Continental oil

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The Kontinentale Öl-Aktiengesellschaft ( Konti Öl ) was a German petroleum company during the Second World War . It was founded on March 27, 1941 and entered in the commercial register under section B 59013 at the Berlin District Court.

history

The object of the company was the takeover of participations and any other business activity in the fuel sector, especially abroad. Konti Öl had the exclusive right to extract, process and trade in mineral oil products in the areas occupied by the German Reich . This monopoly was limited to 99 years. The company, on the other hand, was not active in the Reich itself.

Above all, Deutsche Bank AG as consortium leader and funder, as well as IG Farbenindustrie AG, had a decisive influence on the composition of the company's committees.

The background to the establishment was that German mineral oil companies only played a subordinate role in the European market. Enormous quantities of fuel were required for the imminent war against the USSR , which were to be obtained mainly from sources in Romania and the areas of the USSR to be conquered, especially the eastern Ukraine and the Caucasus . While there had been a German military mission in Romania since 1940, which also secured the oil wells around Ploieşti , so that the purchase of Romanian mineral oil companies by Konti AG could be transacted between states, Konti Öl was supposed to reinstate the Soviet oil wells immediately after an occupation in its own name Start up.

The first acquisitions were the Romanian oil companies Concordia and Columbia Oil from French and Belgian ownership.

The subsidiary Ost Öl GmbH (Ostöl) was founded in August 1941 to take over the oil wells of the Caucasus . At the end of 1941 the company had already bought drilling rigs, vehicles and other equipment for 16 million RM , but the oil wells of the Caucasus were never to come into German hands. For the Baltic States there was the subsidiary Baltische Öl GmbH .

To take possession of the oil plants, special units of the Wehrmacht were formed to collect loot, such as the Mineral Oil Command North , Mineral Oil Command South and the Mineral Oil Command K for the Caucasus.

In the first business year 1941 Konti Öl posted a loss of 1.43 million RM, in the second business year 1942 a net profit of 1.14 million RM. In 1944 the loss was 39 million RM, primarily because of the German withdrawal and the associated loss of machinery, material and oil wells. Since 1945, the company has been in trust management and liquidation.

At the first ordinary general meeting after the war in June 1949, the balance sheets from 1944 to 1947 were noted, a total loss of around RM 55 million was posted for 1948 and the liquidation of the company on December 31, 1950 was resolved. The Kontinentale Öl-AG then went into liquidation on November 1, 1950.

Board of Directors and Supervisory Board

The company was headed by:

  • Rudolf Paatsch - founding board member (lawyer in Berlin)
  • Karl Blessing - Chairman of the Board (delegated to the Board)
  • Ernst Rudolf Fischer - Deputy Chairman of the Management Board (delegated to the Management Board)
  • Hans Brochhaus (delegated to the board)

Had power of attorney:

  • Walter Dihlmann (also managing director of the subsidiary Kontinentale Öl GmbH with a branch in Bucharest)
  • Erich Will

On the supervisory board sat:

After the war there was a new supervisory board from 1949.

capital

Of the RM 80 million share capital :

  • to registered shares at RM 1 million each (with fifty-fold voting rights):
    • Borussia Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH (RM 30 million)
    • Deutsche Erdöl-AG (3 million RM)
    • Elwerath Union (RM 3 million)
    • Wintershall AG (3 million RM)
    • Prussian mining and smelting company (RM 6 million)
    • IG Farbenindustrie AG (3 million RM)
    • Brown coal gasoline company (RM 2 million)
  • to bearer shares of RM 1,000 each (with single voting rights):
    • Deutsche Bank AG (10.5 million RM)
    • Dresdner Bank AG (10.5 million RM)
    • Reichs-Kredit-Gesellschaft AG (4.5 million RM)
    • Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft KGaA (4.5 million RM)

Web links

literature

  • Dietrich Eichholtz : History of the German War Economy 1939-1945 . Volume I-III. Munich reprint 1999, ISBN 3-598-11428-1 .
  • Dietrich Eichholtz: War for Oil. An oil empire as a German war target 1938–1943 . Leipzig 2006, ISBN 3-86583-119-2 .
  • Dietrich Eichholtz: To the Caucasus, to the Urals and further ... From: Junge welt from June 22, 2001. ( Online version )
  • Ludwig Nestler (ed.): Europe under the swastika: The fascist occupation policy in France 1940-1944. Series: The occupation policy of German fascism, document edition. VEB Dt. Publishing House of Science, Berlin 1990.

References

  1. ^ German Reichsanzeiger and Prussian State Gazette (Berlin), No. 94 of April 24, 1941.
  2. ↑ Hermann Josef Abs called the project "Continentale Petroleum AG." On January 21, 1941, in the " Berliner Handelsgesellschaft " folder in the Central State Archives of the GDR in Potsdam, Doc. 16087. He was probably thinking of a Franco-German version of the same name that had existed since 1934 Company as namesake, which belonged to the complex of Société française industrial et commerciale. Look here. ( Memento of the original from December 5, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . The other Nazis, on the other hand, preferred to plan in March 1941 under the name "European Petrol Society." Same archive, film 5166. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr
  3. ↑ see on Baltöl the lemmas KZ Vaivara and Albert Oeckl . The following is instructive about the working conditions of prisoners of war as forced laborers: Dietrich Eichholtz u. a. Ed .: Anatomie des Krieges , Berlin 1969, Doc. 225, p. 422 of March 15, 1943. Quotation The Balt.Öl sees the only possibility of increasing the performance of prisoners of war in a more severe treatment. B. the implementation of a starvation diet .... Here without signature, archive source given.
  4. ↑ Quotation Paragraph: The new Continentale (sic) Petroleum should not drill any holes in the old Reich and develop no production activities of its own ... The new company does not impose any restrictions on activities abroad ... As is known, the shares that are missing in the majority should be in the free Market in France and Belgium are being acquired by us ... IG Farben has promising negotiations with Standard Oil over the Hungarian petroleum fields, the total value of which is estimated by Standard Oil at £ 30 million, and the takeover efforts extend to the majority of this property.
  5. ↑ This was a state holding company of the German Reich, which was founded especially for this purpose (Konti Öl), otherwise not known. Hermann Göring thus secured influence on the oil industry. The choice of name seems to be random and to refer to "Prussia". The holding had nothing to do with the Dortmund collieries of the same name in the vicinity of GBAG , which was also active in the oil business, but more in coal liquefaction
  6. ↑ under the names of all of the above in the index. The formal legal appropriation of the Romanian companies, mostly found to be necessary, because Romania was considered friends and independent, ran mainly through the French shares in Romanian oil companies, in addition to the aforementioned "Colombia" and "Concordia" also the company "Petrol Block" , a company with no oil wells of its own that issued bilingual shares in Romanian and French.