Pundt & Kohn

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Pundt & Kohn

(Renamed Pundt & Kohnert in 1937)

legal form OHG
founding 1863
resolution 1967
Reason for dissolution Death of the owner
Seat Geestemünde GermanyGermanyGermany 
management Hans Kohn (ert)
Number of employees 100-150
Branch Timber import and processing

The Pundt & Kohn OHG was a 1862 by FJS Kohn in Geestemünde ( Bremerhaven ) based Holzimport- and processing companies . Until it was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944, it was one of the most important and oldest companies in this branch on the Lower Weser and was dissolved in the third generation in 1967 after the death of its last owner, Hans Kohnert .

Company history

Foundation and first generation (1863–1879)

The sailing ship captain and ship owner Franz Johann Syabbe Kohn founded his own timber import company in Geestemünde in 1862 and for this purpose expanded an original old-style warehouse , two-storey and three-cellar, on the Geestemünder dike near the old Geestebrücke to a residential and office -, and warehouse. In the summer of the same year, the union with the timber trade of Captain Dietrich Pundt, also located on the Geeste dike, took place. Both founded the company Pundt & Kohn (P&K). Business flourished thanks to the construction of new port facilities on the Geeste and the rapidly growing demand for pit timber , railway sleepers and construction timber for residential and factory buildings in the wake of population growth and the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Since the domestic supply of wood could no longer meet this great demand, the company shifted to importing wood mainly from Scandinavia , Russia and partly also from America , from where mainly precious woods were obtained . In view of the weight of the transported goods, the waterway was by far the most cost-effective until well into the 19th century . It was no coincidence that wood importing companies concentrated on the lower reaches of rivers such as the Weser , from where the imported and processed wood was distributed to the centers of industrialization by barges , and later increasingly also by rail . This also applied to the P&K company, whose first wood storage areas were in Deichstraße (later called Bussestraße) directly on the Geestedeich shortly before the confluence of the Geeste with the Weser, where the owner's old residential and office building stood until the Second World War . After only five years of collaboration, co-owner Diedrich Pundt left the company in 1868 due to illness. From then on, Franz JS Kohn continued to run the well-developing timber import business, linked to his shipping company with its own ships or ship shares ( Guayana and the Briggs Marianne , Auguste and Salia ), until he died on August 13, 1879. Then his son Franz Kohn took over the family business.

Flowering period and second generation (1879–1909)

The storage areas on the Geeste soon proved to be too small. In the new industrial port of Geestemündes, there were new construction and storage areas, which were also separated from the Geeste by a lock , were largely ice-free and independent of the tides throughout the year . On the west and north side of the cross canal, the connecting canal between the main canal and the wooden port of Geestemünde , which was inaugurated in 1877, P&K built new storage sheds along Schönianstrasse with a length of 300 m, in large two-story storage buildings specially prepared for the import, as well as open storage areas for the company on over 10,000 m². Around 1890 the company imported approx. 30,000 solid cubic meters of wood annually, compared to 25,000 solid cubic meters of the competitor Chr. Külken founded in Geestemünde in 1872. To facilitate their imports, P&K founded its own steamship shipping company at the end of the 1880s with two ships of 750 and 1,150 tons, specially prepared for timber imports; further ships were planned in 1890. A new office building at Schönianstrasse 15 was also built at this time. In 1887 the Kohn family moved into a new representative villa at nearby Borriesstraße 6.

Together with the two other large timber importing and processing companies in Geestemündes, Chr. Külken and Rogge, P&K systematically expanded the timber trade until the 1890s. By barge into the Upper Weser region, and by rail into the Ruhr region and other industrial centers currently under construction. The breakthrough came only with the customs connection of the Lower Weser towns (1888) and the inclusion of the Holzhafen in a much larger spatial and economic sales area that this made possible. In just a decade, timber imports on the Lower Weser tripled.

The various stages of development of industrial woodworking in the 19th century, which did not develop continuously but rather cyclically, had a decisive influence on the operational structure of P&K. The planing machines played a key role in this . As early as 1877 a permit for a sawmill and planing mill on the cross channel was applied for. Built in 1890, Pundt & Kohn then at the head of the transverse channel, between industry Road, Canal Street and saw street a modern sawmill and planing mill with rod fabrication, under the name Geestemünder timber industry works Backhaus & Co. changed its name. In contrast to the unrealized project of 1877, the company now had a direct rail connection on Industriestrasse.

