Hermann Koch (politician, 1882)

Hermann Georg Willibald Koch (born April 2, 1882 in Werro , Russian Empire ; † March 29, 1957 in Lüdersfeld ) was a politician of the German minority in Estonia and a member of the German-Baltic Party in Estonia (DbPE).

Koch attended high schools in Dorpat and Pernau. From 1901 to 1906 he studied law in Dorpat . From 1907 to 1909 he was a court candidate at the district court and from 1909 to 1937 a sworn attorney.

From 1905 to 1906 he was a member of the German self-protection during the Russian Revolution in 1905 . Between 1907 and the beginning of the war in 1914, he was a managing board member of the German Association in Estonia, which organized the German school system. During the First World War he was in Berlin from 1914 to 1918. First he did studies there and in 1917/18 worked for the Orient at the Foreign Office. In 1918 he became head of the war damage commission at the German provincial administration in Estonia. During the German occupation of Estonia in 1918/19 he was German People's Minister there. From 1920 to 1923 he was a member of the Estonian parliament for the constituency of Dorpat .

He was the founder and head of the Estonian Farmers' Cooperative. This received cheap Reich loans to promote the down-to-earth attitude of the German ethnic group. In 1924 he became the owner of the Seppa farm (Harrien). The main activity until 1941 was the role of partner, board member and director of the largest German-run industrial company in Estonia, the Nordic paper and pulp mills Reval. In addition, he was CEO of the EKA insurance company, with which most Germans were insured in Estonia, and AG Siemens in Estonia and de Port-Kunda-Zement AG in Kunda . From 1932 to 1934 he was again a member of the Estonian Parliament. In 1939 he became a member of the economic advisory board of the German Treuhandverwaltung. At first he did not take part in the resettlement and instead kept the operations going until the Russians invaded. He left Estonia on February 15, 1941 with the last resettlement ship, the “Ozeana”.

He first moved to Schwerin. On April 2, 1941, he was denounced by Erhard Kroeger at the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. The allegation was that he had disrupted the resettlement in 1939 with strong counter-propaganda, sabotaged it and used the resettlement for speculative business. He is an outspoken opponent of National Socialism and a pest of the people. Since then he has been under police supervision. In 1942 he was questioned by the Reichsführer SS and chief of the German police in the Reich Ministry of the Interior.

In 1942 he was hired by the Todt Organization and later by the General Commissioner of the RKO district of Estonia, Litzmann, as director and deputy trustee of the Port Kunda cement plant, which was important for the war effort. This supplied the entire Army Group North with cement. With Koch, his entire family of seven had returned to Reval. Several attempts by his opponents to revoke the residence permit were unsuccessful. In 1944 a daughter of Koch fled to Sweden via Finland. Now the residence permit of the politically unreliable family was canceled and the family traveled to Poznan on April 1, 1944. Koch then lived on Gut Pappeln near Schroda before he fled to Lüdersfeld as part of the expulsion.

literature

• Mads Ole Balling: From Reval to Bucharest - Statistical-Biographical Handbook of the Parliamentarians of the German Minorities in East Central and Southeastern Europe 1919-1945, Volume 1, 2nd Edition . Copenhagen 1991, ISBN 87-983829-3-4 , pp. 123-124 .

Web links

• Baltic Historical Commission (ed.): Entry on Hermann Koch. In: BBLD - Baltic Biographical Lexicon digital