Kurt Herrmann (entrepreneur)

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Kurt Herrmann (born May 20, 1888 in Leipzig , † November 4, 1959 in Vaduz ) was a German architect , publisher and industrialist .

Life

Herrmann, son of master craftsman Carl Robert Herrmann and his wife Maria Paulina, b. Oschatz, completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer from 1902 to 1905. He then studied at the Royal Saxon Building Trade School in Leipzig , which he left in 1908 as a state-certified master builder . Then he worked a. a. as construction manager in the municipal building administration of the city of Leipzig under city building inspector Hans Strobel . On July 1, 1912, he became self-employed as an architect in Leipzig.

After Herrmann had planned the construction of a new printing house on Dresdner Strasse for the publisher Bernhard Meyer (1860–1917) in 1913, he married Meyer's daughter Erna Agnes (1893–1972) in 1914 and the couple had two children. Meyer was the owner of the book publishing and printing company Bernhard Meyer in Leipzig, which was founded in 1889 and expanded in 1902 by a printing company . Meyer combined magazines with a supraregional reach with a subscription insurance , which caused the circulation to rise sharply. The subscribers of the magazine after work received accident insurance, and later also death benefit insurance.

Before the First World War , Meyer invested large sums of money in aircraft construction; in 1911 he founded the Deutsche Flugzeug-Werke (DFW) in Lindenthal near Leipzig , later the Flugzeugwerke Lübeck-Travemünde , the Flugzeugwerke Berlin-Johannisthal and the Deutsche Motorenbau-Gesellschaft Berlin-Marienfelde . When Bernhard Meyer died on April 19, 1917, Herrmann inherited a considerable industrial fortune, became general director of the DFW and director of the Bernhard Meyer publishing house. During this time he met Hermann Göring . After the restrictions of the Versailles Peace Treaty , the aircraft factories had to cease operations, and Herrmann founded Allgemeine Transportanlagen-Gesellschaft in Leipzig in 1919 , which took over DFW Plant II in Leipzig- Großzschocher . The TH Dresden made him an honorary senator in 1927.

On October 1, 1931, Herrmann took up residence in Eschen in Liechtenstein and applied for Liechtenstein citizenship. On October 18, 1931, 125 citizens in the community of Eschen voted against the acceptance of Herrmann, his wife and their two children, which was confirmed by Prince Franz I on October 24, 1931 . On October 26, 1931, he paid a “purchase fee” of 9,000 Swiss francs to the municipal treasury  , as well as a “state fee” of 4,500 francs to the princely government, whereupon he received a citizenship certificate and a family home certificate. He hid his Liechtenstein citizenship in Germany.

Shortly before the end of the Second World War, Herrmann fled to Liechtenstein. In autumn 1945 he married Senta Fricke (1911–1986) and lived in Vaduz until his death.

Herrmann as a sponsor of the Nazi regime

After the National Socialists came to power , Herrmann maintained close personal contact with leading National Socialists. He went hunting with his friend Hermann Göring and was the guest of honor at his wedding to Emmy Sonnemann on April 10, 1935. He regularly made generous monetary gifts to Göring, Hitler and Goebbels .

When his son Heinz was arrested on January 6, 1933 as an accomplice of a robbery in Berlin and sentenced to eight months in prison on March 7, 1933, thanks to his good relationships, Herrmann was able to obtain that Heinz Herrmann on April 13, 1933 against payment of 50,000  Reichsmarks released from custody and in January 1934 the sentence was suspended until it was completely erased from the criminal record a year later. Herrmann thanked the then State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice Roland Freisler in a letter .

In 1936 he was appointed to the Reichsjagdrat and in the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts , Reichspressekammer and Reichskulturkammer added.

By order of the Leipzig tax office , Herrmann was arrested in Berlin on September 11, 1936 on suspicion of tax evasion . He then turned to Goering's State Secretary Paul Körner . Göring enforced his release on September 13, 1936 and instead had the responsible tax inspector arrested, for which Kurt Herrmann thanked Göring by telegraph with the words "You, dear Colonel General, my immeasurable thanks and deepest devotion" .

