Odilo Burkart

Odilo Burkart during the Flick Trial on April 23, 1947

Odilo Burkart (born August 28, 1899 in Riedlingen , † April 29, 1979 in Munich ) was General Manager at Friedrich Flick , military economic leader and defendant in the Flick trial of the Nuremberg Tribunal .

biography

Burkart came from a family that can be counted as part of political Catholicism . Two of his sisters became religious. His godfather, Adolf Gröber , was one of the most important center politicians in Germany. Furthermore, the painter Albert Burkart is a brother of Odilo Burkart.

After graduating from high school in Rottweil in 1917, he began to study law in Tübingen and became an active member of the Catholic student association KStV Alamannia in the KV . At the end of the war, he was drafted into the war for six months and was then able to continue studying law. In Tübingen he received his doctorate. iur. with the topic of parliamentarism in Württemberg . Burkart then studied in Berlin and then in Munich, where he also became a member of associations of KV, in Berlin with Askania (now KStV Askania-Burgundia ) and with KStV Ottonia Munich. In 1922 he was promoted to Dr. rer. pole. PhD.

After completing his studies, Burkart worked as a businessman in Paruschewitz (Upper Silesia), which fell to Poland in 1922. In 1927 he became head of the economic department in the Oberschlesischen Eisenindustrie AG in Gleiwitz , received procuration in 1931 and became sales manager in 1934.

In 1933 he entered the Stahlhelm and when it was transferred to the Sturmabteilung (SA), he announced his departure, which was approved in 1936.

Burkart was married, and the marriage resulted in a daughter.

Flick Group

In April 1936, Friedrich Flick brought him to the corporate headquarters in Berlin and he succeeded Hermann Terberger, a member of the board of directors at Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke , who moved to the Maxhütte board of directors there. Burkart was responsible at Flick for the steel group of the group and the armaments expansion in this area. When Otto Steinbrinck stepped down from the board in 1938, he became deputy chairman of the board at Mittelstahl and took over his area of ​​responsibility for lignite. As a general representative at Flick, he was responsible for iron, steel and lignite. He negotiated a compromise with Colonel Hermann von Hanneken , who was employed by Hermann Göring for the allocation of crude steel , which on the one hand enabled the Flick companies to produce more steel that Hanneken urgently needed for armaments production. On the other hand, he was allowed to roll out more steel and the profit situation of the Flick companies was improved. At the level of the iron industry, he successfully blocked redistribution of the crude steel contingents to the disadvantage of Flick. In 1940 he was appointed military economist.

Gradually he became one of Flick's most important executives and moved into supervisory and advisory boards of the group: Sächsische Stahlwerke Döhlen ( Freital ), Anhaltische Kohlenwerke , Hochofenwerk Lübeck , Maxhütte, Rombacher Hüttenwerke , Brandenburger Eisenwerke ( Brandenburg an der Havel ) and Spandau steel industry .

After 1945

After the end of the Second World War , he was arrested by the Soviets on December 5, 1945, but they released him. Thereafter, Burkart was charged before an American military tribunal for his alleged involvement in the slave labor program and acquitted on December 22, 1947.

Immediately afterwards he made himself available to Friedrich Flick, who was imprisoned until 1950. In 1949 he was again a member of the board of directors at Maxhütte and in 1955 its chairman. Burkart owned Alumetall GmbH and, since 1958, the Express works in Nuremberg . When Auto Union decided to sell its two-wheeler production in 1959 , he acquired it and merged the Viktoria , Express and DKW companies into the Zweirad Union.

For a long time after the war, Burkart was chairman of the supervisory board of Stahlwerke Südwestfalen AG in Siegen and of the Vogtland cotton spinning mill in Hof. He was also a member of the Presidium of Bavarian Industry, the Wittelsbach Compensation Fund and the board of the Deutsches Museum .

Awards

Burkart was an honorary citizen of Riedlingen and an honorary senator of the Technical University of Munich. He was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit with a Star, the Great Silver Medal of Honor for Services to the Republic of Austria , the Great State Medal of the Free State of Bavaria, the Bavarian Order of Merit and the Papal New Year's Order.

literature

• Johannes Bähr et al .: The Flick Group in the Third Reich. Edited by Institute for Contemporary History Munich-Berlin on behalf of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. Oldenbourger Wissenschaftsverlag, Munich 2008.
• Susanne Jung: The legal problems of the Nuremberg trials. Depicted in the trial against Friedrich Flick . Tübingen 1992. Partly available online: Rechtsprobleme
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-039309-0 .
• Siegfried Koß in Siegfried Koß, Wolfgang Löhr (Hrsg.): Biographisches Lexikon des KV. 7th part (= Revocatio historiae. Volume 9). Akadpress, Essen 2010, ISBN 978-3-939413-12-7 , p. 33 f.
• museum-digital: baden-württemberg: portrait sketch by Odilo Burkart

Individual evidence

1. ^ "Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10, Nuremberg, October 1946-April, 1949: Case 5: US v. Flick (Flick case)", p. 431
2. ^ Bähr: Flick Group , p. 187.
3. ↑ Jung: Rechtsprobleme , p. 29.
4. ↑ Bähr: Flick Group , p. 187 ff.
5. ^ Bähr: Flick Group , p. 275.
6. ^ Bähr: Flick Group , p. 289.
7. ↑ Jung: Rechtsprobleme , p. 54.
8. ↑ zweirad-union-mopeds.de ( Memento from February 18, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ Ernst Klee: Personal Lexicon , p. 87.
10. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.6 MB)