Hermann Schmitz (industrialist)

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Hermann Schmitz (1931)

Hermann Schmitz (born January 1, 1881 in Essen , † October 8, 1960 in Heidelberg ) was a German industrialist, from 1935 to 1945 chairman of the IG Farben board .

biography

Hermann Schmitz came from a working-class family. Although he was exceptionally gifted, his parents could only finance him to attend a business school . In 1906 he started his first job as a secretary at the metal company (at that time the largest non-ferrous metal company in the world) in Frankfurt am Main , where his talents (including his tough negotiating tactics) quickly emerged and helped him to a steep career. Just four years later, in 1910, he became a deputy member of the executive board of the global company. In this position of the metal bank he secured influence on the Spanish lead business.

During the First World War he was "Commissioner" under Walther Rathenau , who headed the War Resource Department in the Prussian War Ministry until he took up his position as President or Chairman of the Supervisory Board of AEG in 1915 . Schmitz demanded there in 1916 a. a. a state subsidy for nitrogen production at BASF . Reason: “The BASF subsidiary in Ludwigshafen, which is currently under construction in Merseburg, will be the most important link in Germany's nitrogen supply for ammunition purposes after it goes into operation. The army has the greatest interest in the early completion of the factory. "

He was a member of the board of the "Interest Group of the German Tar Paint Industry", the forerunner of the later merger of large German industry to form IG Farben. In this position Schmitz was one of the representatives of Germany as an expert in the negotiations for the Versailles Treaty after the lost First World War.

It was on this occasion that Schmitz met Carl Bosch , Chairman of the Board of Management of BASF, and joined the company in 1919, which was merged with IG Farben in 1925. He became Bosch's personal financial advisor, who ensured that Schmitz would soon be promoted to finance director of IG Farben. In 1925, Schmitz acquired the patent for the Bergius process for high-pressure liquefaction of coal into oil on behalf of IG Farben . From 1926 on, he was a member of the Group's board of directors. He was the initiator and main active in the concealment of the foreign property of IG Farben from the Allies by founding camouflage societies such as Interhandel . Schmitz 'refined approach continues to be reflected in 1928: Prior to a share emission of IG Farben in the amount of 250 million Reichsmark announced he raising the dividend to in order to boost the share price. After the issue, the price fell again due to measures he initiated. This meant that the company had to pay around 10 million Reichsmarks less in dividends and the shares could be bought back at a profit. This procedure was actually a violation of § 226.1 ( share buyback ) of the then commercial law.

Schmitz worked repeatedly with Chancellor Heinrich Brüning during the Great Depression . In the summer of 1931 he was the German representative on an international committee of economic experts that negotiated the catastrophic foreign exchange losses of the Reichsbank during the banking crisis by means of a standstill agreement . In the autumn of that year Schmitz, who was a member of the board of directors of the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft until 1933 , was offered the Ministry of Transport . The background to this was the urging of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg that Brüning should break away from his dependence on the SPD and orient his cabinet more to the right. Because when Schmitz was appointed minister, Alfred Hugenberg's Scherl-Verlag had to fear publications about financial irregularities at IG Farben , so nothing came of it. The IG Farben supervisory board Hermann Warmbold became economics minister as a substitute , and Schmitz joined an economic advisory council of the Reich government together with 24 other industrialists, including Paul Silverberg , Albert Vögler and Otto Wolff . With this, the Chancellor wanted to signal to the Reich President that the reorientation of his cabinet to the right would still have been successful. The advisory board met in October and November 1931, but effective public support for Brüning's deflationary policy failed because Silverberg and Schmitz advocated credit expansion . Schmitz was a member of the so-called Wagemann Circle, a group of economic and financial experts around the President of the Reich Statistical Office, Ernst Wagemann , who were thinking about a credit reform. It was planned to introduce a second type of money , the so-called consumer money , for which the strict cover rules of the Reichsbank should no longer apply. The clear rejection of the Wagemann Plan published in January 1932 by the Reich government led to Schmitz's growing alienation from Brüning. In order to find out whether the NSDAP would be willing to campaign for the implementation of the Wagemann Plan in the event of government participation, Schmitz also met once with Hitler , who was not averse. A collaboration did not come about initially.

Hermann Schmitz during the Nuremberg Trials

During the National Socialist era , Schmitz was a member of the Reichstag from November 1933 to 1945 and joined the NSDAP . In 1933 he was one of the eighteen foundation stone donors for the House of German Art in Munich , built in 1937 . In 1935 he was appointed military manager. In 1941 he received the War Merit Cross 1st Class. In 1935 Schmitz succeeded Bosch as chairman of the IG Farben board and was therefore primarily responsible for the deployment of forced laborers in factories and for the financing and construction of the Auschwitz III Monowitz concentration camp . In the IG Farben trial he was sentenced to four years imprisonment for looting in 1948, together with other executives of the company, and was released from the Landsberg war crimes prison in 1949, taking into account the previous imprisonment .

In the Federal Republic, Schmitz became a member of the supervisory board of Deutsche Bank Berlin-West in 1952 and, in 1956, honorary chairman of the supervisory board of Rheinstahl-Rheinische Stahlwerke , of which IG Farben had been the largest shareholder during the Nazi era.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus Sator: Big Capital in Fascism: illustrated using the example of IG colors . (Marxismus aktuell series), Frankfurt am Main 1978, p. 17.
  2. ↑ quoted from Klaus Sator: Big Capital in Fascism: illustrated using the example of IG Farben . (Marxismus aktuell series), Frankfurt am Main 1978, p. 18.
  3. ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: The Reichsbahn and the Jews 1933–1939 - Anti-Semitism on the railroad in the prewar period . Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2011, ISBN 978-3-86539-254-1 , p. 38
  4. ^ Heinrich Brüning, Memoirs 1918–1934 , Deutsche Verlagsanstalt Stuttgart 1970, pp. 425f.
  5. ^ Gerhard Schulz, Von Brüning zu Hitler , De Gruyter Verlag, Berlin, New York 1992, pp. 613–624.
  6. ↑ For the Wagemann plan, see Rainer Meister, The Great Depression. Constraints and room for maneuver in economic and financial policy in Germany 1929–1932 , transfer Verlag Regensburg 1991, pp. 343–51.
  7. ^ Henry Ashby Turner : The big entrepreneurs and the rise of Hitler , Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1985, p. 318f.
  8. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 550.
  9. ↑ Reichsbank treasure inventory catalog ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / reichsbankschatz.de
personal data
SURNAME Schmitz, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German industrialist and politician (NSDAP), MdR
DATE OF BIRTH January 1, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH eat
DATE OF DEATH October 8, 1960
Place of death Heidelberg