At that time, P&K was one of the oldest and largest companies in this branch on the Lower Weser, and P&K was by far the largest company in terms of turnover. Due to its national economic and commercial importance, Pundt & Kohn was mentioned in the Brockhaus Encyclopedia as early as 1894 .

Expansion and third generation (1909-1945)

Pundt & Kohn was an important creditor of the insolvent company JH Krumnack, Möbelfabrik, Dampfsägewerk and Holzhandlung via goods delivery credits . In Melle. For this reason and also out of family interests, this company was taken over by Pundt & Kohn on September 27, 1909 as part of the liquidating foreclosure auction . After the death of Franz Kohn in 1909, his son Hans Kohn continued the business of P&K in the third generation and his older son Gerhard Kohn took over the management of the newly acquired factory in Melle , which was renamed Meller Möbelfabrik GmbH (MMM) in 1909 with the main business field of furniture manufacturing Commercial register has been entered. The sole owner was the general partnership Pundt & Kohn in Geestemünde , where both brothers were personally liable and authorized signatories.

In the following years, the shareholders also founded the company Unterweser Holzhandel GmbH, Wesermünde . The sole owner was its mother, the widow of Franz Kohn, who died in 1909, Johanne Kohn. The company's managing director was Hans Kohn, who, together with his brother Gerhard, has now combined four companies within the framework of a tax group: the parent company Pundt & Kohn , MMM , Backhaus & Co and Unterweser Holzhandel GmbH . The affiliation served not least for the purpose of tax avoidance . This in particular through profit transfer and / or profit and loss offsetting between the legally independent companies, which incurred different business, wage sums and corporation tax depending on size and economic situation. The affiliation was being said but also vital for P & K due to large losses in the Great Depression (1929-32), under which the Meller furniture factory suffered less. During this time, P&K recorded life-threatening losses of over RM 400,000 , and a. due to the failure of trade credit receivables to business customers who had gone bankrupt.

1937 Hans Kohn requested the change in the family and company names Kohn in Kohnert , it was approved ministerial on 14 August 1937th The reason was hostility because of the Jewish-sounding family name Kohn / Cohn in the context of the National Socialist Aryanization . During the war, timber imports at P&K concentrated on (neutral) Sweden, and in particular on the Kramfors sawmill in the Härnösand district in northern Sweden.

Reconstruction and the end (1945-1967)

The P&K factories, as well as the Kohnertsche Villa, were completely destroyed during the Allied bombing raids on Bremerhaven on September 18, 1944, while the subsidiary Meller Möbelfabrik survived the war undamaged. The office building at Schönianstrasse 15 remained largely undamaged and was converted into the Kohnert family's residential and office building by 1948. The build-up phase after the war was delayed, however, as the American occupation forces temporarily banned the company owner from his profession (1945-47) because of his work as President of the Gau Chamber of Commerce and as a military economic leader under the Nazi regime. In addition, parts of the company's quay facilities on the cross channel were confiscated by the Allies for military purposes and were therefore not available as wood storage space. In addition, the military government initially forbade the payment of the compensation for war damage requested in 1945 totaling RM 1.1 million (of which P&K: 475 thousand; Backhaus & Co .: 518 thousand, Unterweser timber trade: 114 thousand), apart from that from an advance of RM 245,000 already approved before the end of the war. The final approval under the Burden Equalization Act was delayed so long that P&K no longer benefited from it. It was not until 1967, after the death of the managing directors and the dissolution of the companies, that a fraction of the requested compensation - offset against the advance paid in 1945 - was paid out to the heirs. While P&K was able to resume importing wood from 1948, the means of equalizing the burden were not sufficient to build up the destroyed sawmill and planing mill. So P&K had no choice but to have its wood cut to size by its competitor, the Külken company, also based in Geestemünde, which significantly reduced its own profit. P&K was never able to really recover from this, despite the great pent-up demand for sawn timber and construction timber in booming post-war Germany and the time of the economic miracle . The profit transfer (1956-66) by the subsidiary Meller furniture factory as part of the 1937 agreed fiscal unity could not decay stop, so the company after the death of its owner Gerhard Kohnert 1962 and Hans Kohnert disbanded in 1967 and on 13 October 1967 from has been deleted from the commercial register.

