Jürgen Ponto

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Jürgen Ponto (born December 17, 1923 in Bad Nauheim , † July 30, 1977 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German bank manager . From 1969 until his assassination he was the spokesman for the board of the Dresdner Bank . Ponto was shot dead by members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist group while trying to kidnap him .

Life

Jürgen Ponto was the son of a Hamburg merchant family; he spent a few years of childhood in Ecuador , where his father Robert Ponto ran commercial businesses. He was the nephew of the actor Erich Ponto .

In March 1942 he made his Abitur at the Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Hamburg ; immediately afterwards he was drafted into the armed forces or for military service. After completing a war officer training course, he was deployed at the front in the Russian campaign as a tank destroyer in southern and central Russia. In February 1943 he was seriously wounded. Even before his discharge from military service, Ponto began studying law and political science at the University of Göttingen in April 1944 with the minor subjects philosophy and art history, which he continued in Hamburg after the war. During his studies in Hamburg he also wrote for the Hamburger Akademische Rundschau and played in student theaters. In 1950 he married Ignes von Hülsen (* 1929), a son was born in 1951 and a daughter Corinna in 1957 .

Ponto passed both state exams (the second in 1952). In 1950/51 he worked as part of his legal clerkship in the legal department of the Hamburger Kreditbank , headed by Joachim Entzian , a successor to the Dresdner Bank, which was disengaged by the Allies . Entzian gave Ponto a good rating, hired him as a volunteer in 1951 and promoted him. In 1951 he studied at the University of Seattle (USA); from February 1952 he was back at the Hamburger Kreditbank and was hired as an employee of the legal department after the assessor examination. 1959 Ponto was to succeed Entzian the General Counsel , appointed Dresdner Bank AG, Headquarter Hamburg.

In the years that followed, Ponto headed the Money and Credit Department at Dresdner Bank. In June 1969 he became spokesman for the Board of Management of Dresdner Bank, succeeding Erich Vierhub . Ponto, until then relatively unknown, internationalized the Dresdner Bank in the following years. The bank opened branches in Singapore, New York, London (all 1972), Tokyo (1973), Los Angeles (1974) and Chicago (1974), as well as a representative office in Moscow (1973). He also pushed overdue organizational changes and initiated an image, communication and marketing change. He held a number of supervisory board mandates for large companies within the framework of “ Deutschland AG ” . Ponto played a leading role in the sale of a 14 percent stake in Daimler-Benz from the Quandt family's assets to Kuwait ; this sale was considered his masterpiece, but at the same time triggered concerns about a sell-out to sheikhs . His advice was also in demand in government circles; Among other things, he advised Helmut Schmidt , who had become Federal Chancellor in May 1974 . Ponto was considered a possible candidate to become President of the Bundesbank , which he refused.

The artistically interested Ponto founded a foundation of the Dresdner Bank together with Herbert von Karajan in 1972 to support young musical talents. He also set up a working group to promote German musical life.

assassination

In the spring of 1977, Ponto came into the focus of the Red Army faction when Susanne Albrecht reported on her family's friendship with the Pontos and thus offered them access to the victim. Her younger sister Julia Albrecht was a sponsored child of Ponto. According to later investigations, the RAF had since been planning an attack on Ponto and intended to kidnap him from his home in order to obtain ransom money or to ransom detained RAF members. In May and June 1977 Albrecht visited the Pontos twice in their house. They did not know that Albrecht had joined the RAF. There was no warning from the State Security and the Albrechts family, who were already aware of Albrecht's membership in the RAF. On July 29th, Albrecht arranged a visit for tea the next day.

On Saturday, July 30th, Albrecht, accompanied by Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Christian Klar , rang the bell at the Pontos ( 50 ° 11 ′ 36.2 ″  N , 8 ° 34 ′ 12.3 ″  E ) and asked to be admitted. The three members of the RAF were led into the dining room by Ponto. When Klar Ponto declared at gunpoint that he was being kidnapped, a scuffle broke out between Ponto and Klar. As a result, Klar and Mohnhaupt fired several shots at Ponto, who was hit in the head and body by several bullets. The assassins then escaped in an escape vehicle held by Peter-Jürgen Boock . Ponto's wife Ignes was in the next room at the time of the crime. Jürgen Ponto died of his injuries two hours later in Frankfurt University Hospital .

