Herbert Eklöh

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Herbert Eklöh (born March 3, 1905 in Bochum ; † July 6, 1978 in southern France ) was a German entrepreneur and former Mexican honorary consul .

Life

Eklöh came from a merchant family. He had been married to Elli Semmler since the 1930s and from this marriage had a common adoptive son, Herbert Eklöh, jr. In 1940, as a result of his relationship with the married Erne Kreke, their son Jörn was born, who only lived with him for a short time after 1952 and whom he then attended school and university in the United States. In 1953, the Eklöhs opened a children's home for orphans in their place of residence in Dahl bei Hagen .

Eklöh, who had learned the trade of druggist , opened his first grocery store in Gummersbach in 1928 , which he sold again in 1932, which now has five branches. A year later, Eklöh reopened a retail store, now in Osnabrück on Grosse Strasse. In 1934 he also took over three branches of the “non-Aryan” Edelweiss-Oelgesellschaft from “a friend of his parents” in Oggersheim and Ludwigshafen am Rhein , which he reopened in November 1935 as a “German store”. After 1935 he first became a consultant and later director of the Kaufhof food departments. In 1938 Eklöh opened the first self-service grocery store in Europe at Jürgensort 6/8 in Osnabrück, and in the same year Eklöh also introduced his “ratio system” in Ludwigshafen. In 1939 he became general director of the Görlitzer Wareneinkaufsverein in Dresden , which operated 110 shops in Saxony. He also ran a number of his own branch stores, which were managed by authorized representatives or authorized signatories. In the Reich Chamber of Commerce, Eklöh was the deputy head of the "Zweckvereinigung Filialbetriebe", head of the "Working group for food stores" and a member of the advisory board of the "Food group Berlin". After the occupation of the Soviet Union in the Ukraine in autumn 1941, the Reichsgruppe Handel in the Reich Ministry of Economics commissioned Eklöh "with the food supply of the German civilian population in Kiev ". Eklöh also acted as acting managing director of the "Auffanggesellschaft Oberschlesien" of the Handels Aufbau-Ost GmbH (HAO), which had the task of expropriating Polish and Jewish companies in the war-occupied areas in Eastern Europe in order to sell them to Germans after the expected end of the war especially to those involved in the war. In Chemnitz , on October 24, 1945, Eklöh sold a plot of land owned by the Uhlmann company to the Franz Dost company.

After the Second World War , both the Görlitzer Wareneinkaufsverein and Eklöh himself were expropriated in what was then the Soviet occupation zone, but he set up more self-service shops in northern and western Germany and expanded to Cuba himself . The Emil Uhlmann company continued to exist in the west, Eklöh had branches in Dortmund and Cologne , which were brought into Eklöh KG aA in 1956 as a contribution in kind. In Ludwigshafen, his grocery stores were completely sold to a co-owner in 1948. 1956 60 million were in its approximately 58 stores  DM implemented (in today's money about 149,147,898 €) and opened on 26 September 1957 Eklöh on 2,000 sqm of retail space in Cologne Rheinlandhalle one of the first German supermarkets , where in the first year 9.2 million DM were converted.

In 1958 he sold the twenty-four supermarkets of the Cologne-based Herbert Eklöh KG aA to a consortium of the department store groups Karstadt , Hertie , Kaufhof and Horten and became a member of the supervisory board of the company now trading as Eklöh GmbH . Eklöh then continued to operate the remaining branch companies Joh. Schreiber & Co. in Ludwigshafen (four large stores and 33 branches) and the Herbert Eklöh company in Münster (six large stores). In addition, the enthusiastic amateur pilot with moderate success founded a gyrocopter -Vertrieb.

At the end of 1962 he took over 95% of the shares in the Hussel confectionery chain from his then friend Rudolf Hussel , on whose supervisory board he had previously been deputy chairman. Eklöh became chairman of the board, and Hussel moved to the supervisory board as intended for health reasons. Just six months later, Eklöh sold a large part of its block of shares to an investment bank at a high profit and against Hussel's will, which brokered the acquired shares to a large number of foreign investors, again at a high profit. This led to the break of friendship with Hussel, who then left Hussel AG , but Eklöh continued to hold 51% of the shares through Holdings and was therefore owned by the company - ultimately for a stake of less than 6 million DM. As a result, Eklöh began to expand with this. A central warehouse with a capacity for 400 shops was built and in 1964 more than 200 branches brought sales of almost 40 million DM (in today's purchasing power approx. 83,888,847 €).

At the end of the 1960s, Eklöh acquired the perfumery chain Douglas . In 1969, his then 29-year-old son Jörn Kreke , who had been with the company since 1963 and whom Eklöh passed off as his stepchild throughout his life, replaced him as managing director. With the transformation of the company into a holding company, Kreke laid the foundation stone for what would later become Douglas Holding , whose chairman since 2001 has been his son and Eklöh's grandson Henning Kreke .

Honors

literature

  • Herbert Eklöh: Diary of my failures. Private printing
  • Hans Otto Eglau: The cash register has to be right - that's how they had success in retail, from the Brenninkmeyer clothing dynasty to the Albrecht discount brothers to the sex mail order company Beate Uhse . Düsseldorf / Vienna 1972

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Ingeborg Haase: Don't be afraid of small shops . In: Die Zeit , No. 26/1964
  2. ↑ Jörn Kreke . munzinger.de; Retrieved June 7, 2016
  3. ↑ Douglas founder Dr. Jörn Kreke celebrates his 75th birthday parfuemerienachrichten.de, May 5, 2015
  4. ↑ Eklöh Children's Home Helga on the Dickerköpfchen. In: panoramio.com. Retrieved August 19, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Hans-Otto Eglau: The cash register has to be right - this is how they had success in retail, from the Brenninkmeyer clothing dynasty to the Albrecht discount brothers to the sex mail order company Beate Uhse . S. 204 .
  6. ↑ Hans-Otto Eglau: The cash register has to be right - this is how they had success in retail, from the Brenninkmeyer clothing dynasty to the Albrecht discount brothers to the sex mail order company Beate Uhse . S. 205 .
  7. ↑ Archives BArch, R 88-I / 81 VIII / 2 Auffanggesellschaft Oberschlesien 1943-1945 .
  8. ↑ a b c The fear of Eklöh . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1959 ( online ).
  9. ↑ Abendblatt.de
  10. ↑ supermarket . In: Die Zeit , No. 25/1957
  11. ↑ With the whip . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1963 ( online ).
  12. ^ Hugo Müller-Vogg : The Douglas Story - Jörn Kreke about trading with heart and mind . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-455-50172-8 . P. 18
  13. ↑ Yvonne Hinz: "Douglas father" Jörn Kreke is celebrating his 70th birthday . On May 5, 2010 on derwesten.de
  14. ↑ Niels Kruse: The scent of money . manager-magazin.de, October 1, 2004
  15. ↑ Niels Kruse: The Scent of Money - Part 2: Buy and sell with great enthusiasm . manager-magazin.de, October 1, 2004
  16. ↑ March 3rd, 2005 - Herbert Eklöh was born in Bochum. In: www1.wdr.de. March 3, 2005, accessed January 29, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Eklöh, Herbert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH March 3, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Bochum
DATE OF DEATH July 6, 1978
Place of death South France