Hermann Röchling

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Portrait of Hermann Röchling on an industrial monument in Völklingen

Hermann Röchling (born November 12, 1872 in Völklingen ; † August 24, 1955 in Mannheim ), Dr. iur. H. c. , was a German coal and steel entrepreneur . As a member of the NSDAP , he was a military economic leader during the Second World War . With his company Saar Röchling , he played a key role in the development of war technology during the Nazi era ( Röchling spears ).

Training and taking over the father's work

Röchling passed his matriculation examination at Saarbrücken high school in 1891 . He studied law at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg and in 1892 became a member of the Corps Guestphalia Heidelberg . In 1898 Röchling took over the Völklinger Hütte from his father Carl (1827–1910) . During the First World War , Röchling served as Rittmeister (1914/1915) and from 1915 was again in charge of the Völklingen plant, which from 1916 supplied the special steel for the steel helmets of the German army. After the end of the war, the French victorious powers withdrew ownership of the Carlshütte in Diedenhofen ( Thionville ) and the iron ore mines in Lorraine . The brothers Robert and Hermann Röchling were sentenced as war criminals to ten years of forced labor. While Robert remained imprisoned until 1925, Hermann was able to "buy himself out" on November 9, 1919 by handing over a majority stake of 60% in Völklinger Hütte to the French state.

In addition to the reconstruction of the old family empire and the founding of new companies, Röchling devoted himself above all to keeping the Saar region in Germany after 1920 . He belonged to the regional council of the Saar region in all four legislative periods (1922–1935); there he was a representative of the Liberal People's Party (from 1924: German-Saarland People's Party ), which was absorbed into the German Front after 1933 .

Röchling implemented several progressive social measures in his companies, for example he provided medical care and school education for his workers. With these social initiatives he gained a high reputation among the population.

Röchling in National Socialism

In 1934 Hermann Röchling received the Grashof Memorial Medal from the Association of German Engineers . In 1935 he took over a number of companies in Central Germany .

In the run-up to the Saar referendum scheduled for 1935 , the German Front was founded in 1933 on the initiative of Hermann Röchling, advocating the annexation of the Saar region to the German Reich . Röchling wanted the Jews to vote pro-German, but at the same time limit the influx of Reich German Jews into the Saar area. Such an influx was to be expected after the 1935 election due to the guarantees provided. With this in mind, he intervened in writing with Hitler on July 21, 1933 so that the Saar area would not become a “Jewish nature reserve” after 1935 . The legal betterment of the Jews in the Saar area (i.e. the non-application of the discriminatory Reich laws) was later limited to one year until February 29, 1936. Röchling already had close ties to the National Socialists at this time. Röchling commissioned the Quierschieder NSDAP mayor Peter Schaub to spy on opponents of the Anschluss at events in Saarbrücken's Johannishof with a hidden microphone. The Johannishof was managed by Gerhard Graf, the father of the resistance fighter Willi Graf .

In 1935 Röchling joined the NSDAP. In the same year he was admitted to the armaments advisory board of the Reichswehr Ministry , acted as a member of the supervisory board of numerous companies in the coal and steel industry and soon after became a military economist. Röchling was finally appointed head of the Southwest district group of the iron and steel industry business group. From 1933 to 1936 he was a senator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society , and he was also a senator of the Academy for Scientific Research and Maintenance of Germanness in Munich.

Between July 1940 and June 1942 Röchling was appointed general representative for the iron and steel industry in Lorraine, Meurthe-et-Moselle with the exception of Longwy - in rivalry with Friedrich Flick , who had also had an eye on the Lorraine steel industry. Röchling wanted to completely transfer the works in the region into German ownership ("Germanize"), while Hermann Reusch was against it, because he feared the later construction of new steel works elsewhere in France, in Normandy, so close to the coast. After that, from June 1942, Röchling became head of the Reichsvereinigung Eisen and was awarded the eagle shield of the German Reich . In 1941 he became President of the Saarland Chamber of Commerce and Industry .

