Otto Wolff von Amerongen

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Otto Wolff von Amerongen, 1977

Otto Wolff von Amerongen (born August 6, 1918 in Cologne ; † March 8, 2007 ibid, completely Otto Wolff Freiherr Taets von Amerongen ) was considered one of the most influential entrepreneurs in Germany after 1945. He was also known as a "pioneer of trade with the East" and " secret east trade minister ”.

Live and act

Private life

Otto was the illegitimate son of the iron industrialist Otto Wolff and of Else von Amerongen born. Pieper (wife of Hans Taets von Amerongen). Otto Wolff adopted his biological son on July 22, 1935, which resulted in Otto Taets von Amerongen becoming Otto Wolff von Amerongen. He graduated from elementary school in Austria , passed his Abitur and began commercial training. After five years in the Hitler Youth , von Amerongen was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1938 . During the Nazi dictatorship , he did not join any other National Socialist organization or any of its subgroups. After the war he was interned by the Allies until 1947 .

Gravesite of the Wolff family

Wolff married Eva Hehemann (1923–2016) in 1943. The marriage resulted in three daughters, Claudia, Regine and Jeanne. After the couple separated, Wolff married Winnie Greger in 1966. She was a master tailor by trade and ran a fashion store.

For health reasons, Wolff increasingly withdrew from the public around 2003. He died in 2007 at the age of 88 and was buried in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne (HWG, between lit. L + M).

Role in the time of National Socialism

In 1940 he followed his father Otto Wolff after his death as a personally liable partner in the Otto Wolff Group . He represented the group during the war in Lisbon and 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. Portugal was the only state that supplied the German Reich with this raw material.

Corresponding notes in files of the US military government and the Soviet KGB are considered to have proven that the Otto Wolff Group, under his leadership, procured Jewish property in the form of shares , gold and other values ​​for the National Socialist government and its war financing until 1945 and on the stock exchanges z. B. invested in Switzerland .

The two journalists Ingolf Gritschneder and Werner Rügemer had researched this for months and brought the topic to the public in a documentary that was broadcast in 2001 under the title “Hehler für Hitler”. Wolff von Amerongen never took a public position on allegations of personal involvement.

Family coat of arms Taets von Amerongen

Entrepreneurial activity from 1945 to 1990

After the end of World War II he was interned temporarily. In 1947 he was able to return to the family business. Since many companies in the metal industry were largely under the control of the Allies, his main effort during these years was to prevent the fragmentation and unbundling of the individual parts of the company. He focused his business activities on three main areas, trading in the metal goods sector, the basic industry and the processing industry. In addition, there was also the planning and construction of complete systems at times. In 1949 he renamed the Wolff Group as a limited liability company, with 49 percent of the capital in his hand. In 1963 the company's annual turnover was DM 3 billion. This made it the third largest German family company after Krupp and Flick. In 1966 he converted the Wolff Group into a stock corporation and headed it as chairman of the board until 1986. However, it always became clear that the company was increasingly reaching its limits in the international market due to its size. Therefore, in 1968 Wolff sold the share in the basic industry in order to be more flexible in other areas. With the emergence of the steel crisis in the mid-1970s, it was possible to maintain stability in the company, but in the mid-1980s it was increasingly caught up in the global crisis. Wolff had bought company-owned real estate to provide financial support, one subsidiary had made an annual loss of over DM 200 million, and the subsidiary responsible for steel trading was getting more and more into difficulties. In 1986 he appointed his son-in-law Arend Oetker as Chairman of the Board of Management, who then sold the entire group including its 200 holdings and 30,000 employees to Thyssen AG (now ThyssenKrupp AG ) after the ongoing crisis and previous partial sales . According to Wolff von Amerongen, this was "not a step out of necessity" but an acceptance of the economic facts that arose at the end of the 1980s.

In the period under review, Wolff von Amerongen held numerous supervisory board mandates and in 1971 was the first German to be appointed to the executive committee of the US Exxon group.

Memberships and offices

From 1969 to 1988 Otto Wolff von Amerongen was President of the German Industry and Trade Congress and then until his death he was honorary president of numerous organizations, such as B. the Cologne Chamber of Industry and Commerce , the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce , the German Olympic Society , the German Society for Foreign Policy and also the Association of German Business in the Russian Federation . He belonged to the inner circle of the Bilderberg Group and was a member of the Presidium of the Europa-Union Deutschland . The German-Portuguese Society (DPG), of which he was a founding member, was founded in 1964 on the premises of his company . From 1959 to 1960 he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation .

