Paul von Gontard

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Paul von Gontard (born November 4, 1868 in Wesel , † December 21, 1941 in St. Louis , Missouri , USA ; full name Paul Theodor Eduard von Gontard ) was a German engineer and industrial manager . From 1905 to 1928 he worked as general director of Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken AG , trading as Berlin-Karlsruher Industrie-Werke from 1923 after conversion , and as a member of numerous supervisory boards .

family

Paul von Gontard came from an old French aristocratic family from the Dauphiné , whose members came to Germany in 1685, and was the son of the landowner and royal Prussian colonel Otto von Gontard (1819–1895) and Elisabeth von Gontard nee. de Haas (1823-1889). His great-grandfather was the architect and Prussian construction officer Carl von Gontard .

Von Gontard married on December 16, 1895 in St. Louis Clara Busch (born May 16, 1876 in St. Louis, † June 1959 (probably) in St. Louis), the daughter of the brewery owner Adolphus Busch (1839-1913), founder (1870) of the brewery - dynasty Anheuser-Busch , and the born Lilly Busch Anheuser , daughter of the brewery owner Eberhard Anheuser (1805–1880). The couple had three sons and a daughter: the engineer and explorer Paul Curt von Gontard (1896–1951), the engineer Adalbert von Gontard (1900–1976), the theater director Gert Heinz von Gontard (1906–1979) and Lilly Claire von Gontard (1910–1986), who was her second marriage to the defense contractor Bernhard Berghaus .

Life

As general director of the Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken AG (DWM), von Gontard cooperated with the unscrupulous arms dealer and “war profiteer” Basil Zaharoff (1849–1936). At the same time in France in 1907 the newspapers Le Figaro , Le Matin and L'Écho de Paris published articles on the accelerated equipping of the French army with machine guns . These reports were read in Germany and noted with concern. As a result, the German Reichstag approved 40 million marks for the purchase of machine guns in the three following years . They were supplied by DWM under the direction of Paul von Gontard, who had close economic ties with Vickers , a British defense company owned by Zaharoff. As was only later known, von Gontard had asked a Parisian agent of Zaharoff to launch a report in Le Figaro stating that France had decided to "considerably speed up the re-arming of the army with machine guns".

Villa Gontard in Stauffenbergstrasse framed by new buildings

From 1910 Paul von Gontard lived in the Villa Gontard named after him in Berlin-Tiergarten, today the seat of the management of the Berlin museums. He was lord of the manor at Gut Großwudicke in the Altmark , from 1912 to 1918 a member of the Prussian manor house and Knight of Honor of the Order of St. John . He held the academic degree of doctoral engineer as well as the honorary title of a Anhalt and a Prussian secret senior building officer . Since 1931 he had the citizenship of Liechtenstein .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christian Tenbrock: Merchant of death . In: Die Zeit , No. 50/2003
personal data
SURNAME Gontard, Paul from
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gontard, Paul Theodor Eduard von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German engineer and industry manager
DATE OF BIRTH November 4, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH Wesel
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 1941
Place of death St. Louis , Missouri , USA