Matthias Lackas
Matthias Lackas (born November 28, 1905 in Merzig , † May 29, 1968 in Munich ) was a German bookseller and publisher's representative . During the Second World War he was temporarily managing director of the mail order bookshop Arnold (a subsidiary of the former Ullstein group). In this position and as a subsequent employee at the Deutsches Archiv Verlag, he was centrally involved in the corruption scandal in which army and air force positions were involved in 1943/44 . After the war he made a second career as a successful publisher . His Perlen-Verlag , founded in 1949 , Marbach am Neckar, then Munich, achieved one of the greatest business successes of the 1950s and 1960s with the book of etiquette written by Karlheinz Graudenz with the collaboration of Erica Pappritz . The company was sold at a profit in 1963 and renamed, it continues as Südwest-Verlag . Lackas also had his own book club , which he set up with great commercial success in the Bertelsmann Lesering in the mid-1950s . The Matthias Lackas Foundation was founded on his initiative and is now involved in cancer research.
Life
Training and first professional activities
Lackas' father Nikolaus was already active as a publisher; Politically committed as a primary school teacher, he published patriotic writings, some of which were self-published. In 1911 the family moved to Trier . Lackas dropped out of high school due to poor health. He did an apprenticeship as a bookseller, but failed when trying to become self-employed as a teaching material representative.
He left Trier through debt. From 1931 he worked as a representative for a teaching material distributor in Berlin. 1933 at the teaching material and globe factory Räth in Leipzig, 1935 through his brother at the Aichacher Kurier . It was not until 1939 that he achieved greater security through a job as a correspondent at Deutscher Verlag, Berlin, the former Ullstein house . A temporary agency in Hamburg was followed by the transfer of the general agency for the Rhineland. It became the career springboard. Lackas brought his district to second place in the company's internal ranking and was finally appointed to the head office in Berlin in 1941 to rehabilitate a loss-making subsidiary there, the Georg Arnold mail-order bookstore.
In the Deutsches Verlag (Ullstein) contact person for the front book trade
The management of the mail order bookstore Georg Arnold used Lackas for a restructuring that made him a de facto sole entrepreneur: With 50 employees and an annual turnover of around RM 500,000, the branch was in the red. Sales increased to RM 1,500,000 in 1941 and reached RM 8,500,000 in 1942 (roughly to be multiplied by 5 for today's value in euros ) - with a workforce that ultimately included three clerks and a secretary as assets . Lackas went to the Wehrmacht offices that bought books for field hospitals and their libraries , and here put his company in the lucrative position of an organizationally active middleman who exhausted paper quotas . In order to supply the soldiers with printed goods, the individual branches of the armed forces , the party associations and other larger customers, such as the Todt Organization , were given quarterly paper quotas. For the approved amount of paper they could buy books from publishers. In order to protect the trade from corruption , direct orders were as good as excluded. Mail order bookstores became attractive as middlemen. The company managed by Lackas enjoyed a favorable position here as a subdivision of the party's media group (Ullstein was " Aryanized " in 1937 and affiliated with the central publishing house of the NSDAP in the course of the proceedings ). Lackas offered to completely organize the supply of books for Wehrmacht units that wanted this. He was informed of how much paper there was to be printed in the quarter and made contact with publishers who could deliver on this scale. The procedure was monitored and bureaucratised by the issuing of paper checks: each order to a publisher had to be noted down on a form along with the required paper volume. All those involved in trading, from the paper supplier through the publisher to the end customer, noted their participation before two authorities independently checked the paper check and the order placed with it.
The procedure was problematic for the Wehrmacht agencies, as they barely had the necessary connections to the book trade to quickly bring paper checks into the approval process. If they did not exhaust the contingents, these were foreseeably cut back. Lackas modified the process by having the paper checks handed over and using them to publishers of his choice. He had them put the signatures of the responsible publishing house representatives blank into the forms - the orders, the paper volumes and the costs remained open. At the end of the quarter he was able to use the checks signed in advance to go to the Wehrmacht orderers and now use the paper volumes and orders to be allocated precisely so that the allocations would be completely exhausted. The process was interesting for publishers as well as Wehrmacht customers; However, it downgraded the approval authorities to institutions that could only sign the completed checks downstream.
