Josef Neckermann

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Signature of Josef Neckermann
Josef Neckermann on a 1969 Ajman stamp
Josef Neckermann on a Deutsche Post stamp from 1996

Josef Carl Peter Neckermann (born June 5, 1912 in Würzburg , † January 13, 1992 in Dreieich ) was a German mail order merchant ( Neckermann Versand ) and a successful dressage rider .

ancestors

The roots of the family can be traced back to the beginning of the 16th century: In 1508 the "Men from Neckar " were registered in the guild regulations as raftsmen . The family settled in the Gollach Valley near Würzburg.

Josef Neckermann's grandfather Peter Neckermann (1842–1902) came from Hemmersheim in Middle Franconia and was a master butcher. He later became a member of the Reichstag for the Center Party .

Life

His father Josef Carl Neckermann (* 1868; † December 20, 1928) did not want to continue the butcher business and had his inheritance paid off early. In 1895 he founded a coal trading company and subsequently expanded it into a company with 80 employees, which supplied major customers such as the Reichsbahn and was involved in numerous other companies (see JC Neckermann ). In addition, he acquired several houses in Würzburg as well as shares in the Bayerischer Staatsanzeiger and the Frankfurter Zeitung . Because of his property and his connections in business and politics, he was dubbed the " Rockefeller of Würzburg" .

His marriage to Jula Lang (1878–1963) had three children: Maria-Barbara (1909–1948), Josef Carl Peter and Walter (1914–1972).

In 1962 he became an honorary member of the KDStV Badenia (Strasbourg) Frankfurt am Main .

Young entrepreneur in the Third Reich

Shortly before his death in 1928, the company founder - he had heart problems - transferred the management of JC Neckermann to the general manager Guido Klug . The then 16-year-old son Josef was supposed to take over the company after training. Neckermann closed in 1929, the school with the school leaving certificate and graduated to 1931 as a bank clerk in the Bavarian Mortgage and Exchange Bank in Würzburg. He then moved to his father's company and, at the age of 22, also joined its management in 1934.

On September 15, 1935, the Nuremberg Race Laws were enacted. As a result, Jewish merchants were put under pressure, both personally and entrepreneurially, and their companies were “ aryanized ” in a legal way at ridiculous prices . Neckermann benefited several times from these forced sales:

Josef Neckermann had his mother pay out his inheritance share in the coal trade in the amount of 200,000 Reichsmarks (RM). On October 25, 1935, he took over from the Jewish entrepreneur Siegmund Ruschkewitz (1871-1940) for 100,000 RM (of which Neckermann only transferred 46,000 RM to a blocked mark account) his textile department store, which was founded in 1898 and a little later in Würzburg Schönbornstrasse, and the low-price business Merkur with a total of 130 employees and 60 sales representatives taking over the debts and mortgages . The department store industry was in crisis during these years and the purchase price was well below the value of the company.

Neckermann joined the SA cavalry squadron in 1933 and was accepted into the NSDAP in 1937 with membership number 4.516.510 . In the following year, the Aryanization of the company of Karl Amson Joel , (the grandfather of the US singer-songwriter Billy Joel and the conductor Alexander Joel ) - he had built up a flourishing textile manufacturing and shipping company in Nuremberg and Berlin - the Lingerie and clothing factory Josef Neckermann .

Neckermann pressed down on the purchase price and set up a trust account at the Hardy & Co. bank in Berlin - as it turned out in the later reparation process - his own name. Neckermann justified this with the fact that he wanted to protect the money from access by the NSDAP. Joel, who has now fled to Switzerland, sued for the money to be paid out, but the suit was dismissed on the grounds that he was a " foreign currency ".

Neckermann thus owned the fourth largest German textile mail order company (after Quelle , Witt Weiden and Schöpflin ). With the Joels company, Neckermann also took over the rental agreement for his villa in Tannenbergallee in Berlin's Westend , which he moved into with his wife Annemarie Neckermann .

At the end of December 1941, together with Hertie managing director Georg Karg, he founded the Central Storage Community for Clothing (ZLG), a company under public law . Through Otto Ohlendorf , whom Neckermann had got to know during a tour of the company and who was also a silent partner in the ZLG, the company received orders from the clothing department . Among other things, the company supplied clothing for slave labor and uniforms for soldiers on the Eastern Front. Neckermann became head of the Reich Office for Clothing . Neckermann signed up for the SS in December 1941 , but was put under pressure by Hans Kehrl UK to present the winter uniforms at the Wehrmacht headquarters on April 19, 1942.

In his autobiography, Memoirs , he commented on his work during the Nazi regime, in which he laid the foundation for his post-war career :

“I didn't have the slightest need to get into trouble. I am not interested in active opposition in political matters. I am not fit to be a martyr . "

After the Second World War Neckermann fought vehemently against the claims for compensation from the expropriated entrepreneurs, even suspecting a “Jewish conspiracy” against himself. In a settlement with the heirs of Siegmund Ruschkewitz, Neckermann finally agreed on compensation of DM 50,000 and a plot of land in Würzburg. Karl Amson Joel received two million DM in compensation only in 1957 after years of reparation proceedings that lasted over several instances; a fraction of the real value of the company that Neckermann had taken over twenty years earlier.

Construction and decline of an "economic miracle"

On April 20, 1945, shortly before the end of the war, Josef Neckermann left Berlin and went to Munich . From there he wanted to take care of the remaining clothing stocks of the ZLG in Bavaria. After the end of the war he got a job in the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs through old connections .

