Kurt Lange (Ministerial Officer)

Sitting: Reich Economics Minister and President of the Deutsche Reichsbank Walther Funk with the newly appointed Vice Presidents of the Reichsbank Emil Puhl (standing on the left) and Kurt Lange (standing on the right) looking at the drafts for the new twenty-mark notes (1940).

Kurt Lange as a witness at the Nuremberg trials.

Kurt Lange (born July 8, 1895 in Eisenach ; † 1990 ) was a German civil servant. Among other things, he was Vice President of the Reichsbank and Ministerial Director in the Reich Ministry of Economics .

Live and act

After attending a high school, Lange completed a commercial apprenticeship. Lange took part in the First World War, became a reserve lieutenant in 1917 and led a seaplane combat squadron. After the end of the war, he completed a degree in business administration at the Berlin School of Management and then studied law and political science at the Universities of Hamburg and Berlin .

Lange joined the NSDAP at the beginning of October 1930 , for which he was a member of the Hamburg parliament from 1931 to 1933 . At NSFK he later reached the rank of standard leader .

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Lange was appointed President of the Hamburg Court of Auditors. He held this position until 1936. He then worked from 1936 to 1938 as a department head in the Office for German Raw Materials .

In 1938, Lange moved to the Reich Ministry of Economics , where he became Head of Department IV (“Money, Credit, Banking and Insurance”) with the rank of Ministerial Director . In 1939, Lange switched to the Reichsbank, where he was appointed second vice president in 1940. In the management of the Reichsbank he was mainly concerned with personnel matters. He was also a member of the Reichsbank board of directors and a member of numerous supervisory boards of important commercial companies such as Alpine Montan AG (RHG, Linz), as well as the supervisory board of Deutsche Golddiskontbank .

At the turn of the year 1942/1943, Lange founded a committee on behalf of the Minister of Economics Walter Funk - who followed a request from the head of the party chancellery of the NSDAP, Martin Bormann - which was to promote the National Socialist orientation of private banks in the German Reich and which was later called Bormann Committee became known. The committee, which was organized under the Reich leadership of the NSDAP in Munich and began its work in early 1943, aimed in particular at changing the composition of the management levels of the banks in the interests of the party.

When the war ended a long time came - Henke in his study on the history of Dresdner Bank in the Nazi era as "pure Parteibuchkarrieristen" and confidant Bormann characterized - in Allied captivity. As a result, he was interrogated as a witness in the context of the Nuremberg trials , especially in the Wilhelmstrasse trial.

Fonts

• “Capital market policy in the controlled economy”, in: Deutsche Geldpolitik, Berlin 1941, pp. 403-421.

literature

• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .

Web links

• Minutes of an interrogation of Lange in 1947 at the IFZ (PDF file; 1.1 MB)
• Newspaper article about Kurt Lange in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ^ The archive: reference work for politics, economics, culture 46-48. O. Stollberg, Berlin 1938, p. 1516.
2. ^ Frank Bajohr: Aryanization in Hamburg. The displacement of Jewish entrepreneurs 1933–1945 , Hamburg 1997, p. 255.
3. ^ Klaus Dietmar Henke: The Dresdner Bank in the Third Reich. Dresdner Bank in the economy of the Third Reich , 2006, p. 108.