Röchling had a close relationship of trust with Hitler , who presented him on May 18, 1942 at his lunch table as "an industrial personality who was particularly impressive in her reticence and serenity". Röchling wrote several memoranda for him, for example on August 17, 1936 under the title: Thoughts on the preparation for war and its implementation , in which he called on Hitler to wage war against the Soviet Union in order to decisively combat world Jewry . He wrote:

“The danger of war for the German people is becoming ever more threatening. In the east, Russia, with its communist conception of the state and its doctrine of the godless, is in sharpest contrast to National Socialist Germany, which is blocking its way to world revolution. With its anti-Semitism, Germany has declared the sharpest fight against the Judaism that is absolutely ruling in Russia and the Judaism of the world, the most influential champion of Bolshevism . [...] It cannot be seen where the possibility should exist to avoid the decisive battle between Bolshevism and National Socialism "

At the instigation of Hermann Röchling and under the direction of chief engineer August Coenders, engineers at the Völklinger Hütte began developing special artillery pieces intended for stationing on the French coast near Calais ( multi-chamber cannon LRK 15, or high-pressure pump HDP, or V3 - Retribution weapon 3 ). From here, new long-range projectiles, later known as Röchling spears after the development work , were to attack London . The development was stopped due to technical problems that could not be managed. The engineers had chosen a hill on the island of Wollin near the seaside resort of Miedzyzdroje as a test site . The site was abandoned. Long after the end of the war, the Poles, to which Wollin now belonged, set up a small museum in the test bunker.

Hermann Röchling's son Karl-Theodor was murdered together with chief engineer Koch on December 17, 1944 at the Völklingen ironworks under circumstances that have never been clarified by unknown perpetrators.

After 1945

After the Second World War, Röchling was initially able to go into hiding, but he was arrested in November 1946 and extradited to France in May 1947. Hermann Röchling, his nephew Ernst Röchling, his son-in-law Hans-Lothar von Gemmingen and the directors Albert Maier and Wilhelm Rodenhauser were arrested. The charges under Control Council Act No. 10 in the Rastatt trials were of industrial exploitation of the occupied territories, increasing the war potential of the German Reich and influencing the deportation of people for forced labor .

On appeal before the Tribunal Supérieur, he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment on January 25, 1949, following an originally milder sentence. He was found guilty of the economic pillage of the occupied countries and at least tolerated the mistreatment of foreign forced laborers in his company. He served some of his prison sentence in so-called honorary imprisonment in the Freiburg deaconess home in Freiburg. His defense attorney was Otto Kranzbühler .

Hermann Röchling was released prematurely from prison on August 18, 1951 for health reasons, with the condition that he would never return to Saarland. The Völklinger Hütte was under compulsory French administration. He died in Mannheim in 1955 without ever returning to his homeland. The company was only returned to the Röchling family at the end of 1956 following efforts by the then Minister of Economics, Norbert Brinkmann . In 1956 Ernst Röchling took over the helm of the Völklingen plant.

memory

After 1914, Röchling was always caught up in the tension between Franco-German enmity and was already controversial during his lifetime (sentenced to ten years in prison as a war criminal on December 24, 1919 and again on January 29, 1949, and also honored with awards). After his death, memories remain divided. Some recall the war crimes and forced labor in the armaments industry , some recall the patriarch and entrepreneur in peacetime who created social institutions for his workers.

In 1956, on the first anniversary of his death, a district of Völklingen was named after him, the Hermann-Röchling-Höhe , which, together with the fact that he is an honorary citizen of Völklingen, was sharply criticized in an ARD television magazine in 2000 . On January 31, 2013 the city council of Völklingen decided after years of local political discussions to rename the district Röchlinghöhe . In future, the name will no longer be associated with Hermann Röchling himself, but with the Röchling family of entrepreneurs.

