Johannes Bernhardt
Johannes Eberhard Franz Bernhardt (* 1897 in Osterode, today Ostróda , Warmia-Masurian Voivodeship , Poland , † 1980 in Munich ) was Mannesmann's general agent in Spanish Morocco .
Life
Bernhardt, a law student, enlisted in the military in 1914. During World War I he was an occupying soldier in Ukraine . After the First World War, Bernhardt was in Hamburg with Walther Bierkamp in the Bahrenfeld Freikorps , an association of the black Reichswehr . In order to undermine the Treaty of Versailles , the Reich government transferred arms deals to straw men of the Reichswehr at this time .
Shipowner in Hamburg
Bernhardt was a shipowner in Hamburg from 1919 to 1924 . The Johannes Bernhardt shipping company opened branches in Reval and São Paulo . The Stoltzenberg chemical factory sold chemical warfare agents to Spain from the port of Hamburg .
In mid-January 1922, the Vespa laden with chemical warfare agents sank .
“The deck load and the load stowed in the so-called Versuploch consisted of iron barrels, wooden barrels and demijohns, the contents of which the crew had no idea [...]. Suddenly there was a tremendous detonation. […] The captain points out the gases in the bottles and barrels. From the navigating bridge comes the order to change course and steer against the wind, so that the gases are not blown over the ship but to the rear […] Now the crew is about to put the previously spared forecastle deck overboard to be on the safe side throw. In the middle of this work the second explosion takes place [inside the ship]. [...] now the fire is raging in front of and behind us. The sea also seems to be on fire, because the barrels that go overboard catch fire immediately upon contact with the water. [...] Only eight [out of 32] men survived the disaster, but later on, most of these eight also died as a result of gas poisoning "
Mannesmann in Morocco
Bernhardt became a representative of Mannesmann and Rheinmetall - Borsig . From 1906 the Morocco-Mannesmann-Compagnie in Hamburg had acquired around one eighth of all the values of the Sultanate of Morocco in the form of mining concessions, trading companies and agricultural companies. In 1911 Wilhelm II tried to put a state-run colonial regime alongside this private commitment with the so-called panther jump. Mannesmann had received the assurance for 2027 mining concessions throughout Morocco. The focus of the prospecting projects was in the Rif Mountains ; here were abundant phosphate-free deposits of iron ore . There was copper , lead , zinc , silver , low-sulfur coal , crude oil and rich phosphate deposits prospected by Mannesmann. The French government tried diplomatic maneuvers, legal maneuvers and financial actions to prevent Mannesmann's projects. After the First World War, the mining concessions and all other rights from other contracts of the Mannesmann brothers in French Morocco were expropriated. In January 1930 Bernhardt appeared in Spanish Morocco, which had been pacified with Stoltzenberg's poison gas from 1923 to 1927 . Bernhardt acted as authorized representative of H. & 0. Wilmer, Sucesores de H. Tönnies . The first branch was in the port city of Larache . Bernhardt delivered to the Spanish military authorities (targets for practice shooting etc.) and to companies such as Compañía Española de Minas del Rif and the Compañia Agricola del Lucus . Its branches are in Tétouan , Melilla , the location of the lost factory, Ceuta and Tangier , the international city. The German consul in Tetuán, Wilhelm Brosch described the H. & 0. Wilmer, Sucesores de H. Tönnies as the most important and most respected German company in the Spanish protectorate zone . Borsch Bernhardt had reports written on the economic situation in Morocco for the German embassy in Madrid. Bernhardt was informed about developments in French Morocco through his branch in Tangier . At the beginning of 1935 Bernhardt opened a branch in Casablanca , the capital of the French protectorate in Morocco. Bernhardt had an unlimited residence permit for French Morocco, but from March 1935 he was no longer allowed into the French protectorate and the French authorities ensured that he was also denied entry to Tangier.
