Hans Weidtman

Hans Weidtman (born March 21, 1894 in Dortmund ; † February 4, 1977 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German bank manager and director of the Deutsche Bank branches in Düren , Sofia and Istanbul .

Live and act

Hans Weidtman was the son of the mining manager Victor Weidtman and Adele Grach (1862-1944) and brother of Maria Weidtman, who had married the judge Hugo Cadenbach . After his parents moved to Aachen in 1908 , where they had acquired Rahe Castle in Aachen, Hans Weidtman completed a banking apprenticeship from 1911 to 1913 at the Aachen branch of the Bergisch-Märkische Bank . During the First World War he initially served in the cuirassier regiment "Graf Gessler" (Rheinisches) No. 8 and was later trained as a pilot. Awarded EK I , he then finished his military service as a lieutenant in the reserve and was taken over by Deutsche Bank, to which the Bergisch-Märkische Bank had been transferred in 1914.

After just a few years, Deutsche Bank put him in charge of the branch in Düren. In 1925 he was transferred to Sofia, where he initially took over the management of the local branch as deputy director and from 1929 as director. Weidtman was active on the school board of the German school abroad in Sofia from 1920 to 1925 . He then chaired the administrative committee of the German schools in Bulgaria, and was instrumental in the construction of the school building there in 1930. For this purpose he also became a member of the board of directors of “Pestalozzi AG”, which was exclusively responsible for purchasing the required property and building the school. As a special gift, Weidtman also bequeathed its own swimming pool to the new building complex. On April 27, 1931, Weidtman was ceremoniously bid farewell by the school management after he had to move to the Istanbul branch of Deutsche Bank due to work.

There Weidtman was appointed as second director alongside Edmund Goldenberg and from 1938 together with Kurt Hausmann as co-director in place of Edmund Goldenberg, who had been pushed out because of his Jewish descent. At that time, this branch of Deutsche Bank was the only remaining foreign representation of a German bank, along with Deutsche Orientbank , through which a large part of the trade in stolen gold was handled. Deutsche Bank managed gold deposits for the embassies in Ankara and Istanbul as well as for the consulate in Istanbul and for numerous senior embassy and consular officials. This was also one of the reasons why the acting ambassador in Istanbul, Franz von Papen , refused to bring Weidtman to the embassy as commercial attaché in 1939 , as had been planned by Hermann Josef Abs , member of the board and responsible for the international business of the Berlin bank headquarters because von Papen, who himself had a gold deposit at Deutsche Bank, declared him indispensable as the head of the Istanbul branch.

On August 3, 1944, after diplomatic relations were broken off, Turkish-German business relations also collapsed and Weidtman was taken prisoner by the Turks and, like his CO director, was initially taken to a Turkish internment camp and from there to the camp of the German School in Istanbul later moved to Kırşehir . After the end of the war, Weidtman was handed over to the American armed forces, which first took him to a camp near Pisa and later to Hohenasperg , while his family was able to return to Istanbul. After his release from internment, Weidtman initially saw no opportunity to return to Istanbul and then took on an assignment as a charge de mission of the Banque de la Société Générale based in Frankfurt am Main until 1951 . Afterwards, he finally moved back to Istanbul, where he worked as a freelance businessman for various American companies and as a consultant for the Turkish Central Bank and, among other things, assisted in the liquidation of the former Deutsche Bank branch.

During his time in Istanbul, Weidtman made a significant contribution to the interests of the German School in Istanbul . He was also a member of Club Aachener Casino since 1919 . In 1959 he received the Great Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany . Hans Weidtman spent his twilight years in Turkey.

Hans Weidtman was married to Susanne Marie Valentine Tramsen (* 1909), daughter of the businessman Georg Hans Andreas Tramsen (* 1881) from Flensburg, with whom he had several children.

literature

• Eduard Arens, Wilhelm Leopold Janssen : Club Aachener Casino , new ed. by Elisabeth Janssen and Felix Kuetgens , Druck Metz, Aachen 2nd edition 1964, p. 226
• Anna Slavtcheva-Raiber: History, development and language advertising activities of German schools in Bulgaria from 1900 to 1939; Diss. University of Mannheim, 2006; Mentions on pages: 87, 88, 101, 161 and 341 pdf
• Jonathan Steinberg: Deutsche Bank and its gold transactions during the Second World War, CH Beck, 1999, mentions on pages 55, 56, 60, 66 and 70 digitalisat

Web links

• A Century of Deutsche Bank in Turkey, Vita Hans Weidtman on pages 46ff. (English)
• Entry about Hans Weidtman in Familienbuch-euregio.eu; accessed on June 9, 2017

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Vita Hans Peter Weidtman, p. 7 (English) ( Memento of the original from May 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.