In August 1945, the Allied Control Council had taken over the trusteeship for numerous German companies by means of Military Law No. 52 and prohibited the owners of “Aryanized” companies from any “instruction, administration, supervision or other control over assets” . Despite this ban, Neckermann tried to resume his business in Würzburg, for which he was arrested on September 20, 1945 and released after a few days on the condition that he would not continue to work professionally.

At the end of October, Neckermann applied to the Mayor of Würzburg to open his acquired Merkur low-cost department store . In addition, he tried through intermediaries to get the ZLG operations in Goßmannsdorf and Ochsenfurt under his leadership.

On December 1, 1945, he was charged by a military tribunal for violating the Control Council Act and subsequently sentenced to one year of “ hard labor ” (labor camp). He had to work on the sewing machine for a starvation wage in the Ebrach prison for his own company, which was now under the administration of the Allies. In the summer of 1946 Neckermann fell ill with tuberculosis and was transferred to a hospital. The recovery time was counted towards his prison sentence, and at the end of 1946 Neckermann recovered and became a free man.

Despite his profits from the “Aryanizations” and the employment of forced laborers , Neckermann's Nazi past was not fatal: in the denazification process in May 1948 he was classified as a “fellow traveler” and only a fine of 2,000 RM was imposed on him.

In autumn 1948 he founded the textile company Neckermann KG on Mainzer Landstrasse in Frankfurt am Main . In 1950 this was transferred to Neckermann Versand KG . The company, which initially only offered textiles, but soon also offered numerous other consumer goods at extremely low prices, experienced a rapid boom in the 1950s. Neckermann expanded his company into a group; A chain of department stores was added in the mid-1950s, followed by the travel company Neckermann und Reisen (NUR) and other subsidiaries in the early 1960s . The company slogan "Neckermann makes it possible" became a symbolic slogan for the economic miracle of the post-war period and Neckermann became one of its figureheads .

The company ran into financial difficulties in the 1970s, and Neckermann finally had to sell the majority of it to Karstadt AG in 1976/77 . Together with his sons Peter and Johannes, who had also worked in the management, he left the company a year later and now devoted himself primarily to his work as a sports official .

Success as a dressage rider and sports official

In addition to his entrepreneurial career, Josef Neckermann was also a successful dressage rider. Even as a teenager he was attracted to horses and equestrian sports and won a pair competition in Stuttgart at the age of 14 .

As a dressage rider, he won 333 tournaments, 6 Olympic medals, including two gold medals in the team competition at the 1964 and 1968 Olympic Games between 1956 and 1981 . In 1966 he became world champion, in 1970 vice world champion. At the European Championships Neckermann reached the with the German team in 1965, 1967, 1969 and 1971 league titles . Between 1962 and 1974 he won the German dressage championship four times. He ended his active career on June 28, 1981 at a tournament in Aachen .

He was awarded the Silver Laurel Leaf for his sporting success .

In addition, after the foundation of the German Sports Aid Foundation in 1967, he was its first and long-term chairman. Neckermann was a diligent fundraiser. Up until his retirement in 1988, the foundation supported a total of around 16,500 athletes with 230 million DM; 90 million DM of this sum came from private individuals.

Family grave in the Frankfurt main cemetery
Photo by Josef Neckermann at the grave

Private

Josef Neckermann was married to Annemarie Brückner (1915–1989), daughter of Richard Brückner (1885–1955) and Agnes Ebert (1886–1978). The marriage had three children, two sons and a daughter - "Evi" Pracht (* 1937), who lives in Canada and followed in her father's footsteps by winning the team bronze medal in dressage for the Canadian team at the 1988 Olympic Games kicked. Florian Homm (* 1959), an internationally sought-after German stock market speculator and company founder, is Neckermann's great-nephew.

Josef Neckermann died of lung cancer at the age of 79 in Dreieich near Frankfurt am Main. He was buried in the main cemetery in Frankfurt .

Awards

Literature (selection)

Movies

  • The film documentary Die Joel from 2001 describes the Aryanization of the textile mail order business of the Joel family by Josef Neckermann.

Web links

Commons : Josef Neckermann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Complete directory of the CV. 1969, Munich 1969, p. 87.
  2. ^ Stolpersteine ​​in Würzburg , accessed on December 9, 2011
  3. ^ Sybille Grübel: Timeline of the history of the city from 1814-2006. In: Ulrich Wagner (Hrsg.): History of the city of Würzburg. 4 volumes, Volume I-III / 2, Theiss, Stuttgart 2001-2007; III / 1–2: From the transition to Bavaria to the 21st century. Volume 2, 2007, ISBN 978-3-8062-1478-9 , pp. 1225-1247; here: p. 1239.
  4. ^ Horst-Günter Wagner : The urban development of Würzburg 1814-2000. In: Ulrich Wagner (Hrsg.): History of the city of Würzburg. 4 volumes, Volume I-III / 2, Theiss, Stuttgart 2001-2007; III / 1–2: From the transition to Bavaria to the 21st century. 2007, ISBN 978-3-8062-1478-9 , pp. 396-426 and 1298-1302, here: p. 408.
  5. ^ Hans Kehrl: Crisis Manager in the Third Reich. With critical comments and an afterword by Erwin Viefhaus. Düsseldorf 1973, pp. 240-242, and Document 6, on p. 491