In 2018, Südwestrundfunk (SWR) produced a documentary about Röchling as a docudrama with archive recordings, game scenes and expert interviews. The first broadcast of Der Stahlbaron - Hermann Röchling and the Völklinger Hütte was on March 26, 2019 on arte in prime time .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Frank Hilbert: Hardworking Lieschen. Retribution Weapon V3 . In: polish-online.com , accessed October 27, 2018.
  2. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 69 , 861.
  3. ↑ a b Heike Hupertz: Arte documentary "Der Stahlbaron": The dazzling figure of the steel baron . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 26, 2019, film review.
  4. ↑ Could Hitler's "seizure of power" have been prevented? ( Memento from January 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) seniorentreff.de
  5. ↑ Landesarchivverwaltung Rheinland-Pfalz in connection with the Landesarchiv Saarbrücken (ed.): Documentation on the history of the Jewish population in Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland from 1800 to 1945 , Vol. 6, Koblenz 1974, p. 268 and p. 315 ff.
  6. ↑ a b Ralf Banken: National Socialism in the Company's History: Does the Special Economic Cycle leave its mark? ( Memento of October 27, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) In: Accumulation . Information from the working group for critical corporate and industrial history, ISSN  1436-0047 , Ruhr University Bochum , 20, 2004, (PDF; 56 p., 486 kB), H. Röchling passim .
  7. ↑ Ruth Hanna Sachs: White Rose History . Exclamation! Publishers, 2003, ISBN 0-9710541-4-2 , pp. 25, 36 (English, limited preview in Google Book search).
  8. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons in the Third Reich. 2003, p. 502.
  9. ↑ Kim Christian Priemel: Flick. A corporate history from the German Empire to the Federal Republic , p. 441, limited preview in the Google book search
  10. ^ Johannes Bähr , Ralf banks and Thomas Flemming: The MAN. A German industrial history. Beck, Munich 2008, p. 302, limited preview in the Google book search
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Steguweit : The "Eagle Shield of the German Empire" . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 6, 2000, ISSN  0944-5560 ( luise-berlin.de - 19 carriers 1922-1932, 38 × 1933-1944).
  12. ^ Henry Picker : Hitler's table talks in the Führer Headquarters 1941-1942. Stuttgart 1965, p. 353. See Dietrich Eichholtz : History of the German War Economy . Berlin 1985, Volume 2, p. 88.
  13. ↑ Quoted from Dietrich Eichholtz , Wolfgang Schumann u. a. (Ed.): Anatomy of the war. Berlin 1969, p. 142 f.
  14. ^ Katrin Becker: The history of the Röchling group: Part 4. The group under the Nazi regime . ( Memento of November 17, 2004 in the Internet Archive ; PDF; 793 kB) In: Röchling magazin , 2004, No. 1, pp. 12-14.
  15. ↑ Forced laborer at Röchling ; and photo Röchling with Hitler
  16. ^ Françoise Berger, Hervé Joly: "Case 13": The Rastatt Röchling procedure . In: NMT - The Nuremberg Military Tribunals between History, Justice and Righteousness . Ed .: Priemel and Stiller, Hamburger Edition 2013, ISBN 978-3-86854-577-7 , p. 487 f.
  17. ↑ Chris Humbs: World Heritage Site "Röchling-Völklingen" - Will a war criminal remain the namesake ? In: contrasts , September 21, 2000.
    Adam Gusowski, Chris Humbs: war as a name - How the Saarland Völklingen distanced halfheartedly by Hermann Röchling . In: kontraste , February 7, 2013.
  18. ↑ dd: “He put himself in the service of the Nazis.” ( Memento from April 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: Saarbrücker Zeitung , January 27, 2010, interview with the historian Hans-Walter Herrmann.
  19. ↑ Bernhard Geber: Völklingen district is only called "Röchlinghöhe". ( Memento from December 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: Saarbrücker Zeitung , February 1, 2013.
  20. ↑ Content of the docudrama: The Steel Baron. Hermann Röchling and the Völklinger Hütte . SWR television , June 2, 2019, with online video.
  21. ↑ Film data: The Steel Baron - Hermann Röchling and the Völklinger Hütte . In: Crew United , accessed April 1, 2019.
  22. ↑ A kind of commemorative publication by the company, with a critical comment by Ralf Banken: “… from the company's point of view, the company's own past is still not described in concrete terms and is described in an euphemistic way. The history of Röchling's family company von Seibold, published in 2001, is a particularly blatant example. ”In: National Socialism in Company History . ( Memento of October 27, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) In: Accumulation , No. 20, 2004, p. 2.
personal data
SURNAME Röchling, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German steel industrialist, military leader of the Third Reich
DATE OF BIRTH November 12, 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH Völklingen
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 1955
Place of death Mannheim