Gustav Lichdi

Gustav Lichdi (born April 13, 1876 at the Dörrhof near Rosenberg ; † April 26, 1945 at Liebenstein Castle ) was a German entrepreneur. He founded the Lichdi grocery chain .

Life

Gustav Lichdi was the fourth of ten children of the farmer Johannes Lichdi and his second wife Dina, geb. Kreuter or Kreider. Johannes Lichdi was not the owner of the Dörrhof, but had only leased it from the Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rosenberg family and lost this lease in 1886 after one or two bad harvests . Since the couple was now without income, the children were distributed among relatives. Gustav Lichdi came to an aunt on a farm in Bundorf and had to break off his school career after five years of elementary school and help to look after the cattle. At times he later lived again with his parents, who got by with day labor and sewing work and were supported by their Mennonite community members. The short-term plan to emigrate to America was abandoned.

Through his mother's mediation, Gustav Lichdi received an apprenticeship at the grocer Heidenreich in Mannheim . He worked there from 1890 to 1893. His brothers also completed their apprenticeships with Heidenreich. In addition, Gustav Lichdi continued his education. After completing his apprenticeship, he worked for two years in Lahr and Neustadt an der Weinstrasse . From 1895 he was employed by Jacob Latscha in Frankfurt am Main . Like Lichdi, Latscha was a Mennonite and since 1892 tried his hand at branch operations in what was then relatively new in Germany . Lichdi rose quickly from the simple clerk and received management tasks in the administration of the company; his salary was increased accordingly.

During his time in Frankfurt, Lichdi gave accounting courses at the YMCA there , which Latscha had founded. At that time he also met his future wife Henriette Hunnius (1878–1970), who worked as a housekeeper for a banker. The couple married in Cannstatt in 1905 ; In 1907 the only son Kurt was born.

In 1903, Gustav Lichdi followed the long-cherished wish to become self-employed and opened a chemist's shop in Wiesbaden with a partner named Koch , but quickly gave up this experiment and resolved never to associate again. He decided to open his own grocery store in Heilbronn , where there was still no full-range supplier in 1903. He opened this first Lichdi store on February 5, 1904 at Lohtorstrasse 18 on the corner of Rathausgasse. In June of the same year a branch followed in Sülmerstrasse. Contrary to his intentions, he had to team up with a business partner again, because his initial capital of 5,000 marks was not enough to start the business: A nephew of Latscha's, Adolf Lehmann, paid 7,500 marks into the newly founded Lichdi GmbH.

As early as 1905, Lichdi introduced the Sunday off for his employees; the shops were closed that day. He later set up a support association for retirees and had a so-called “welfare building” built on the site of the central warehouse for the employees.

By the turn of the year 1905/06, Lichdi had set up five branches in Heilbronn. They were supplied from a central warehouse at Badstrasse 30. In 1907, after a financial bottleneck, a branch in Neckargartach followed , and by the outbreak of World War I , 16 further branches were added in an area that stretched from Eppingen in the west to Crailsheim in the east and from Bietigheim in the south to Neckarelz in the north. At that time there were eleven branches in Heilbronn itself. The central warehouse was now at Frankfurter Strasse 18b.

Lichdi's success, which was partly based on massive advertising measures, evidently attracted the envy of the competition. He had to defend himself against defamation several times. For example, he announced in a newspaper advertisement in 1906: "As we hear, there is a rumor that a small child had been found in our sauerkraut [...]" Lichdi insisted on paying 100 marks to the person who created it Would show the rumor usable in court. Apparently, the slander could not negatively affect business. If the Lichdi family had previously lived at more modest addresses, they now moved to Heilbronn city center to a place of residence on the corner of Kaiserstrasse and Allee . Lichdi later built a villa at Lerchenstrasse 83, which was used as a so-called America House in the post-war period. After the Second World War, the Rhein-Main-Bank (later Dresdner Bank and Commerzbank ) built their Heilbronn branch on the property on Kaiserstraße and Allee .

During the First World War, Gustav Lichdi was conscripted in a food laboratory. Again he had to defend himself against slander during this period; this time it was said that he was an Italian and had set himself apart with gold, whereupon he made his family background and personal résumé public.

After the First World War, in July 1918, the GmbH was converted into a limited partnership . Gustav Lichdi became a personally liable partner and, like his partner Lehmann, shared half of the profit. Lichdi, who became a commercial judge in 1920, now began to spend his money on land and real estate. In addition to a commercial building in Neckarelz, he bought a plot of land in Heilbronn's Südstadt on the corner of Urbanstrasse and Happelstrasse. There - at Happelstrasse 17 - he had his first warehouse built in 1922. It was expanded in 1937/38. The already mentioned building for the employees was also built on this property. In addition to the horse and carriage, which belonged to the company until the air raid on December 4, 1944 , a truck was also used from 1921, which enabled branches to be set up in more distant places.