In the next step, trading became independent: the publishers began printing before the checks came back approved by the authorities. That did not seem problematic, since the paper volumes had already been granted to the buyers in army and party organizations.
The economic activity was largely based on bribery : publishers paid Lacka's commissions , which he had skimmed off through two middlemen in his own company - his own salary was fixed. He himself bribed with “ scarce goods ” from France and the Netherlands , goods that could no longer be obtained during the war, the people in the army offices who provided him with orders and securities (official letters that opened doors for him, and himself protect against conscription for military service).
Secret trial before the Central Court of the Army and death sentence
Matthias Lackas found himself in a precarious position when he broke with Deutscher Verlag at the end of 1942. The aim of the provoked action was business independence. The subsidiary managed by Lackas made most of the profit that the former Ullstein group now brought in. In theory, it had to be possible to act directly as an intermediary for the Wehrmacht. A staff of two would be sufficient.
In practice, the exit from the parent company meant the end of protection by the party publisher of the NSDAP . Lackas was called up for military service immediately after the break in early December 1942 and was only able to save himself thanks to his most important client in the Air Force. This put him in touch with a small publisher, the Deutsches Archiv Verlag, which excelled above all with equestrian literature.
In a complex arrangement, the Air Force negotiated the modalities under which it could continue to order through Lackas - this did not end the conflicts with his former employer. The superiors of the German publishing house saw the business of the former subordinate bypassing them and, in the course of 1943, prepared the corruption scandal with which Lackas and the military units involved came into the crosshairs of secret corruption investigations at the end of 1943. The end of the initiated proceedings was the secret trial against Lackas and his two most important employees, negotiated from March 14th to April 22nd, 1944, during which the Central Court of the Army was constituted on April 12th .
The imprisoned on the part of the Wehrmacht agency chief Walter Pinski and Heinrich Schepelmann committed, the file notes, in their cells suicide . Lackas was sentenced to death on May 31, 1944 . Among the companies that worked with him were S. Fischer Verlag , Berlin; the Wolfgang-Krüger-Verlag, Berlin; the Wilhelm Frick publishing house, Vienna; the C. Bertelsmann Verlag , Gütersloh; the publishing house Karl Rauch, Dessau; the Societäts-Verlag, Frankfurt (Eher Group); the stages publishing house, Leipzig, the publishing house bookstore Ludwig Kicheler, Darmstadt; the publishing house H. Goverts, Hamburg; the Willibald-Keller-Verlag, Leipzig; the Völkische Verlag, Düsseldorf; Piper Verlag , Munich; the Saarpfälzische Druckerei- und Verlagsgesellschaft, Kaiserslautern, the Eugen Händle-Verlag, Mühlacker. However, the focus of the process was placed on Bertelsmann, the main competitor of the NSDAP media group . The leading Bertelsmann employees had already been imprisoned at the end of 1943 / beginning of 1944 and taken to Berlin for a specially scheduled trial. Bertelsmann, according to the plan in 1944, was to start the process of joining.
Escape on the way to the front
Lackas ultimately owed his survival to this planning. Heinrich Himmler's petition for clemency, which he submitted on June 12, 1944 , was rejected on September 4, 1944 (the sentence for the co-defendants being reduced by Riewel and Moldt), but the execution of the judgment was postponed due to the ongoing investigations against Bertelsmann because Lackas was needed as a possible witness in the follow-up process. However, the relocation of the Bertelsmann proceedings to Westphalia gave the lawyers the chance in March 1945 to negotiate an arrangement for the Gütersloh publishing house on site. The death sentence against Lackas was changed to “parole at the front” in the spring of 1945 against the background of the impending military collapse. The collective transport from the Berlin-Moabit prison did not reach the probation unit . When the train in front of Pilsen , which had just been bombed, came to a stop, the train staff released the prisoners. Lackas made his way to the West, was temporarily imprisoned by the Americans and finally got to his brother Joseph in Aichach . His next path led him to Marbach am Neckar , where the former printer's owner Cantz was a contact point for stranded publishing booksellers.