Fire magic company
On July 22, 1936, Francisco Franco and Juan Beigbeder sent a telegram to the military attaché Erich Kühlental (1934–1938 military attaché in Paris) responsible for Spain for ten transport aircraft. The answer was:
"In the view of the Foreign Office, responding to the Spanish request cannot be considered at the moment"
On July 24, 1936 Bernhardt and landed NSDAP - Ortsgruppenleiter , Mannesmann engineer Adolf Lange's home in Berlin-Tempelhof . Rudolf Hess made it possible to meet Adolf Hitler on July 25, 1936 at the Bayreuth Festival , after a performance by Siegfried . On July 25, 1936, Hitler agreed to support Franco. On July 27, 1936, the special staff W was formed under Hermann Göring , which was headed by Helmut Wilberg and Erhard Milch . The first project of the Sonderstab W was named after the 3rd act, 3rd scene from Wagner's Walküre company Feuerzauber . It was the airlift through which troops of the coup plotters, including members of the Spanish Legion , were moved from Spanish Morocco to the mainland. The relocation lasted from July 28th to October 1936, with 20 Ju 52s transporting around 14,000 Spanish Foreign Legionnaires and 500 tons of material in more than 800 flights. Bernhardt organized tetra dietary for aviation benzene from Portugal , Gibraltar , Tangier and French Morocco. On August 21, 1936, Bernhardt reached a negotiation with António de Oliveira Salazar that war material and fuel could bypass a blockade of the Spanish port of Cádiz by the Republican Navy via the port of Lisbon . Walter Warlimont , who was initially entrusted with the economic coordination, suggested setting up a company based on the coal and steel scheme .
Compañía Hispano-Marroquí de Transportes Limitada
On July 31, 1936, Franco named the company for the economic development of the Feuerzauber company , the Compañía Hispano-Marroquí de Transportes Limitada (HISMA, Limitada). Bernhardt was the managing director; Fernando de Carranza-Fernandez-Reguera, a retired naval officer, was co-owner. The entry in the commercial register is dated April 1, 1936. Bernhardt had good relations with Franco in 1936 and he managed to extend the control mechanisms of HISMA to the entire German-Spanish movement of goods.
Commodity compensation trading company
As a result of a meeting between Bernhardt and Hermann Göring on October 2, 1936, the Rohstoff- und Wareneinkaufsgesellschaft mbH (ROWAK) was created as a counterpart to HISMA in Germany, which operates in Spain . The managing director of ROWAK was Eberhard von Jagwitz, a major of the First World War who had lived in Argentina , a friend of Bernhardt. The ROWAK received three million Reichsmark starting capital as a loan. The loan was approved by Ministerialdirektor Alfred Olscher of the Reich Ministry of Finance , who sat on the supervisory board of the Reich-owned arms manufacturer Vereinigte Industrie Unternehmerung AG ( VIAG ) and Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft AG (RKG). The Reich Ministry of Economics forbade any private import from Spain without the participation of ROWAK. ROWAK demanded two to three percent for this. ROWAK charged three to five percent for the services as a general agent for products from the German Reich. Rheinmetall Borsig was part of VIAG and was headed by Max Wessing, a member of the RKG supervisory board. In the spring of 1938, ROWAK was absorbed by the Reich Ministry of Economics. Jagwitz became special ministerial director for foreign trade in the Reich Ministry of Economics. Numerous NSDAP members worked here when Goering trimmed the power of Hjalmar Schacht . The management of ROWAK was taken over by Friedrich Bethke, representative of a Chilean pharmaceutical company, who was hired by ROWAK in October 1936 while on vacation in the German Reich . The ROWAK monopolized the trade in goods from Spain in the German Reich. ROWAK invested the capital thus accumulated in mining concessions. In 1937 ROWAK had 73 mining rights and in 1938 135 mining rights in Spain. The mining rights related to strategic goods such as iron, copper, lead, tungsten, tin, zinc, cobalt and nickel. The ROWAK monopolized a barter, with which the putschists paid for the support they had given with strategic goods. The strategic goods achieved convertible foreign exchange (e.g. British pound) on the international market. Fascist Spain therefore never let the traditional trade relations between Great Britain and northern Spain be severed. Bernhardt set a fixed exchange rate of 1 Reichsmark to 3.33 Pesetas , which Bernhardt enforced against the protest of the head of the Comité de Moneda and which was forcibly enforced almost unchanged by fascist Spain for the period of trade with the German Reich until August 1944 has been. The rate of the peseta in republic-controlled Spain fell to 1 Reichsmark to 10 pesetas. The putschists had banknotes stamped in their domain and later Bernhardt arranged that new banknotes for fascist Spain were printed by Giesecke & Devrient in Leipzig . The very prompt delivery of weapons by sea by Joseph Veltjens' company suggests that the weapons for the putschists were ordered before July 19, 1936. With the coup there was also a prospect of their payment in ore deliveries.
