Kurt Multiply

Kurt Wilhelm Vermehren (born August 28, 1885 in Lübeck , † October 2, 1962 in Tegernsee in a car accident) was a German lawyer.

Candlesticks in memory of Kurt Vermehren in Lübeck's Marienkirche

Life

Kurt Vermehren came from a Lübeck family whose progenitor had come to Lübeck around 1580 during the Eighty Years' War from Zaventem in Flanders as an exile . His father was the Senator Julius Vermehren ; his mother Isabell, b. Nölting (1862–1956), was the daughter of Carl Georg Nölting (1822–1889) and Marie Auguste Angelika, b. Schultze (1833-1914). After visiting the Katharineum in Lübeck until Easter 1904, he studied law at the University of Göttingen , especially with Georg Detmold (1850–1917), and was awarded a doctorate here in 1910. jur. PhD . During his student days he was one of the founders of the Academic Freischar , an alternative to the traditional student associations shaped by the youth movement.

He completed his legal clerkship in Lübeck, where he opened a practice as a lawyer specializing in civil, marriage and contract law, which he moved to Hamburg in 1922.

In August 1914 he married Wilhelmine Petra Schwabroch , the daughter of the Possehl partner consul Johannes Schwabroch (1863–1945) and his wife Friederike (1865–1952). The couple had three children: Michael (1915–2010), Isa (1918–2009) and Erich (1919–2005). The couple had lived separately since the 1930s, Petra Vermehren moved to Berlin in 1933 and worked as a journalist, initially in the foreign policy department of the Berliner Tageblatt , from 1937 as a foreign correspondent in Athens and from 1941 in Lisbon .

After his son Erich Vermehren, who was stationed as a diplomat, but actually as an Abwehr agent headed in Istanbul by a family friend, Paul Leverkuehn , defected to the British with his wife in early 1944, the Vermehren family became Lured to Potsdam under a pretext , where she was first placed under house arrest in a hotel and then interned as part of the “ kin detention ”. Kurt, Petra and Michael Vermehren were sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Isa Vermehren survived her stay in the Ravensbrück , Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps . Kurt Vermehren’s apartment and accounts were also confiscated by the Gestapo.

On April 15, 1945 Kurt, Petra and Michael Vermehren were released from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the instructions of the Reich Main Security Office . Kurt Vermehren returned to Hamburg and rebuilt his practice there after the end of the war.

In 1953 Vermehren married Elisabeth Michelsen, widowed von Lilien, with whom he had another daughter: Beate (born February 11, 1954 in Hamburg).

Act

Art funding

In the 1920s, Vermehren belonged to a group of around a dozen Lübeck art lovers who, with their generous donations, enabled the museum director Carl Georg Heise to acquire large amounts of modern art for the Behnhaus . Most of these works of art were lost to Lübeck in the course of the Degenerate Art campaign . Hans Schwegerle's portrait bust of Thomas Mann is one of the pieces that have survived to this day, six bronze copies of which he made in July 1919. It came into the Behnhaus collection as a gift from Kurt Vermehren in 1921 and is now in the Buddenbrookhaus .

Hamburg-Lübeck Society

During the Weimar Republic, Kurt Vermehren was an ardent advocate of the idea of ​​a northern state , which was to emerge from the merger of the two free imperial cities of Hamburg and Lübeck as part of the reorganization of the imperial territory discussed since 1919 . The merger was advocated by business circles in order to be able to solve the fundamental structural problems that were based on the fact that the territorial state of Prussia surrounding both Hamburg and Lübeck had been hindering their development since the First World War. Hamburg in particular lacked space for port development and residential construction. For this purpose, after preparations in 1926, the Society for the Promotion of Common Interests Hamburg and Lübeck e. V. , known as the Hamburg-Lübeck Society for short , was founded. In this, merchants from Hamburg and Lübeck joined forces with the support of the chambers of commerce in both cities. The company's board of directors was made up of well-known entrepreneurs and the syndici of the chambers of commerce in both cities, chaired by the Hamburg banker Max Warburg . Kurt Vermehren was appointed managing director of the company.

The governments of both city-states endorsed the approach and joined the association in 1929, so that from then on both mayors were also represented on the board of directors. In 1929, at the suggestion of Hamburg Mayor Carl Wilhelm Petersen, Vermehren created a memorandum “The closer connection as a general problem”.

In 1930 Prussia took the initiative for the first time and began bilateral negotiations with Hamburg and Bremen. In these talks, representatives of Prussia indicated that further cooperation between Hamburg and Lübeck was not in the interests of Prussia and its seaport policy. In this context, the Prussian state government was also concerned that the two influential city-states might succeed in establishing a territorial connection at its expense and thus advancing to a state of area . The activities of the Hamburg-Lübeck Society under Vermehren had triggered diplomatic action by Prussia within a short time. In April 1930, Vermehren submitted another memorandum to the Board of Directors. This memorandum Hamburg-Lübeck on the construction of the state of Hamburg-Lübeck, Lübeck's position in the state of Hamburg-Lübeck and other influences on Lübeck's position was already provided with a draft constitution for the new federal state, which was derived from the current Hamburg constitution . On February 7, 1931, the SPD parliamentary groups in both cities published unprepared declarations for the population in the Lübecker Volksbote and Hamburger Echo , calling for the two cities to merge, although Julius Leber, as editor-in-chief, was aware of the polarizing effects of this approach. As a result, Lübeck's conservative press, the Generalanzeiger , which was affiliated with the Hanseatic People's League , spoke out in favor of connecting Lübeck to Prussia, and negotiations with Hamburg stalled despite decisive efforts. The syndic of the Lübeck Chamber of Commerce Rudolf Keibel , himself a member of the citizenship of the Hanseatic People's Federation, insinuated that Vermehren had launched the publication. The negotiations between the appointed State Commissioners Hans Ewers and Adolph Schönfelder on the draft of a state treaty got stuck. Increasingly tried to break this situation by giving presentations on complex topics, but in the early autumn of 1931 both state commissioners stopped their work, partly due to a lack of support from the administrations. In 1932 the Lübeck Senate decided to suspend negotiations with Hamburg and to negotiate with Prussia. This sealed the end of the Hamburg-Lübeck company, led by lawyer Vermehren, as well as the idea of ​​merging. The Greater Hamburg Law , which enlarged the area of ​​the city of Hamburg in 1937, made the merging of the two cities completely obsolete.

