Hans Gerling

Hans Gerling (born June 6, 1915 in Cologne; † August 14, 1991 ibid.) Was a German insurance company and headed the Gerling Group, which he had owned since 1935, from 1949 until his death .

Hans Gerling came as the second of three sons of the married couple Robert and Auguste, geb. Hoffmeister, born in Cologne. The oldest son was Robert Gerling II (* 1913), the youngest Walter Gerling (1918-2019). After Hans Gerling had passed his Abitur at what was then Realgymnasium Kreuzgasse , he studied economics and law and passed the diploma examination as a business graduate in 1936 . As early as 1937 he received his doctorate on the subject of “monetary value and unemployment”.

In an agreement dated July 12, 1934, Robert transferred the shares in the Gerling Group to his son Hans , but retained the voting rights until his death. After Robert Gerling died shortly afterwards in January 1935 as a result of acute pneumonia , he did not leave his three sons a legally valid will . After Robert Gerling's death, Walter Forstreuter initially took over management of the company because Gerling's sons were still too young for this. Hans Gerling's brother Robert Gerling II received the post of general manager until he emigrated to the USA in 1939 . Hans Gerling himself took over this post in 1939. Forstreuter - never a member of the NSDAP - was allowed to continue his activity with the approval of the American military government when the business was reopened on June 2, 1945. On November 13, 1948 Forstreuter resigned from the chairmanship in favor of Hans Gerling. In January 1949, Hans Gerling became CEO of all Gerling companies.

Brother Robert Gerling II tried to regain control of the company, which he succeeded in 1947. In the years that followed, the three brothers argued in numerous will trials before reaching a settlement in April 1958 . The settlement provided that Hans Gerling and initially also his brother Walter kept the German companies of the Gerling group, Robert received 30 million DM as severance pay and the Swiss and American companies.

Hans Gerling initiated the construction of the Gerling high-rise in Cologne's Gereonsviertel, which was completed on January 25, 1953. At the instigation of Hans Gerling, the sculptor Arno Breker contributed to the design. Gerling founded on April 20, 1954 Gerling Speziale Kreditversicherungs-AG , the first commercial credit -, surety and fidelity insurance business. After his youngest brother Walter left, Hans Gerling took over sole management of the company in 1965.

After Hans Gerling's childhood friend Iwan David Herstatt the insignificant Cologne on June 2, 1955 Bankhaus Stools & Co. had acquired Gerling involved with a contribution of 5 million DM as a limited partner - shareholder (81.4%; the rest was subsidiaries of Gerling -Group) at the bank, which has been operating as "Bankhaus ID Herstatt KGaA" since December 10, 1955 . Because of the majority stake, the Herstatt Bank was in fact a subsidiary of the Gerling Group. As a result of bad speculation by the Herstatt Bank, it got into a banking crisis from June 1973 , from which it no longer recovered. On June 26, 1974, the Federal Banking Supervisory Office withdrew the Herstatt Bank's banking license . In December 1974, under public pressure, Gerling had to pledge 51% of the shares in his Gerling group to the Deutsche Bank as collateral . An insurance holding company owned by Deutsche Industrie (VHDI) consisting of 59 industrial companies - whose majority shareholder was Friedrich Karl Flick - acquired 25.9%, the remaining 25.1% of the shares were taken over by Zurich Insurance Company . Gerling resigned as CEO from numerous companies and took over supervisory board mandates at the respective companies. The sale brought 210 million DM into the benchmark of the Herstatt bank, which Gerling paid voluntarily to enable a compulsory settlement . In February 1978, Zurich sold its shares to VDHI. After Gerling bought back a total of 88.8% of the shares in VHDI in January 1986 and the pledge was dissolved again, he regained control of the Gerling Group. After Hans Gerling's death in August 1991, his son Rolf Gerling took over the company as the sole heir.

Hans Gerling was posthumously referred to as a "social patriarch" by Hilmar Kopper . He never left any doubts about who is “in charge”, but at the same time was social. He refused participation because he was against external influence without corresponding internal responsibility. But he gave his executives entrepreneurial freedoms and the social partners a say.

In 1973 Günter Wallraff worked for two months as a messenger in the Gerling company and wrote a book about it.

literature

• Gerling in: Bernt Engelmann / Günter Wallraff : "You there above, we there below" , pp. 207-258, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, 1976 (1973 at Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne)
• The spectacle . In: Der Spiegel . No. 41 , 1958 ( online - October 8, 1958 , about the opening ceremony of the Gerling administration building in Cologne).

Web links

• Literature by and about Hans Gerling in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ OV, Von Friedrich Wilhelm zu Gerling - A Century of Life Insurance 1866–1966 , 1966, p. 82
2. ↑ 100 years of Gerling - a chronicle. (PDF) (No longer available online.) HDI, archived from the original on May 2, 2014 ; Retrieved April 29, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ^ Peter Koch: History of the insurance industry in Germany . 2012, ISBN 978-3-89952-371-3 , pp. 364 .
4. ↑ DER SPIEGEL 17/1958 of April 23, 1958, Der Bruderkrieg , p. 6 ff.
5. ↑ koelnarchitektur.de: The Gerling buildings in the Friesenviertel ( Memento of the original from February 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
6. ↑ Rudolf Vierhaus (Ed.): Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie , Volume 3, 2006, p. 781
7. ↑ Peter Koch, History of the Insurance Industry in Germany , 2012, p. 414