Influence on Eastern Trade

In the area of ​​economic cooperation with the eastern countries, Wolff von Amerongen could build on the traditions from the time of his father's management after 1945. In 1922 he played a major role in the establishment of the German-Russian Trading Company, helped build the Manchurian railway line with his company and was involved in the creation of the first oil pipeline between Batumi and Baku. In 1952 he took over the chairmanship of the working group of the Soviet Union in the Eastern Committee of the German Economy . In the same year he succeeded in holding constructive talks with the Soviet leadership about improving economic relations between Germany and the Soviet Union. For 1954 he had prepared a German-Soviet meeting with the Soviet leadership in Moscow, at which further serious steps towards economic cooperation were to be discussed. All travel formalities had already been completed and the organizational preparations had been made when the Foreign Office prohibited this meeting for flimsy reasons. Again and again Wolff von Amerongen was forced to maintain a certain foreign policy balance with the US government in his activities towards the east. In order to be able to guarantee this "consideration" in terms of content, he became a co-founder and member of the Steering Committee of the Bildberg Conference in 1954. Nevertheless, his Eastern European demarches also met with criticism and opposition in Washington. From 1955 to 2000, Wolff von Amerongen headed the East Committee of the German Economy and in this position established economic contacts with the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s . In 1961 he was appointed by Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to head the committee for the preparation of the Moscow 1962 industrial fair. The German-Soviet natural gas pipe business - a so-called barter deal - is considered to be his greatest success with an influence on the détente policy of the Federal Republic. During the Leipzig trade fair, Wolff von Amerongen regularly sought and cultivated personal contact with political and economic circles in Eastern European countries. That is why he was praised by Mikhail Gorbachev as the “oldest pioneer of the Germany / Soviet Union labor brigade”. As chairman of the Eastern Committee of the German Economy, Wolff von Amerongen was the first foreigner to visit Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng in 1989, three months after the Tian'anmen massacre .

Entrepreneurial activity from 1990 to 2003

But even in the new political and economic situation that occurred at the beginning of the 1990s, Wolff von Amerongen remained active in business. From now on he concentrated more on the service sector, buying and restructuring companies in order to make them fit for the new market conditions. In 1991 he founded the Otto Wolff von Amerongen industrial consulting and investment company and became its managing director.

In 1992 he founded the Otto Wolff von Amerongen Foundation to promote education, upbringing and international understanding, and took over as chairman of the board. In 1998, this resulted in the Otto Wolff Foundation , which maintains an institute for economic research in Cologne, the Otto Wolff Institute for Economic Order . Since 2009 awards the Otto Wolff Foundation to Otto Wolff von Amerongen SME Award . The award is given for outstanding performance in three categories: to German medium-sized companies in Russia, Russian medium-sized companies in Germany and innovative companies in both markets. The award is the only award in the German-Russian economic context. In addition to the entrepreneurial activities, he also recognizes the pioneering achievements in the respective target market and focuses on the high innovative strength of the companies.

Since 2001, the Club of Cologne has awarded the Otto Wolff von Amerongen Prize for Sports Science, endowed with 5,000 euros, every two years .

Movie

From March 2, 2006, a documentary entitled Has Wolff von Amerongen committed bankruptcy crimes? in German cinemas. In it, the director Gerhard Friedl sheds light on Wolff's role in the context of several company failures. This film received the German Short Film Award 2005 and the ARTE Documentary Film Award 2004.

Awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "The pioneer of trade in the East turns 85" , stern , August 5, 2003.
  2. ↑ Jochen Thies: Otto Wolff von Amerongen: Scout of the market economy , in: Peter Danylow / Ulrich S. Soénius (ed.): Otto Wolff. A company between business and politics , Munich 2005, Siedler Verlag. ISBN 3-88680-804-1 , p. 391.
  3. ^ Obituary notice Eva Wolff von Amerongen , FAZ , December 17, 2016.
  4. ↑ Jochen Thies: Otto Wolff von Amerongen: Kundschafter der Marktwirtschaft , in: Peter Danylow ..., Munich 2005, p. 397.
  5. ↑ Otto Wolff von Amerongen is dead. Obituary in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 9, 2007.
  6. ↑ Jochen Thies: Otto Wolff von Amerongen: Scout of the market economy , in: Peter Danylow ..., Munich 2005, p. 414 f.
  7. ↑ Interview with the historian Janis Schmelzer, author of the book "Devisen für den Endsieg", 2003, p. 3.
  8. ↑ Werner Rügemer: Colonia corrupta. Münster 2012, p. 181 ff. ISBN 978-3-89691-525-2 .
  9. ↑ a b Hehler für Hitler , documentation by Werner Rügemer, 2004 on 3sat.de and 2012 on EinsExtra ( Memento from January 18, 2012 in the Internet Archive ).
  10. ↑ Organigram ( memento of February 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) on ost-ausschuss.de
  11. ↑ "Otto Wolff von Amerongen is dead" ( Memento from March 12, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) on heute.de from March 9, 2007.
  12. ↑ Frank Dohmen et al. a .: Beloved enemy. The rapid rise in the Middle Kingdom is bringing the German economy a growth miracle - but also new risks . Der Spiegel , 34/2010, p. 70.
  13. ↑ Profile of the Foundation ( Memento from January 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), on: otto-wolff-institut.de ( Memento from December 10, 2006 in the Internet Archive ).
  14. ↑ Otto Wolff von Amerongen Middle Class Prize. Retrieved July 22, 2020 .
  15. ↑ The Otto Wolff von Amerongen Prize for Sports Science , on uni-bielefeld.de .
  16. ↑ Film content on cinema.de .
  17. ↑ Did Wolff von Amerongen commit bankruptcy offenses? .
  18. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB).
  19. ↑ Otto Wolff von Amerongen 85 years from August 4, 2003.
personal data
SURNAME Wolff von Amerongen, Otto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baron Taets of Amerongen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German industrialist and economic functionary
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Cologne
DATE OF DEATH March 8, 2007
Place of death Cologne