Only two weeks after the crime - significantly later than usual - did the RAF publish a letter of confession a few lines long in which it stated that it had not expected such behavior from Pontus. In contrast to the normal procedure of the RAF, the letter of confession was personally signed by Susanne Albrecht. Just a few days after the crime, a "Red Morning Liberation Movement" and "Red Morning Campaign" acknowledged the crime through two calls to Reuters and demanded "the immediate release of all political prisoners of war in Germany". Otherwise “other members of the exploiting class would be executed”. After the assassination of Siegfried Buback, the attempted kidnapping of Pontos represented a further part of the so-called Offensive 77 of the RAF, which reached its climax in the German autumn .

Brigitte Mohnhaupt, Christian Klar, Peter-Jürgen Boock, Sieglinde Hofmann and Susanne Albrecht were later convicted of murder, accessory to murder or attempted hostage-taking and attempted kidnapping for their involvement in the crime . It later emerged that, contrary to the 1982 judgment, Hofmann was not directly involved. A case against Adelheid Schulz was dropped because of the conviction in other cases.

Susanne Albrecht testified as a key witness in the proceedings against her in 1991 that there was no resistance to the Pontus murder. This fueled speculation, also by Pontos biographers, that at least some of the perpetrators had been involved in the murder of Pontus from the start, which, however, are now considered refuted. The RAF had rented a conspiratorial apartment in the Südring 3a high-rise building in Hattersheim near Frankfurt for the kidnapping of Pontos .

Ponto's grave is located in the old forest cemetery of Ober-Sensbach . After the attack, his wife, daughter and son moved to the United States.

In memory of Jürgen Ponto, a fountain on the Oberurseler Rathausplatz and a square in the city center in Frankfurt am Main were named after him; the silver tower (Jürgen-Ponto-Hochhaus) stands at this place .

A few months after the murder, his wife Ignes and Dresdner Bank founded the Jürgen Ponto Foundation to promote young artists .

Film and family conflict

After the release of the feature film Der Baader Meinhof Complex in September 2008, Ponto's widow criticized the lack of historical authenticity in the portrayal of her husband's murder in the film. The loudly audible shots in the film were actually fired with silencers, Ponto fell on the floor in a completely different way from the one shown in the film, the room was dark instead of flooded with light, and she did not sit on the terrace during the act, but was in the neighboring room been. Ignes Ponto therefore filed a lawsuit against the production company Constantin Film in order to ensure that the scene may no longer be shown. Previously, in protest against the film, she had returned her Federal Cross of Merit to the then Federal President Horst Köhler . The civil chamber of the Cologne regional court dismissed their lawsuit in January 2009 and determined that their personal rights would not be violated by the film, that the scene neither falsified Ponto's view of life nor degraded his person and that the criticized scene in the film was also based on the fundamental right Freedom of art is covered.

In 2011 Corinna Ponto , the daughter Jürgen Pontos, and Julia Albrecht, the sister Susanne Albrechts, published the book Goddaughters , which they had written together, "a kind of reconciliation book", which deals with the murder of Jürgen Ponto and the role of the two families grapples. Stefan Ponto, the son of Jürgen Pontos, took a very critical view of this in a 2014 interview with Spiegel. He called it an "unbearable book", accused the authors of trivializing the murder of his father and stated: "I see our relationship [his relationship to his mother and sister] as irreparable."