In 1937 Herrmann formed the Universalverlag W. Vobach & Co. - Bernhard Meyer - Curt Hamel GmbH Berlin from the publishers Bernhard Meyer GmbH Leipzig, Willy Vobach & Co. GmbH Leipzig and Curt Hamel GmbH Berlin-Charlottenburg . The Universalverlag published 25 titles (7 fashion magazines and 18 insurance magazines), these magazines had 4.6 million subscribers in 1939. In 1938 Herrmann acquired the Braunschweigische Lebensversicherungsbank AG, which was responsible for the insurance companies associated with so-called insurance magazines.

Göring appointed Kurt Herrmann to the Prussian State Council in 1938 .

Through his contacts, Herrmann was also able to participate in the Aryanization of Jewish companies. After the arrest of Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, who headed the Leipzig CF Peters Musikverlag after his two brothers Max and Walter had emigrated, on November 13, 1938, he was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp one day later and expelled from the Reich Chamber of Culture and Music on November 15 , with which he lost the right to practice. Thereupon the “forced Aryanization” of the publishing house due to the regulation on the use of Jewish assets by a state appointed administrator was initiated. By mid-January 1939, the leading music publishers in Germany applied to acquire the company. A purchase agreement was finally concluded on July 22, 1939, new shareholders were Kurt Herrmann, who brought in the capital, and Johannes Petschull , who took over the management. The purchase price was RM 1 million, including the property at Talstrasse 10, all copyrights, records, manuscripts and inventory as well as the neighboring Peters Music Library with the associated property at Königstrasse 26 (today Goldschmidtstrasse).

In 1938 Herrmann also became the owner of the Friedländer Brothers jewelry company in Berlin. He renamed them to Deutsche Goldschmiedekunst-Werkstätten Inh. Kurt Herrmann and became Göring's special representative for diamond purchasing in the occupied territories. In this function he had the opportunity to acquire inexpensive jewels expropriated by the National Socialists.

Until the end of the war Herrmann owned a large number of properties in Leipzig - including the former Hôtel de Pologne - the Federow and Speck manors near Kargow in Mecklenburg and the Kobershain manor near Leipzig. With assets of around RM 9 million in bank deposits and around RM 14 million in securities, he was considered one of the richest residents of Leipzig.

In March / April 1945 he left Leipzig and went via Austria to Liechtenstein, where he arrived on April 30, 1945. He later applied for a denazification procedure in which he stated that he had put up such an early and violent resistance against the National Socialists that he had to leave Germany before they came to power. In 1950 he was classified in Hanover by the denazification committee "without measures" in category 4 ( followers ).

In 1945/46 the publishing house was handed over to the Leipzig District Board of the SPD , and from January 1946 it operated as Universalverlag GmbH Leipzig . In 1949 it was affiliated with the Sachsenverlag Dresden , later parts went to the Verlag für die Frau , the Druckhaus Einheit (later the headquarters of the large graphic company Interdruck ) and the Leipziger Volkszeitung .

The remaining assets of Herrmann in the Soviet occupation zone were expropriated in 1948.

Legal dispute over Herrmann's assets

After the political change in the early 1990s, Ursula Herrmann, the wife of Herrmann's deceased son who lived in Liechtenstein, raised the claim as sole heir to the 40 to 50 properties previously owned by her father-in-law in eastern Germany.

The Leipzig Office for Unresolved Property Issues, however, rejected the return requests for the Hôtel-de-Pologne property at Hainstrasse 18-24, estimated at DM 11 million. The heiress then initiated a lawsuit against the city of Leipzig, which was supposed to declare the expropriation ineffective, since her father-in-law lost his German citizenship because he lived in Liechtenstein and foreign property was under the protection of the occupying powers. After her claim was denied in the first instance in 1994, she appealed to the Federal Administrative Court and the case was renegotiated. However, at the end of 1998 the Federal Administrative Court came to the same conclusion. The court rejected the objection that Herrmann had lost his German citizenship because he had lived in Liechtenstein since 1931. There was insufficient evidence for this, Herrmann had stayed in Liechtenstein every now and then, but had not lost his German citizenship as a result. A complaint was then made to the Federal Constitutional Court. However, the court decided not to take the case.

