Guarantee and credit bank for the east

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The Guarantee and Credit Bank for the East (Garkrebo) was a Berlin- based bank specializing in business with the Soviet Union during the Weimar Republic .

Unter den Linden 68a was the address in Berlin (photo of the building during previous use)

Its founder, the Swedish banker Olof Aschberg , had set up a trading office in Berlin in 1920 that also served to process Russian financial transactions, which after the founding of the Russian Commercial Bank in 1922 - Aschberg was chairman of the board there - converted into the guarantee and credit bank for the East has been. It was built with a capital of 100 million marks with the participation of the Russian State Bank and represented the Russian Commercial Bank in Germany.

In the early 1920s, the business of the German export industry was still structured in such a way that the Soviet Union paid for the goods in cash , but long-term payment terms soon became common. Accordingly, after the trade agreement of 1925, Deutsche Bank and Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft granted the Soviet Union a credit line of 75 million Reichsmarks . German exporters were able to recover three quarters of their sales price immediately - they had to take care of the procurement of the remaining 25 percent in some other way - so that 50 percent were paid out by the banks on presentation of the delivery notes or contracts with the Russian commercial agency, while 25 percent of the value went to the Garkrebo against the deposit of bills of exchange . In addition to the practical benefit, the agreement had the principle value for the Soviet Union that the credit blockade imposed on the USSR was broken for the first time.

One of the first orders presented by Moscow was only reluctantly accepted, however, to help Willi Munzenbergs Aufbau, Industrie & Handels AG gain liquidity by lending up to 80% to the guarantee and credit bank as a representative of the Russian state bank when an international workers' bond was issued Percent would take over. The bond, which was aimed at a propagandistic effect, offered the social democratic press an area of ​​attack in that it could warn against a supposedly certain failure to redeem the bonds later. Possibly the workers' loan served as a means of concealing the origin of the money needed to pay for machines bought abroad: what looked like the international proletariat was supporting the Soviet Union was misappropriated donations or the expropriation of wealthy Russians.

Contrary to the pessimistic expectations, however, the bonds including interest were redeemed when the bank had a liquidation office at the turn of the year 1932/33, which, thanks to extraterritoriality, was able to work after Hitler came to power . The German attack on the Soviet Union took place on 22./23. June 1941 the arrest of the management after himself and the compulsory administration by the Reich Commissioner for Hostile Assets, without any business from now on.

It was put back into operation on May 27, 1945 and approved as a purely Soviet company by Marshal Wassili Sokolowski , head of SMAD , under the new name Garantie und Kreditbank AG . In terms of its own self-image, it was a service provider for SMAD on German soil, it was a branch of the Soviet state bank, operated under private law according to local law, with the power to develop into the center of banking and finance in the Soviet Zone from 1946 to 1949 . 1949 was the year of the maximum turnover with 38 billion marks, to be processed after transferring its tasks to the German central bank in 1956.

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Footnotes

  1. ^ Babette Gross : Willi Munzenberg. A political biography. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1967, p. 143.
  2. ↑ Manfred Pohl : The financing of the Russian business between the two world wars. The development of the 12 large Russian consortia. Fritz Knapp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1975, p. 10.
  3. ^ Manfred Pohl: Business and Politics. German-Russian / Soviet economic relations 1850–1988. v. Hase & Koehler Verlag, Mainz, 1988, p. 80.
  4. ↑ Alain Dugrand & Frédéric Laurent: Willi Münzenberg. Artiste en révolution (1889–1940). Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris 2008, p. 218.
  5. ↑ Sean McMeekin: The red millionaire. A political biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow's secret propaganda tsar in the West. Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2003, p. 138.