Oskar Adolf von Rosenberg

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Oskar Adolf Rosenberg , since 1914 Baron von Rosenberg-Redé (* 1878 in Vienna , † 1939 in Kaumberg , Lilienfeld district , Lower Austria ) was an Austrian banker and entrepreneur . From 1924 to 1938 he was the last private owner of the Ostseebad Heiligendamm .

Life

Oskar Adolf Rosenberg was probably of Jewish descent. His mother was Hungarian and the identity of his biological father remained unknown. Even as a toddler he was from a banker by Rosenberg adopted , which related to him well and also of Jewish descent from speech in northern Hungary Heves county was. He was elevated to the Hungarian baronate on April 12, 1914 in Vienna with a diploma dated May 26, 1916 .

Rosenberg married Edith Kaulla from one of the best-known upper-class families of Jewish descent in southern Germany (see also: Karoline Kaulla ). The couple had three children Marion (* 1916), Hubert (* 1919), who committed suicide in Hollywood , and Alexis (1922–2004), who lived in Paris in the " Hôtel Lambert ", and his maiden name was Dieter Rudolf Oskar Baron von Rosenberg-Redé in the Principality of Liechtenstein had officially changed to Alexis de Redé .

Villa Rosin in Kaumberg shortly after completion

Initially, Rosenberg was an Austrian citizen. When his native part of Hungary came to Romania after the First World War , he became a Romanian citizen. It was not until 1937 that he took the citizenship of the neutral Liechtenstein - probably for his own safety because of the Nazi rule - and formally moved his permanent residence to a 16-room suite in the “Hotel Dolder” in Zurich . Until his suicide, however, he lived in Kaumberg near Vienna in his "Villa Rosin" (built in 1898).

Rosenberg was a successful entrepreneur, banker in Constantinople , London , Paris and Zurich and was particularly successful on the stock exchange . In 1912 he is said to have made enormous profits on the stock exchange with King Nicholas of Montenegro through internal manipulation in the first Balkan War .

Heiligendamm

Heiligendamm around 1925, spa and bath house

In 1924 Rosenberg took over all shares in the constantly loss-making "Ostseebad Heiligendamm GmbH" from the Lübeck bank Louis Wolff for 4,500 British pounds and received Heiligendamm in the following years through constant financial injections. However, as the owner of all corporations and real estate companies in the Baltic Sea resort, he remained in the background and instead let the board of directors and the supervisory board act in public. The supervisory board chairman since 1924 was Duke Adolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg , the managing director was the Doberan lawyer Fritz Knaack. All banking transactions were processed through the Dresdner Bank industrial office .

In the 1920s, Rosenberg invested several million Reichsmarks in the Baltic Sea resort of Heiligendamm. Without these donations, the GmbH would have gone bankrupt and Heiligendamm would have been left to decay. In 1932 Duke Adolf Friedrich was pressured by the Nazis to resign from his chairmanship of the supervisory board of Heiligendamm-GmbH, since this company is "a little Aryan matter" . However, the latter refused and in 1933 the company even warned the new rulers in writing: “The GmbH is only financed by OA Rosenberg & Co. Zurich. It requires substantial subsidies every year, as the incoming lease does not even cover property and rent tax. So we are only dependent on the goodwill of a foreign donor. ” Until 1937, Rosenberg compensated for the deficit of his GmbH every year, even at the time when Adolf Hitler , Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi politicians frequented Heiligendamm and although he was a consequence of the emergency ordinances of the German Reich (blocking of accounts of foreign owners) since 1932 could no longer dispose of his German accounts.

But after 1938 Austria in the German Reich had been connected , it became impossible Rosenberg to secure the invested assets in Heiligendamm. In August 1939 Heiligendamm was even confiscated for army purposes and used as a reserve hospital .

According to documents such as the “death record” of the Kaumberg community and statements by the stock exchange trader André Kostolany , Rosenberg is said to have committed suicide in his “Villa Rosin” in late summer 1939 out of desperation after the seizure of Heiligendamm and before the war began. After his death, Dresdner Bank arranged for his villa to be auctioned.

Today Rosenberg is almost forgotten. There are only occasional references to the “Jewish baron” . Heiligendamm, whose market value was estimated at 500 million D-Marks just a few years ago, was sold in 1996 for only 18 million D-Marks to a company of the Fundus Group . Possible heirs of Rosenberg had not made any recourse claims against the federal government since the German reunification - not even son Alexis. Nevertheless, since 2007 the " Jewish Claims Conference " has taken on this process.

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SURNAME Rosenberg, Oskar Adolf von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rosenberg, Oskar Adolf Baron von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian banker and entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 1939
Place of death Kaumberg , Lilienfeld district , Lower Austria