Johannes Gährs

Johannes Gährs (born December 31, 1874 in Ostmoorende in the Jork district of the Hanover province ; † May 18, 1956 in Hamburg, buried in the Estebrügge cemetery in Jork; full name: Johannes Dietrich Gährs , also: Johannes Diedrich Gährs ) was a German civil engineer and served as ministerial director in the Reich Ministry of Transport and as president of the Prussian Academy of Building (1929).

Life

As the son of shipowner and captain Johann Hinrich Gährs and his wife Katharina Stür Stürholdt, he attended the secondary school in Harburg and began studying construction at the Technical University of Charlottenburg . From 1899 to 1900 he did his military service as a one-year volunteer with the No. 1 Railway Regiment.

As a government construction supervisor ( trainee lawyer ) he was employed in Harburg, Swinoujscie and Stettin from 1900 to 1903. After passing the second state examination in 1904, he was appointed government master builder ( Assessor ). His first activity in the years 1904 to 1907 concerned building measures for the regulation of the lower Oder . In 1905 he married Meta Winter, daughter of the sugar factory director Nicolaus Garleff Winter and his wife Metta Lohmann.

From 1907 to 1911 he worked in Kiel on the expansion of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal , with the new locks being built on the Baltic Sea. He was appointed building authority in 1911, which meant that he was responsible in Rendsburg from 1912 to 1913 for further work on enlarging the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal.

In 1914 he worked in Celle as a building authority on the sewerage of the Aller . He took part in the First World War from 1914 to 1918 as a captain and was released as a major in the reserve. From 1918 to 1921 he headed the hydraulic engineering department in Emden . In 1921 he was transferred to the Prussian Ministry of Commerce as Ministerialrat .

From January 1924 he held the position of ministerial director in the Reich Ministry of Transport, where he worked as head of the hydraulic engineering and mechanical engineering department. From 1924 he was a member of the Prussian Academy of Civil Engineering, and in 1929 he became president of that academy. A year earlier had given him the Hannover Technical University , the honorary doctorate awarded (as Dr.-Ing. E. h.).

He also worked on the supervisory board of Rhein-Main-Donau AG and on the board of the Weser-Ems advisory board. He took on another task as head of the German delegation in the Association of International Shipping Congresses.

In 1943 he retired from service in the Reich.

In Berlin-Dahlem he lived at Göbenstraße 43. In the 1970s there was a suction excavator called "Johannes Gährs", which dug the river channel on the Lower Elbe and reminded of the work of the civil engineer. In 1954 he was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit.

literature

• Georg Wenzel: German business leader . Life courses of German business personalities. A reference book on 13,000 business figures of our time. Hanseatic Publishing House , Hamburg / Berlin / Leipzig 1929, DNB 948663294 .
• Cuno Horkenbach: The German Empire from 1918 to today. Berlin 1930.
• Who is it Xth edition, published by Herrmann AL Degener , Berlin 1935, p. 466.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary by Alfred Feyerabend in "Yearbook of the Hafenbautechnische Gesellschaft: Twenty-third and twenty-fourth volume 1955/57", pp. VII and VIII
2. ^ [1] Project family advertisements from the Hamburg area of ​​the Genealogical Society
3. ↑ Picture of the suction excavator "Johannes Gährs"