Gelsenberg affair

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The term Gelsenberg affair , also Gelsenkirchen affair , describes the secret and overpriced purchase of a block of shares in Gelsenkirchener Bergwerk AG (and thus also the share blocking minority for Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG ) on May 6, 1932 from the property of Friedrich Flick by the then largely State-owned Dresdner Bank under the then Reich government under Heinrich Brüning .

prehistory

In the 1920s, Friedrich Flick had taken over the majority in Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG and through this stake gained control of the United Stahlwerke AG . The entrepreneur financed these and other acquisitions largely through loans.

After the Great Depression of 1929, Flick was now confronted with the demands of his creditors in the amount of 66 million Reichsmarks , which he could no longer pay, as his company investments were only a fraction of the value they had before the stock market crash. While it was previously able to offer securities of 110 million Reichsmarks, these had now shrunk to 25 million Reichsmarks.

To save his group of companies, he tried to sell parts of the portfolio. Flick was ready to give up his majority stake in the United Steelworks, so he started looking for investors in the Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG.

The sale

The Swedish industrialist Ivar Kreuger was initially interested, and American investors were also in discussion. After these negotiations were unsuccessful, Fritz Thyssen offered 120 million Reichsmarks for the shares, which he wanted to raise with the help of Dutch and French donors. These included the major French bank Crédit Lyonnais , which worked with the Berlin bank Mendelssohn . After this project became public through indiscretions, the German national press launched smear campaigns against the Jewish banking house Mendelssohn and the French investors. Parallels were drawn with the occupation of the Ruhr by French troops. A short time later, the Dutch media reported that the Luxembourg steel company Arbed wanted to pay Flick, together with the French armaments company Schneider, five times the market value (around 125 million Reichsmarks) for the shares in Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG. It later became known that this message was launched from Flick's environment.

The situation came to a head in January 1932 when the United Steel Works were on the verge of bankruptcy. Now, through his confidante Otto Steinbrinck , who, as a highly decorated military man from the First World War, had good contacts with Berlin politics, Flick made secret contact with the Reich government under Brüning and negotiated a sale of the shares to the German state, with the threat of otherwise having to sell to French investors.

In view of the public discontent that was to be feared and the strengthening of the nationalist and revanchist forces, the Reich government finally agreed on May 6, 1932, to buy the shares at 90 percent of the nominal value , which was a price of 99 million Reichsmarks for the package of Gelsenberg shares corresponded. The market value at the same time was just 25 million Reichsmarks. Critics spoke of an indirect state subsidy or even of corruption (with regard to Flicks good contacts in politics).

Flick paid for this transaction 450,000 RM to the election fund to finance the Hindenburg - 1932 election and another 100,000 RM for a secret funds of the Reichswehr and again 100,000 RM for a fund of Chancellor Franz von Papen . The transactions were brokered by Otto Wolff , member of the supervisory board of the United Steel Works AG, through Kurt von Schleicher ( presidential cabinet ) with the Reich Finance Minister Hermann Dietrich .

With the sale price, Flick was able to pay off all liabilities, later (during the Flick process ) he justified the inflated price with the actual possibility of selling a key company to foreign investors and with the risk of the bankruptcy of his entire group of companies, which was the case Eliminate tens of thousands of jobs. The transaction was carried out on May 31st through a subsidiary of the then state-dominated Dresdner Bank , Hardy & Co. GmbH , which had the advantage that this subsidiary, as a GmbH, did not have to publish any balance sheets and so the transaction could remain hidden.

As a result of the transaction, the heavy industry representatives around Fritz Thyssen and Emil Kirdorf lost their influence on the supervisory board of the United Stahlwerke AG to the representatives of the chemical and electrical industry around Carl Friedrich von Siemens .

aftermath

On July 19 of the same year, the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Kölnische Zeitung published reports on the controversial deal. The news of such indirect subsidization of large-scale German industry in the person of Friedrich Flick in times of economic hardship caused great outrage across all political camps. However, since the government under Brüning had meanwhile been replaced by the Franz von Papen government, clarification of the case was delayed and was not pursued after the NSDAP came to power on January 30, 1933, which was due to the good contacts Flick had with the Nazi leadership was attributable.

The Gelsenberg affair was not the last political scandal in which the industrial family Flick was involved. In the 1980s, Friedrich Flick's son Friedrich Karl Flick also caused a major scandal with the so-called Flick affair .

With the Lex Stahlverein in 1936, the share package was sold back for the United Steelworks with a profit of 33 million Reichsmark .

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