Post war career
Together with colleagues from the publishing industry and Johannes Hoffmann , who later became Prime Minister of Saarland , Lackas received the license on February 21, 1946 to found Saar-Verlag , Saarbrücken . However, the company developed disastrously because of irregular business practices, in which Lackas in particular was involved. Lackas had to leave Saar-Verlag a little later in a scandal.
On July 14, 1949, he founded his own publishing house, Perlen-Verlag , based in Marbach . The company rounded off its own book club under the title “Books for Everyone”. As far as can be seen, Lackas gained 800,000 members from 1950, who guaranteed the purchase of one novel per month. In the mid-1950s, “Bücher für Alle” was absorbed by Bertelsmann Lesering , and Lackas received regular payments for the members he transferred to the former competitor. Perlen-Verlag celebrated its outstanding business success at the end of the 1950s with Graudenz's book of etiquette , which became the most important etiquette of the post-war republic.
Lackas was also known as the "paper pope" in the post-war book trade. Nobody knew as well as he where companies and private individuals had stored paper in the chaos of war, which remained in short supply for a long time even after the currency reform . Publishers contacted Lackas when they got into trouble with the paper supply (according to the statement of the later publisher Albrecht Knaus 2004, who was employed by Piper at the time). In contrast to the period up to 1944, which was well documented by the court proceedings, detailed documents are missing for the post-war period, so that no precise picture emerges. Lackas had married the daughter of the lawyer who had represented one of his employees in the corruption case; the marriage remained childless and overshadowed by the events of the war. Lackas himself could only think back to the war years with attacks of fear. Otherwise, according to his auditor in 2002, he worked hard, but with catastrophic bookkeeping.
On June 30, 1958, Perlen-Verlag moved from Marbach to Munich. On March 12, 1963, it was renamed Südwest-Verlag , Munich, and sold under that name. Matthias Lackas died of lung cancer in Munich on May 29, 1968. His fortune was initially secured to provide for his wife. Since her death in the 1980s, it has been available to the Matthias Lackas Foundation, now headed by his former auditor, for use in cancer research projects.
Remarks
- ↑ The other biographical explanations are based on Hans-Eugen Bühler / Olaf Simons, The blinding business of Matthias Lackas. Corruption investigations in the publishing world of the Third Reich (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 2004) as well as the previous study Bertelsmann in the Third Reich , edited by Norbert Frey, Saul Friedländer, Trutz Rentdorff, Reinhard Wittmann (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 2002).
- ↑ More precise information fell under military censorship during the war and is generally missing from such images.
- ↑ Hans-Eugen Bühler and Olaf Simons published a transcript of the process with accompanying materials at http://www.polunbi.de/archiv/44-03-14-01.html
- ↑ Matthias Lacka's petition for mercy. In: Database writing and image 1900-1960. Olaf Simons, June 12, 1944, accessed November 28, 2015 .
- ^ Heinrich Himmler, answer to the requests for clemency from Matthias Lackas and Karl Heinz Moldt. In: Database writing and image 1900-1960. Olaf Simons, September 4, 1944, accessed on November 28, 2015 : "I overturn the judgment against Riewel and Moldt."
literature
- Hans-Eugen Bühler, Olaf Simons: The dazzling business of Matthias Lackas. Corruption investigations in the publishing world of the Third Reich . Pierre Marteau, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-00-013343-7 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Matthias Lackas in the catalog of the German National Library
- Hans-Eugen Bühler, Olaf Simons: Lackas, Matthias. In: polunbi.de. January 25, 2004 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lackas, Matthias |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German bookseller and publisher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 28, 1905 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Merzig on the Saar |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 29, 1968 |
| Place of death | Munich |