Publications

  • Structural problems of the capital markets from an international perspective. 1968.
  • The role of banks in tomorrow's world. 1970.
  • Banks and the state in conflict. In: Journal for the entire credit system. 1973.
  • Economy put to the test. 1975.
  • Courage to be free. 1977.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ralf Ahrens, Johannes Bähr: Jürgen Ponto 1923-1977. In: Hans Pohl (ed.), German bankers of the 20th century. 2007, ISBN 978-3-51508954-8 : Archive link ( Memento from September 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (p. 10)
  2. ↑ Dresdner Bank AG (Ed.): Jürgen Ponto: Short biography (PDF file; 791 kB) . Eugen-Gutmann-Gesellschaft eV, historical archive of the Dresdner Bank. (accessed on January 16, 2011.)
  3. ↑ Ponto number 2 . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1968, p. 102 ( online ).
  4. ↑ a b Die Zeit 22/1969: A board member said goodbye
  5. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from September 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (p. 16)
  6. ^ A b c Johannes Bähr: Robert Bosch - Paul Reusch - Jürgen Ponto . In: Werner Plumpe (Hrsg.): Entrepreneurs - facts and fictions. Historical-biographical studies (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, 88), De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 197–225, here p. 220, ISBN 978-3-486-71352-7 .
  7. ^ Johannes Bähr: Robert Bosch - Paul Reusch - Jürgen Ponto . In: Werner Plumpe (Hrsg.): Entrepreneurs - facts and fictions. Historical-biographical studies (Schriften des Historischen Kollegs, 88), De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, pp. 197–225, here pp. 218 f, ISBN 978-3-486-71352-7 .
  8. ^ Bundesbank: Who will be President? Hamburger Abendblatt from March 19, 1977.
  9. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from September 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) (p. 21)
  10. ↑ a b Ralf Ahrens, Johannes Bähr: Jürgen Ponto. Banker and citizen. A biography . P. 207 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  11. ↑ a b Julia Jüttner: RAF murder: "You know Mr. Ponto". Spiegel Online from July 28, 2007.
  12. ^ Ralf Ahrens, Johannes Bähr: Jürgen Ponto: Banker and Citizen. CH Beck, Munich 2013.
  13. ^ Jürgen Ponto Foundation for the Promotion of Young Artists: Federal Republic of Germany. Terrorism. Murder of Jürgen Ponto ( memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ). Archive of the Present, August 5, 1977, no year.
  14. ↑ Trick with a crutch . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 1982, pp. 45-47 ( online ). Michael Sontheimer: Terror Trials: The Doubtful Judgments of the RAF Tribunals. Spiegel Online , May 2, 2010, edited excerpt from: Michael Sontheimer: "Of course you can shoot". A Brief History of the Red Army Faction. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2010.
  15. ^ RAF murders Jürgen Ponto. RP Online , July 29, 2007.
  16. ↑ See Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex. 2008, completely revised edition, pp. 461–463; Butz Peters: Deadly error: the history of the RAF. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008, pp. 388–390.
  17. ↑ stern.de / Thomas Seythal: Murder of Jürgen Ponto: The murderers had flowers with them . Stern online July 29, 2007, accessed February 20, 2008.
  18. ^ Initiative Frankfurter Stiftungen eV: Jürgen Ponto Foundation for the Promotion of Young Artists , accessed on March 27, 2015.
  19. ^ Ponto-Witwe takes legal action against RAF-Kinofilm , Spiegel Online from November 1, 2008.
  20. ↑ Ponto-Widow returns the Cross of Merit October 7, 2008.
  21. ^ Ponto-Widow fails with lawsuit against RAF-Film , Spiegel Online from January 9, 2009.
  22. ↑ a b Philipp Oehmke [Interview with Stefan Ponto]: The true tragedy of my life . In: Der Spiegel . No. 25 , 2014, p. 118-121 ( Online - June 16, 2014 ).
  23. ↑ www.kiwi-verlag.de
  24. ^ Review by Christopher Kopper
personal data
SURNAME Ponto, Jürgen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German bank manager; Management Board spokesman of Dresdner Bank; RAF murder victims
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Bad Nauheim
DATE OF DEATH July 30, 1977
Place of death Frankfurt am Main