On July 22, 1936, the German steamship Girgenti was searched for weapons by the Republican militia in the port of Valencia . The captain of the Girgenti evacuated the ship by force. The German Foreign Ministry protested to the democratic government in Madrid. Shortly afterwards, the Girgenti von Veltjens was chartered and loaded on August 22, 1936 in Hamburg with weapons from the special staff W for the coup d'état in La Coruña . After the weapons had been unloaded, the Girgenti in La Coruña was loaded with ore on the initiative of Bernhardt, with which the barter was put into practice. Bernhardt was jealous of the Spanish trade monopoly: Willy Messerschmitt wanted to sell aircraft to Emilio Mola in 1937 , but was only able to go to Spain as a designer in 1951. In October 1937, ROWAK's raw material exports had led the German Reich to dominate Spanish exports, as the Foreign Office found.
It would have been economical for the putschists to end the monopoly of HISMA ROWAK and to sell the strategic raw materials for convertible currency and to lower the price of arms purchases.
The military support of the German Reich for the putschists was used as an economic means of pressure. The international boycott of arms limited the coup plotters' arms purchases to HISMA and Societá Fertilizzanti Naturali Italiani (SAFNI), an importer of Chilean nitrates.
In October 1936, Franco appointed his brother Nicolás Franco as general secretary of the Junta Técnica del Estado to regulate non-military political and economic affairs . Nicolás Franco's primary task was to stay in contact with Bernhardt and the Italian arms suppliers. Nicolás chose the military equipment that had to be ordered from HISMA . Bernhardt then sent the order to ROWAK, which processed the order in the German Reich. Nicolás Franco did business with SAFNI in Rome. On February 10, 1937, the junta asked for an interstate clearing and settlement agreement that would regulate trade. Bernhardt and Bethke were prepared to defend the one-sided monopoly. A major conference took place in Berlin under Göring's chairmanship, and the HISMA-ROWAK exchange system was implemented: Göring refused the official clearing and netting agreement between two equal governments requested by the putschists. Despite the rejection, Nicolás Franco continued to advocate a clearing agreement as a step towards free trade. In mid-May 1937, Ambassador Faupel Franco said that aid from the German Reich would not continue unless the putschists did their trade via Bernhardt's system. Franco agreed. Joseph Veltjens supplied weapons made from imported raw materials in exchange for convertible foreign currency. The deliveries from Veltjens were already there before July 19, 1936, for example on June 17, 1936 and July 6, 1936. HISMA was liquidated in September 1939 and SOFINDUS took over the function of clearing authority in German-Spanish trade.
Sociedad Financiera e Industrial Limitada
Formally, after a bilateral trade agreement between the German Empire and fascist Spain in 1938, including the rights to Spanish mines that it had acquired in the meantime, HISMA was merged into the Sociedad Financiera e Industrial Limitada (SOFINDUS) holding . The managing director of SOFINDUS was Johannes Bernhardt. The Sofindus was divided into three divisions: trade, transport and services, and mining concessions. The mining department was headed by Wilhelm Pasch (member of the NSDAP since 1934), a key figure in Basque-German economic relations. Until 1941 SOFINDUS made losses and operated a very unregulated economy. During the Second World War, the original corporate goal of controlling the monopoly of all German-Spanish trade was given up in favor of the procurement of strategic goods such as tungsten for the war industry of the German Empire and war smuggling. From this point on, SOFINDUS made profits. International transport and fleet construction were added to the three original business areas. The privileges enjoyed by the institutions and citizens of the German Empire in Spain during the Second World War led to an unprecedented intensification of economic relations between Germany and Spain. Between 1936 and 1944, the German Reich developed into the first importer of industrial goods (primarily mechanical engineering and chemical products). For the first time the trade balance showed a substantial surplus in favor of Spain. In accordance with the Allied Control Council, the Spanish government expropriated the property of the German Reich and that of the citizens of the German Reich who did not have legal residence status on May 6, 1945 in Spain from May 6, 1945.
liquidation
The SOFINDUS shares were stored in the vacated German embassy in Madrid Castellana 15 on May 6, 1945. The Spanish government expropriated them without compensation and handed them over to the Allies, who sold the papers, valued at 150 million pesetas, below price. The Spanish government dissolved SOFINDUS in 1945 in accordance with the Allied Control Council and thus complied with the Bretton Woods agreements .