HaFraBa

Another complex of Kurt Vermehren's mandates was HaFraBa e. V. He worked as in-house counsel for the Association for the Preparation of the Hanseatic Cities – Frankfurt – Basel Motorway . The association was founded in 1926 as an association for the construction of a road for high-speed motor vehicle traffic from Hamburg via Frankfurt aM to Basel by road construction companies under the leadership of Robert Otzen and planned a motorway connection from Hamburg via Hanover and Frankfurt am Main to Basel (and then further through the Switzerland of Genoa ). The route planned at that time roughly corresponds to the course of today's A 5 motorway and the northern part of the A 7 .

On May 31, 1928, the association was renamed Association for the Preparation of the Hanseatic Cities – Frankfurt – Basel Road, in order to be able to include the Hanseatic cities of Bremen and Lübeck in the planning. A toll solution was provided for financing, but the National Socialists could not get used to it. In 1933, however, the project was modified further in the course of the job creation project of the Reichsautobahn .

Anastasia trials

Kurt Vermehren became particularly well-known for assuming the mandate for Anna Anderson in the trials that led to the Anastasia decision of the Federal Court of Justice in 1970 . From 1938 until his death he represented her together with his lawyer colleague Paul Leverkuehn in their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to enforce their claim to be the Tsar's daughter Anastasia in court. Leverkuehn & Vermehren had been entrusted with their representation before German courts by Anderson's American lawyer Edward Huntington Fallows (1865–1940). For his part, Fallows had received the mandate through the mediation of Anderson confidants Xenia Georgievna Romanova and Gleb Botkin (1900-1969), the son of the last personal physician of the Tsarist family Yevgeny Sergeyevich Botkin , and together with Anna Anderson the Holding Investments Incorporated of Delaware (later Grandanor Corporation ) as Corporation established for litigation financing and rights exploitation . American investors who wanted to participate in Romanov assets were acquired through this company. In numerous lawsuits, Leverkuehn and Vermehren challenged the inheritance claims of the high nobility to Western European Romanov assets, who were represented in these disputes by the Hamburg lawyer Günther von Berenberg-Gossler.

Fonts

• Contradiction between lawyer and party in the legal process. Rahtgens, Lübeck 1910 (also Göttingen, legal dissertation of Nov. 30, 1910)
• Lower Elbe and Lübeck. In: Lübeckische Blätter 1932, p. 557 ff.
• The Duke's enigmatic journey . In: Die Zeit , No. 50/1960

literature

• Ahasver von Brandt : The end of the Hanseatic community - A contribution to the latest history of the three Hanseatic cities . In: HGBll 74 (1956), p. 65 ff.
• Winfried Meyer: Kurt, Petra and Michael Vermehren . In: Winfried Meyer (Ed.): Conspirators in the concentration camp. Hans von Dohnanyi and the prisoners of July 20, 1944 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (Series of publications by the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, Volume 5) Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-89468-251-5 , pp. 365–371
• Gerhard Schneider : Endangering and Loss of Statehood of the Free and Hanseatic City of Lübeck and its Consequences . Schmidt-Römhild, Lübeck 1986, ISBN 3-7950-0452-7

Individual evidence

1. ^ According to Meyer (Lit.), p. 370, according to other sources: 1962
2. ^ Hermann Genzken: The Abitur graduates of the Katharineum zu Lübeck (grammar school and secondary school) from Easter 1807 to 1907. Borchers, Lübeck 1907. (Supplement to the school program 1907) urn : nbn: de: hbz: 061: 1-305545 , No. 1195
3. ^ Heinrich Jantzen: names and works: biographies and contributions to the sociology of the youth movement. Volume 2, Dipa-Verlag, 1975, p. 18
4. ↑ Meyer (Lit.), p. 356
5. ↑ She used her middle name Petra from the 1930s, initially as an author's name and later exclusively. See Margret Boveri : Branches. Edited by Uwe Johnson . Piper, Munich 1977, p. 230; new: Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1996, 438 pages, ISBN 3-518-39076-7
6. ↑ Abram Enns: Art and Citizenship. The controversial twenties in Lübeck. Christians, Hamburg; Weiland, Lübeck 1978, ISBN 3-7672-0571-8 , p. 67
7. ↑ Gerhard Schneider, p. 44ff.
8. ↑ Schneider, p. 50
9. ^ Archives of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck , NSA III 2C / 31
10. ^ Schneider, p. 55
11. ^ Schneider, p. 59
12. ↑ Schneider, p. 69ff.
13. ↑ Report of the Federal Archives on the creation of HaFraBa (PDF; 2.4 MB)
14. ↑ ANASTASIA. The good fat dairy cow . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1956 ( online ).
15. ↑ See Fallows Papers ( Memento of the original of July 13, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the Harvard University Library