Otto Schniewind

This article deals with the civil servant Otto Schniewind; for the German admiral, see Otto Schniewind (Admiral) .

Otto Schniewind (born August 15, 1887 in Cologne , † February 26, 1970 in Starnberg ) was a German civil servant , ministerial director in the Reich Ministry of Economics and director of the credit institute for reconstruction after the Second World War .

After completing his law studies , Schniewind worked as a court assessor from 1913 . After the end of the First World War , he began working in the Reich Treasury , and in 1922 he switched to business.

As early as 1925 he was a civil servant in the Ministry of Commerce, and in 1927 Ministerialrat . Between 1928 and 1931 Schniewind acted as financial advisor to the Persian government; In 1933 he rose to become Reich Commissioner for the Banking Industry.

Appointed Ministerialdirektor in 1935, he worked as Reichsbankdirector from June 1937.

Since he was against the financing of military armaments and also publicly represented this opinion, he resigned from the civil service in 1938 and became a private banker. From 1939 to 1945 Schniewind was personally liable partner of the former Jewish private bank H. Aufhäuser (Seiler & Co.) in Munich.

Schniewind acted as a liaison between the bourgeois Bavarian resistance group around Franz Sperr and the center of civil resistance against Hitler in Berlin. He was temporarily assigned to the planned Goerdeler government as finance and economics minister and was therefore arrested shortly after the assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 , and imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp . The Americans liberated him here in 1945 . The fact that Schniewind survived is certainly due to the fact that the former co-owner of the H. Aufhäuser bank, Siegfried Aufhäuser, transferred his office as Swedish consul general to him shortly before emigrating , and Schniewind thus enjoyed a certain diplomatic immunity .

Schniewind was a co-founder of the Reconstruction Loan Corporation , which had to implement the Marshall Plan . In April 1948 the Allies appointed him head of the authority, of which he was president until 1958. From 1952 to 1958 Schniewind was chairman of the supervisory board of Bankverein Westdeutschland / Commerzbank-Bankverein AG and from 1958 to 1961 at the successor institute Commerzbank .

Awards

• 1952: Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

literature

• Peter Hoffmann : Resistance, Coup, Assassination. The fight of the opposition against Hitler. Piper, Munich 1969 a. ö.
• Dieter Lehmann:  Schniewind, Hermann Hubert Otto Maria. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 23, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-428-11204-3 , p. 324 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Short biography of the German Resistance Memorial Center
• Newspaper article about Otto Schniewind in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Manuel Limbach: Citizens against Hitler. Prehistory, structure and work of the Bavarian "Sperr-Kreis" . Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-525-31071-7 , pp. 396-402 .