In June 1924 the limited partnership became a stock corporation . Gustav Lichdi now had a simple majority with 52% of the shares and was no longer personally liable. In 1924 he set up ten new branches, but in the process came to the brink of finance and had to look for help at Latscha through Lehmann, which meant that another member of the board had to be included in the company. The arrangement with this Mr. Niedermaier did not succeed for a long time; In 1926 Dr. Karl Schmidt replaces. By 1933 31 additional branches and branches had been set up; one of them had to be closed again later. Lichdi stores were now also in places that were relatively far away from Heilbronn, such as Ansbach and Schwäbisch Gmünd . From 1927 on there were also two so-called "mobile branches", which was taken particularly badly by the competition. As early as 1927, Edeka organized a rally against this form of sale; An inquiry followed in the state parliament because the retail sector felt threatened. Lichdi had to stop selling the two trucks in 1933 after district manager Richard Drauz had warned him by telephone.

Lichdi could not come to terms well with the National Socialists either. As a member of the Heilbronn Freemason Lodge and the Rotary Club , of which he had been a founding member in 1931, he was not wanted in the NSDAP . The Rotary Club records that he had hidden at home were confiscated by the Gestapo . Against another slander - this time it was assumed that he was a Jew - he defended himself by a notice in his shop window. In his anniversary publication from 1934, he criticized the law for the protection of retail trade and the Reich Nutrition Act , both enacted in 1933, quite bluntly. There he described it as madness to paralyze private initiatives as a matter of principle, and declared: “Without free competition there is no progress and no cultural development”. Nevertheless, sales in 1938/39 reached a high of 5.5 million Reichsmarks. At that time, Lichdi had 240 employees.

Gustav Lichdi's grave in the Heilbronn main cemetery

When the Second World War broke out , Kurt Lichdi, who had given up his pianist career in 1935 and had worked for the company since then, was drafted into military service. Gustav Lichdi was therefore unable to retire due to old age or illness. Suffering from pancreatic cancer since about 1942 , he was no longer able to work in the summer of 1944. After the air raid on December 4, 1944, he was brought from Heilbronn to Liebenstein Castle near Neckarwestheim . Lichdi had been associated with the Mennonite tenant of the estate connected to the castle for years. There he wrote a legacy to the members of his supervisory board on February 7, 1945, in which he proposed that his wife Henriette be taken to the supervisory board until his son's return.

Gustav Lichdi also found out that 13 of the 14 Heilbronn branches had been destroyed by the war and the headquarters had been plundered. In April 1945 it was not possible to receive news about the foreign branches. But he explained that the work was going on and that the shops would just be rebuilt. He died two days later.

Gustav Lichdi was first buried in Neckarwestheim. His body was later transferred to Heilbronn and buried there in October 1945.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Image of the first Lichdi store
2. ↑ The Heilbronner Amerikahaus in Lerchenstrasse; 1950s , at www.stadtgeschichte-heilbronn.de
3. ^ Marianne Fix, American Library
4. ↑ Quoted from Diether Götz Lichdi, Vom Hütebub zum Handelsherrn. Gustav Lichdi (1876–1945) , in: Christhard Schrenk (ed.), Heilbronner Köpfe VI. Life pictures from two centuries (= small series of publications from the archive of the city of Heilbronn 58), Heilbronn 2011, ISBN 978-3-940646-08-8 , pp. 55–78, here p. 75.
5. ↑ Kurt Lichdi later appeared again as a pianist and he was also one of the founders of the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra in Heilbronn . See Ulrike Arnold (ed.), Standpunkte - Perspektiven. Essays and articles by Diether Götz Lichdi , BoD 2010, ISBN 978-3839181140 , p. 187. The Heilbronn city archive keeps a concert program from 1939: Program of Kurt Lichdi's first piano recital in Heilbronn .
6. ↑ Diether Götz Lichdi, Vom Hütebub zum Handelsherrn. Gustav Lichdi (1876–1945) , in: Christhard Schrenk (ed.), Heilbronner Köpfe VI. Life pictures from two centuries (= small series of publications of the archive of the city of Heilbronn 58), Heilbronn 2011, ISBN 978-3-940646-08-8 , pp. 55–78