Helmut Horten

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Helmut Horten (born January 8, 1909 in Bonn , † November 30, 1987 in Croglio , Switzerland ) was a German entrepreneur . He comes from the Horten merchant family .

Life

Horten was born in 1909 as the son of Josef Emil August Horten, lawyer for the Senate President at the Cologne Higher Regional Court . His godfather was the Dominican Titus Maria Horten and he was a cousin of Alphons Horten .

Career

He did an apprenticeship at the Leonhard Tietz department store in Düsseldorf and then moved to the Alsberg brothers' textile department store in the neighboring city of Duisburg . When German Jews were increasingly expropriated when the National Socialists came to power in 1933 , and the owners of the Alsberg Brothers , Strauss and Lauter department store were forced to sell and later emigrated to the USA , Horten bought this department store in May 1936. The financing was secured by banker Wilhelm Reinold from Hamburg's Commerz- und Disconto-Bank , a friend of the Horten family, who made the bank a silent partner in the Horten & Co. company that was now founded .

In the same year, Horten acquired the Hess department store in Wattenscheid , which was followed by another six stores by 1939. Although Titus Maria Horten , the entrepreneur's godfather, died in 1936 after a Nazi show trial and subsequent imprisonment , this had no effect on the relationship with the Hitler regime . He managed to take over the distribution of war-related goods for department stores in the entire Lower Rhine area.

After the end of World War II , the British imprisoned Horten in August 1946 and interned him in Recklinghausen until early 1948 . Horten was released after a 17-day hunger strike. During his internment he met Rudolf Tesmann , the former adjutant of Gauleiter Ernst Wilhelm Bohle , who was later to move up to the advertising department of Horten & Co. , then to the advertising ring in Duisburg city center . In 1948 he returned to Duisburg.

Since he had not lost his company and had been hoarding goods in a disused shaft of the August-Thyssen-Hütte, Hamborn, from 1944, Horten began to consolidate and expand Horten & Co. after his release . In 1958, he built a building in Duisburg city center Six-storey building that now houses the Kaufhof and the outer walls and facade of which are listed. In 1953 he bought Merkur AG for 10 million DM , which had belonged to Salman Schocken until 1938 and from 1949 onwards . The bank-financed takeover required the old Horten & Co. to be renamed Merkur Horten & Co. KG , based in Nuremberg . Helmut Horten remained the sole personally liable partner.

In 1954, Horten acquired the shares in Emil Köster AG that had previously been offered to Friedrich Flick from the entrepreneur Jakob Michael who had emigrated to New York and who owned New Jersey Industries as a foreign holding company of DeFaKa , which was then transferred to Emil Köster KG a. A. was converted and its supervisory board u. a. Duisburg regional court director Hans Gatermann and Duisburg lawyer Wilhelm Großhans moved up.

Private

Horten's first wife committed suicide. Around 1964, Horten met the 32 years younger secretary Heidi Jelinek, later Heidi Horten (* 1941) in a hotel bar in Velden am Wörthersee . She became his second wife in 1966. For the wedding he gave her the Blue Wittelsbacher . At the end of 1968, the Horten couple moved to Croglio in the canton of Ticino . Shortly afterwards, from 1969 to 1970, Horten converted his company into a stock corporation so that he could sell its majority. By 1972 he had completely withdrawn from the department store group. The sale itself was controversial for a long time because the shares fell well below the issue price a short time after the issue . For the sale he received DM 1.2 billion, which was tax-free due to a loophole in the law .

For Mülheim an der Ruhr , where he had a representative villa built on Uhlenhorstweg, and especially for Duisburg , where the center of his entrepreneurial activities was, Horten became an important sponsor after the war. He became a member of the Duisburg club Raffelberg , to which he a. a. had a center court built for large tennis tournaments, promoted football, the Duisburg Carnival , donated the Duisburg Zoo and others. a. an elephant and was also involved in the establishment of the famous Dolphinarium in 1965. Only the wish to found a cabaret based on the Berlin model in Duisburg could never be fulfilled. In 1983 he donated 6 million DM to the FDP, which he had saved from financial problems in 1956 with a million donation.

In 1971 Horten established the Villalta Foundation in Croglio to promote medical research; it was renamed the Helmut Horten Foundation after his death . In 2004, the foundation's capital was over 60 million Swiss francs. His wife Heidi was the sole heir to his fortune.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Bernt Engelmann : The power on the Rhine. My friends, the money giants. The old wealth. Volume 1, W. Goldmann, Munich 1983, ISBN 3-442-06649-2 , p. 85.
  2. "After the Aryanization, the department store fell to Mr. Horten for an apple and an egg, after he first ran it as a trustee ..." Statement by saleswoman Erika H. from: Bernt Engelmann , Günter Wallraff : You up there, we down there , Verlag der Nation Berlin, 1975, ISBN 3-462-01202-9
  3. a b c d Hans Otto Eglau: The golden twenty years: With skill, luck and patrons, Helmut Horten became a thousandfold millionaire , Die Zeit, 2/1972, January 14, 1972
  4. finanzen net GmbH: Helmut Horten: The knight of fortune created a department store empire - 02/28/20 - BÖRSE ONLINE. Retrieved April 4, 2020 .
  5. Galeria Kaufhof and monument protection: 60 years of department stores : Galeria, Merkur, Horten , bz-duisburg.de, accessed on May 19, 2019
  6. a b Party finance : The super-rich in Schmollwinkel , Die Zeit 47/1984, November 16, 1984
  7. Der Spiegel November 26, 1984: Safe feeling
  8. a b Died: Helmut Horten , Der Spiegel 50/1987, December 7, 1987
  9. Heidi Horten. Feminine, single, rich. In: Manager magazine . January 30, 2004.