Hibernia AG

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Hibernia AG was a mining -Unternehmen in the Ruhr area .

history

Partial bond for 1000 marks of the mining company Hibernia dated July 1, 1903

In 1855 the Irishman William Thomas Mulvany founded a mine in Gelsenkirchen by sinking a shaft, which he called the Hibernia colliery . The name refers to the Latin name for Ireland . Two years later the Shamrock colliery was founded in Herne . On March 11, 1873, both mines merged under joint management to form Hibernia & Shamrock Bergwerksgesellschaft in the legal form of a stock corporation based in Berlin, later Herne. In 1887 the name was changed to Bergwerksgesellschaft Hibernia .

Starting in 1904, the Prussian state acquired shares in the company, whose ordinary shares in 1909 were worth 10 million marks. This process triggered the "Hibernia Affair", one of the largest economic scandals in the German Empire . From 1900 onwards, price agreements and excessive profit-making by the members of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate led to a supply crisis , known as the coal shortage . From 1903 to 1911 this led to massive disputes between the Dortmund Oberbergamt and the coal syndicate. In the summer of 1904, the then Prussian trade minister, Theodor von Möller, placed an order with Dresdner Bank to acquire the majority of the shares in Hibernia - at the time the third largest mining company in the Ruhr area - for the Prussian state. This state intervention in the oligopolistic market caused great indignation among the members of the coal syndicate . They accused State Minister Möller of selfish motives, as he himself was a major shareholder in a company that was in constant disputes with the coal syndicate. This accusation led to Möller's resignation as Minister of Commerce a year later. The Oberbergamt in Dortmund reacted with the greatest reluctance to approve new explorations . Other industrialists who were dependent on coal, as well as numerous coal traders and workers' organizations, welcomed the state intervention, as they expected falling coal prices from it.

The dispute over the Hibernia mine took on unprecedented dimensions and, among other things, divided positions within the parties at the time. For example, August Bebel advocated the nationalization of coal mines among the Social Democrats , while his party comrade Karl Kautsky vehemently opposed it. The attempt by the state to bring a private company into its possession by means of a hostile takeover ultimately failed because of the role played by the banks, which even then were in a position to largely co-determine the interests of a company. With the support of banks, the coal syndicate gained the majority of shares and temporarily shut down the Hibernia mine.

In February 1917, however, the Hibernia AG again and completely passed into state ownership, the administration of which was taken over by the Royal Mining Directorate Recklinghausen . From 1917 to 1935 Otto von Velsen held the management board and general management. He was also involved in the negotiation of the MICUM agreement to end the occupation of the Ruhr in 1923/24 .
In 1925, the Recklinghausen mine management was transformed into the Recklinghausen mining company . In 1935, the mining company Recklinghausen and the mining company Hibernia were merged into the mining company Hibernia AG . This also founded the Scholven hydrogenation plant in the Gelsenkirchen district of the same name , which compensated for the lack of German oil wells in the Second World War by liquefying coal .

After the war, Hibernia AG was transferred to VEBA (today E.ON ) under the management of Hans Werner von Dewall . The city administration of Herne named a street, at the northern end of which was the Shamrock colliery, after Hibernia AG. There is also the shamrock ring there . Likewise in Bottrop , where the street on which the Rheinbaben mine belonging to the company was located was named after it. In the Alstaden district of Oberhausen , a street near the Alstaden colliery, which also belongs to the company, is called Hiberniastraße . There is also a Hiberniastraße in the "Meistersiedlung" near the Marl Chemical Park , as well as in Gelsenkirchen .

In 1969 Hibernia was merged with Ruhrkohle and VEBA , and on September 30, 1970 it was deleted from the commercial register.

literature

  • Bergwerksgesellschaft Hibernia (ed.): Festschrift on the occasion of the twenty-five year existence of the Bergwerksgesellschaft Hibernia (1873–1898). Bagel, Dusseldorf 1898. Digitalisat the ULB Münster

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Information about the meeting of the supervisory board on the balance sheet for 1908 In: Vossische Zeitung , May 5, 1909; Retrieved April 19, 2015.
  2. ^ Holm A. Leonhardt: Cartel theory and international relations. History of theory studies. Hildesheim 2013, p. 96.
  3. ↑ Dieter Wilhelm: The Rheinisch-Westfälische Kohlensyndikat and the Upper Silesian Coal Convention until 1933. Erlangen 1966, pp. 76–79.
  4. ↑ Dietmar Bleidick: The Hibernia Affair. The dispute over the Prussian state mining in the Ruhr area at the beginning of the 20th century. Bochum, 1999, p. 12 f.
  5. ^ Werner Burghardt, Kurt Siekmann: Recklinghausen. Small city history . Verlag Rudolf Winkelmann, Recklinghausen 1971, p. 196.
  6. ↑ Herne from then to now, accessed on August 14, 2020