , although he held numerous positions during the Nazi era , for example on the supervisory boards of Daimler-Benz , Deutsche Bank and AEG .

According to Benjamin Ferencz , who worked for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials , Günther Quandt and his son Herbert, as well as Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach , Friedrich Flick and those responsible for IG Farben , would have been charged as major war criminals if the documents available today the prosecutors at the time. The decisive documents for her work in the Nazi state were available to the authorities in the British zone of occupation . The British withheld the material because they had recognized the importance of AFA's battery production even after the war, and wanted to protect the owners because of that.

After the Second World War, the sculptor Arno Breker , Hitler's favorite sculptor, created a portrait bust of Günther Quandt, whom he had known from Berlin since the Nazi era. The industrialist sat the artist he admired for this bronze model.

Günther Quandt died on December 30, 1954 while on vacation in Egypt .

The historians Ralf Blank , who examined arms production in the accumulator factory, and Joachim Scholtyseck , who in 2011 presented a detailed scientific study of the family history up to 1954, unanimously described Günther Quandt as a skilful opportunist and entrepreneur who is present in all political systems Sought advantage.

Honors

The Hanseatic City of Lübeck named a square in the Schlutup industrial park after Günther Quandt, which was renamed Wilhelm-Krohn-Platz in 2012.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rüdiger Jungbluth: The Quandts . Campus-Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-593-36940-0 , p. 23. Restricted preview in Google book search
  2. ^ Rüdiger Jungbluth: The Quandts . Campus-Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-593-36940-0 , p. 29. Restricted preview in Google book search
  3. ^ Rüdiger Jungbluth: The Quandts . Campus-Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-593-36940-0 , p. 37. Restricted preview in the Google book search
  4. ↑ Henry Ashby Turner (ed.): Hitler up close, notes of a confidante 1929-1932 . Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1978, p. 372 ff.
  5. ^ Ralf Blank: Hagen in the Second World War . Pp. 85-138; Ralf Blank: Energy for "retaliation"
  6. ↑ Cit. AFA-Ring, 8, 1941, no. 5, p. 5.
  7. ↑ The Quandts' Silence . Documentation, 60 min., Production: NDR , first broadcast, ARD , September 30, 2007, 11:30 p.m., youtube video Das Schweigen der Quandts
  8. ↑ Ralf Stremmel: Zeitgeschichte im Fernsehen offers a critical, sometimes exaggerated examination of the film . The award-winning documentary "The Quandts' Silence" as a questionable paradigm . In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . 58 (2010), pp. 455-481. A criticism of this essay: Willi Winkler: Seltsamer Revisionismus . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of October 31, 2010.
  9. ↑ Internet site of the Isenschnibbe barn memorial in Gardelegen. Accessed January 31, 2018 .
  10. ^ Rüdiger Jungbluth: The Quandts . Campus, 2002, p. 213.
  11. ↑ Rüdiger Jungbluth: The Quandts and the Nazis . In: Die Zeit from November 15, 2007, pp. 27/28, (online)
  12. ↑ The Quandts' Silence . Documentation, 60 min., Production: NDR , first broadcast, ARD , September 30, 2007, 11:30 pm
  13. ^ Ralf Blank: Hagen in the Second World War . P. 98; Joachim Scholtyseck, Interview Wirtschaftswoche from September 28, 2011 (online)
  14. ↑ Source: https://www.schlutup.info/quandt-platz.htm
personal data
SURNAME Quandt, Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Pritzwalk , Ostprignitz district
DATE OF DEATH December 30, 1954
Place of death Cairo