Moritz Hochschild

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Moritz Hochschild , also Don Mauricio Hochschild (born February 17, 1881 in Biblis , German Empire ; † June 12, 1965 in Paris , France ) was a German mining entrepreneur in the first half of the 20th century and alongside Simón I. Patiño and Carlos Victor Aramayo one of the three South American tin barons.

Life

Moritz Hochschild was a German agnostic Jew whose family had worked in the mining and metalworking business for more than a generation. After finishing school he studied mining and engineering at the Bergakademie Freiberg . In 1905 he began his professional career at Metallgesellschaft , a company for raw materials trading and mining.

He later went to Spain and Australia before finally moving to South America to become self-employed. From 1911 to 1914 he made a considerable fortune in the copper trade in Chile. His brother Salomon ("Sali") joined him. When the First World War broke out , he returned to Germany to make a “fatherland contribution”. This happened in particular through the procurement of metals for the war raw materials department .

In 1919, after the end of the war, he went to South America again, together with his wife Käthe Rosenbaum, whom he had married the year before. In 1920 their son Gerardo Hochschild was born, four years later his wife died.

In the following two decades he built up an economic empire from Bolivia with the extraction and trade of tin ores that stretched from Peru in the north to Chile in the south. During this growth period, other family members followed him to South America and worked in his business community, including his cousin Philipp Hochschild with his wife Germaine. Moritz (or Don Mauricio, as he was called in South America) had an affair with Germaine and married her after her divorce from Philipp.

In the 1930s, the economic and political importance of the Moritz Hochschild Group was at its peak. In 1939 and 1944 he was arrested and sentenced to death by order of the Bolivian government. When he had to spend two weeks in the hands of kidnappers a few weeks after his release in 1944, he left South America for good after his liberation.

In 1951, the Hochschilds transferred most of their fortune to the Hochschild Trust and Foundation . In 1952, the Moritz Hochschild Group was expropriated in the course of the Bolivian Revolution. She survived this, but lost 70% of the previous business assets. The company continued to grow and also expanded abroad. Moritz Hochschild died in Paris in 1965 as a respected industrial and commercial entrepreneur.

In 1955 Moritz Hochschild made a substantial donation (DM 5,000) in his native Biblis. As a thank you, Biblis named a street after him.

After his death it became known that he had helped a large number of Jews to flee the Third Reich. "In 1938 Hochschild calculated that he had brought 2,000 to 3,000 Jews, in 1939 it came to 9,000," says historian Robert Brockmann , who is working on a biography of President Germán Busch Becerra , who died shortly before the start of World War II . Hochschild was responsible for transport costs, immigration formalities and the first reception on a farm in the Yungas region . Edgar Ramírez, archive director of the Bolivian mining company COMIBOL , and the chairman of the Bolivian Israelite Community, Ricardo Udler, see far-reaching parallels between Hochschild and the entrepreneur Oskar Schindler , who saved more than a thousand Jews from the Nazis, and that of the director Steven Spielberg with his The 1993 film “ Schindler's List ” set a monument.

Honors

In his hometown Biblis there is a Hochschildstrasse dedicated to him.

Hochschild today

In November 1984 Luis Hochschild, Moritz Hochschild's nephew, sold the Latin American mining business of the Hochschild Group to the South African mining company Anglo American Corporation of South Africa . In return, the latter gave up its Peruvian mining activities to the Hochschild Group.

This resulted in the mining company Hochschild Mining plc ( ISIN : GB00B1FW5029 ) listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) , which specializes in the underground mining of gold and silver in Latin America. The majority of the share capital is in the hands of Moritz Hochschild's descendants. It is run by Eduardo Hochschild, a great-nephew of Moritz Hochschild.

In addition to Hochschild Mining , the Hochschild family also owns companies in the fields of cement ( Pacasmayo ) and phosphate ( Fosfatos del Pacifico ) in Peru .

literature

  • Paul Arnsberg : The Jewish communities in Hesse. Beginning, downfall, new beginning, page 69. Societäts-Verlag 1971, ISBN 3-7973-0213-4 .
  • Gerhard Goldberg: History of the Hochschild Group
  • Helmut Waszkis: Dr. Moritz (Don Mauricio) Hochschild, 1881–1965. The man and his companies. A German jewish mining entrepreneur in South America . Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-89354-164-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Hillman: Review by Helmut Waszkis, Dr. Moritz (Don Mauricio) Hochschild . In: The Mining History Journal , Vol. 10 (2003), pp. 151–155, here p. 152.
  2. ↑ Helmut Waszkis: The Bolivian Case, 1938–1945. Haven for Thousands of Refugees. Remembering Dr. Moritz Hochschild , contribution to the conference of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association , Princeton 1999 ( digitized version ).
  3. ↑ "Oskar Schindler of Bolivia" saved thousands of Jews. In: FAZ.net . March 16, 2017, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  4. ^ Georg Ismar: Thousands of Jews saved: Bolivia's Oskar Schindler . In: Abendzeitung , June 25, 2017, accessed on January 16, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Hochschild, Moritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hochschild, Mauricio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mining entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH February 17, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Biblis , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH June 12, 1965
Place of death Paris , France