The ownership structure of ROWAK and SOFINDUS was not clear. Bethke claimed that SOFINDUS with all of the subcontractors it brought together was a subsidiary of ROWAK, making it imperial property. On another occasion it was argued that it is private property, including from Bernhardt, who should not have been expropriated because of his Spanish citizenship. SOFINDUS included numerous subsidiaries, trading companies, production companies for sample goods and a technical consulting company, which were spread over the entire Spanish national territory, including Spanish Morocco. The associated mining companies made a significant profit for the armaments industry in the German Reich.
The British military government wanted Friedrich Bethke to continue ROWAK together with Gustav Dahrendorf in the Bizone's Economic Administration Office and supported Bethke with his move from Berlin to Hamburg.
Vollrath von Maltzahn (1899–1967), who later became Adenauer's ambassador in Paris, was then head of the foreign trade department in the Bizone , explained Dahrendorf about ROWAK :
“Even today, the ROWAK in Spain is likely to be regarded as the typical exponent of the National Socialist regime; Their close cooperation with Falange , who is known for its corruption system, has not yet been forgotten either. Their extreme monopoly efforts are also incompatible with the fundamental view of the leadership of the JEIA about the future structure of German foreign trade. A revival is likely to have the undesirable consequence that former business and party friends of ROWAK will return to profitable and influential positions. If the company receives funding from the British today, this is likely to be due to a misunderstanding of the earlier connections and the expected consequences of a revival. For political as well as economic reasons, I therefore consider it unreasonable to involve the ROWAK-SOFINDUS organization, whose dissolution was sought during the last years of the war, in the reconstruction of foreign trade in any way. Rather, the organization should wind up its wartime business as soon as possible and then dissolve along with its subsidiaries. "
Dahrendorf wrote this in his statement to the British Property Control, which thereupon ordered the fastest possible liquidation of ROWAK . The industrial holding company was commissioned with the liquidation . It was determined that the ROWAK still had 100 million DM remaining claims on Spain. The supervisory company met annually with the members of the ROWAK advisory board and discussed the status of the liquidation. The impression arose that ROWAK was decelerated and liquidated as leverage in the negotiations with Spain about the expropriations. But even when an agreement on German property was signed, ROWAK was still liquidated in 1960 .
See also
literature
- Hans-Henning Abendroth: intermediary between Franco and Hitler. Johannes Bernhardt remembers 1936. Schleunung, Marktheidenfeld 1978, ISBN 3-922023-00-2 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Federal Archives, Kühlental, Erich
- ↑ Files on German Foreign Policy (ADAP), Series D (1937–1945), Volume III (1951), p. 5 or Juan Carlos Pereira: Introdución al estudio de la política exterior de Espanja. (Siglos XIX y XX). Madrid 1983, p. 171.
- ↑ ADAP, Series D (1937-1945), Volume III (1951), p. 8
- ↑ A little love for airplanes . In: Der Spiegel . No. 38 , 1949 ( online ).
- ↑ a b Birgit Aschmann, loyal friends p. 25 f.
- ^ Robert H. Whealey Hitler and Spain
- ↑ Núria Puig, LA CONEXIÓN ALEMANA: REDES EMPRESARIALES HISPANO-ALEMANAS EN LA ESPAÑA DEL SIGLO XX (PDF; 598 kB)
- ↑ Stefan Hansen, The Condor Legion - the extent and importance of German support
- ↑ VIII Congreso de la Asociación Española de Historia Económica 16-18 septiembre 2005, LA CONEXIÓN ALEMANA: REDES EMPRESARIALES HISPANO-ALEMANAS EN LA ESPAÑA DEL SIGLO XX (PDF; 598 kB) pagina 8
- ↑ in: Bundesarchiv B 120/2060 issue 1
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Bernhardt, Johannes |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Bernhardt, Johannes Eberhard Franz (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German arms dealer, general agent of Mannesmann in Spanish Morocco |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1897 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Osterode |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1980 |
| Place of death | Munich |