buildings

Bernhard Meyer book printing company (around 1920)
Jagdschloss Speck
  • 1912–1913: Marienbrunn garden suburb , building group VI, Dohnaweg 26–30 and building group VIII, monument view 12, Dohnaweg 10–22, Turmweg 11
  • 1912–1914: “Goldene Krone” building complex, Pegauer Strasse 35–39 (today Wolfgang-Heinze-Strasse, together with PC Küster)
  • 1913–1916: Factory building of the Bernhard Meyer book printing company, Dresdner Strasse 1 / Salomonstrasse 2–4
  • 1915: Gartenstadt Marienbrunn, assembly group XX, Am Bogen 1–15 (No. 1 destroyed in the war)
  • 1937: Speck hunting lodge near Kargow , Mecklenburg

literature

  • Neidhardt Krauss: Schloss Speck and State Councilor Herrmann. In: Bernfried Lichtnau (Ed.): Architecture and Urban Development in the Southern Baltic Sea Region between 1936 and 1980. Publication of the contributions to the 2001 Art History Conference. (February 8-10 , 2001, organized by the Caspar David Friedrich Institute, Art History Department, Ernst Moritz Arndt University Greifswald), Lukas Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-931836-74-6 , pp. 86-94.
  • Henryk M. Broder : Diamonds for the Reichsmarschall . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1997, pp. 44-58 ( Online - Feb. 17, 1997 ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph Kühn, Brunhilde Rothbauer: Southern urban expansion. (= Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany , Monuments in Saxony, City of Leipzig , Volume 1), Verlag für Bauwesen, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-345-00628-6 , p. 430.
  2. ↑ a b c d Sabine Knopf: Book City Leipzig. The historical travel guide. Christoph Links Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86153-634-5 , pp. 18-20.
  3. ^ Andreas Graf, Susanne Graf: The origins of the modern media industry. Family and entertainment magazines from the imperial era (1870–1918). (PDF; 5.7 MB) p. 85.
  4. ↑ Der Spiegel , No. 8, 1997, p. 50.
  5. ↑ a b State Archives Leipzig, inventory 21079 - Universalverlag GmbH, Leipzig.
  6. ↑ a b c Erika Buchholz: Exclusion and "Aryanization". The Leipzig music publisher CF Peters. In: Monika Gibas (Ed.): "Aryanization" in Leipzig. Approaching a long repressed chapter of the city's history from 1933 to 1945. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2007, ISBN 978-3-86583-142-2 , pp. 98–114.
  7. ^ According to the statement of assets from March 1, 1945; see. Der Spiegel, No. 8, 1997, p. 54.
  8. ↑ Der Spiegel, No. 8, 1997, p. 58.
  9. ↑ a b Thomas Müller: City rejects return requests. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung of March 8, 2001, p. 15.
  10. ↑ Thomas Müller: The question of the citizenship of the probably richest entrepreneur in Leipzig at the end of the war still unresolved. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung of July 29, 1997, p. 13.
  11. ↑ Thomas Müller: Basic judgment made in the spectacular property dispute. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung of December 11, 1998, p. 13.
  12. ↑ Christoph Kühn, Brunhilde Rothbauer: Southern urban expansion. (= Monument Topography Federal Republic of Germany, Monuments in Saxony, City of Leipzig , Volume 1), Verlag für Bauwesen, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-345-00628-6 , p. 438.
  13. ↑ Christoph Kühn, Brunhilde Rothbauer: Southern urban expansion. (= Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany, Monuments in Saxony, City of Leipzig , Volume 1), Verlag für Bauwesen, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-345-00628-6 , p. 404.
  14. ↑ Christoph Kühn, Brunhilde Rothbauer: Southern urban expansion. (= Monument topography Federal Republic of Germany, Monuments in Saxony, City of Leipzig , Volume 1), Verlag für Bauwesen, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-345-00628-6 , p. 434.
personal data
SURNAME Herrmann, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German architect, publisher and industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH 4th November 1959
Place of death Vaduz