Otto Wolff Group
The Otto Wolff Group was founded in 1904 by Otto Wolff and Ottmar E. Strauss as an iron trading company in Cologne . In the decades that followed, the small company quickly grew into a large and significant group of companies. Due to bad speculations and the " Aryanization " during the National Socialist era , the Jew Ottmar Strauss had to hand over his holdings and real estate to the Otto Wolff company and fled impoverished to Switzerland . After the death of his adoptive father, Otto Wolff von Amerongen took over the management in 1940 , which he held until 1986.
During the Third Reich , the Group also secured with orders from the Four-Year Plan of Hermann Goering from 1943 received the Neunkirchen iron works where the Otto Wolff Group has been involved with 40 percent of the award "war-pattern mode". The company organized the purchase of the war-essential heavy metal tungsten , which is suitable for the manufacture of armor-piercing ammunition, for the German armaments industry. Until 1945, the Otto Wolff Group procured, among other things, Jewish property in the form of shares , gold and other values for the National Socialist government and its war financing and placed it on the stock exchanges e.g. B. in Switzerland . After the war ended, Ottmar E. Strauss's heirs tried unsuccessfully to get their company shares back.
In 1965 the Otto Wolff Group was one of the largest trading companies in the Federal Republic and achieved a turnover of 2.5 billion DM .
In 1990, after the ongoing crisis and partial sales, the entire group, including around 200 holdings and 30,000 employees, was sold to Thyssen AG (now ThyssenKrupp AG ), but continued to exist for years under the umbrella of ThyssenKrupp as a separate unit. The Otto Wolff Handelsgesellschaft mbH was May 1, 2014 the ThyssenKrupp Mannex GmbH merged. The segment has been operating under the name thyssenkrupp Materials Trading since April 1, 2016 .
literature
- Peter Danylow, Ulrich S. Soénius (Eds.): Otto Wolff. A company between business and politics. Siedler, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-88680-804-1 .
- Dieter Mechlinski: The secret government councilor Ottmar E. Strauss. Biography of a forgotten fellow citizen of Königswinter. 5th extended edition, Heimatverein Oberdollendorf and Römlinghoven eV, Königswinter 2008.
- Otto-Wolff-Handelsgesellschaft, Cologne (Hrsg.): Commemorative word for the 50th anniversary of the Otto Wolff company on June 25, 1954. (Festschrift). With colleagues from friends and colleagues. ed. from the owners. Secondary title: Otto Wolff - fifty years. Mainz, around 1954.
Web links
- Website of the group as part of ThyssenKrupp AG
- WDR report on the history of the group and the sons of the founding fathers ( memento from April 11, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
- Early newspaper articles on the Otto Wolff Group in the 20th Century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ^ Hehler for Hitler. ARD, accessed on July 18, 2019 .
- ↑ Phoenix (TV station): The legacy of the fathers - How the Otto Wolff Group became Aryan ( Memento from May 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) , documentary by Gert Monheim and Jürgen Naumann, 2005 (accessed on May 21, 2019)