The company owners in three generations

With the establishment of his own timber import company in Geestemünde ( Bremerhaven ) in 1862, the sailing ship captain and ship owner Franz Johann Syabbe Kohn (born March 16, 1828 in Klippkanne, in Brake (Unterweser) , † August 13, 1879 in Bremerhaven) opened up a new one for himself and his family Field of activity. In addition, he secured the Kohn family, whose heads of families had been captains on emigrant sailors from Brake (Lower Weser) to America and the Caribbean for generations , a new, secure source of income in view of the uncertain future prospects of a sailing ship owner in the age of the beginning steam shipping . After his death, his son Franz Kohn (born December 23, 1857 in Geestemünde; † March 24, 1909 in Geestemünde) took over the company. This was followed by his two sons Hans (Johannes) Kohnert (born November 15, 1887 in Geestemünde; † January 10, 1967 in Bremerhaven) and Gerhard Kohnert (born September 2, 1882 in Geestemünde; † July 5, 1962 in Melle ). The latter mainly built up the wholly-owned subsidiary Meller Möbelfabrik GmbH, Melle (MMM) from 1909 . Within a few decades it developed into an important furniture factory in what was then Grönegau . In accordance with the economic and regional political validity of P&K, both its managing director Franz Kohn and later his son Hans were senators in Bremerhaven and members of the Bremerhaven Chamber of Commerce and Industry (IHK). Hans Kohn was also elected President in 1933 (against the votes of the NSDAP) and later nationally as President of the Gauwirtschaftskammer Ost-Hannover (1943-45), into which the cities of Wesermünde (Bremerhaven) and Lüneburg including their IHK were incorporated (1939) , and finally to military economics leader (1941–45). Under him, the company experienced its heyday, but later also its decline. Nevertheless, in 1951 the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Bremerhaven recognized Hans Kohnert's services to the development of trade in Bremen and beyond with the award of the honorary presidency. His brother Gerhard Kohnert was a co-founder of Meller Volksbank in 1921 and Meller's mayor in 1946 . In 1953 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit for his services to building up the domestic furniture industry.

literature

  • Paul Hirschfeld: Hanover's big industry and wholesale trade. Ed .: Deutsche Export-Bank, Berlin / Duncker u. Humblot, Leipzig, XVI, 1891, 412 pp.
  • Julius Marchet: The timber trade in Northern Germany . Publishing house F. Deuticke, Leipzig, Vienna, 1908.
  • Richard Zimmermann: Germany's wood needs. Journal of Political Science / Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics . Vol. 50, H. 4., 1894, pp. 573-582.

Web links

Commons : Pundt & Kohn  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Treue: On the history of the German timber trade. A quarter of a century . In: Journal of Company History . 25th year, H. 1. 1980, p. 12–27 ( .uni-duisburg-essen.de [PDF]).
  2. ↑ Christian Lotz: Delimitation of the timber trade and memories. 2013, accessed February 2, 2016 .
  3. ^ Shell city map DK 1937, accessed on February 2, 2016 .
  4. ^ Paul Hirschfeld: Hanover's large-scale industry and wholesale trade. Edited from the Deutsche Export-Bank, Berlin. Duncker et al. Humblot, Leipzig 1891, pp. 310-311
  5. ↑ a b c d Hartmut Bickelmann : Men from Morgenstern Yearbook 75: From Geestendorf to Geestemünde - Spatial, commercial and social structural change in the vicinity of the Geestermünder Holzhafen . Ditzen Druck und Verlag, Bremerhaven 1996, ISBN 978-3-931771-75-1 , p. 159-61 .
  6. ↑ a b Family chronicle of the Kohn family (ert), based on the diary of FJS Kohn (Typoscript, family property)
  7. ↑ Hermann Schwiebert: The Holzhafen , Geestemünde in old and new views - Part 7. In: DeichSPIEGEL The online magazine from Bremerhaven. 2016, accessed February 17, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Peter Benje: The introduction of mechanical woodworking and its effects on forms of operation, products and production in the joinery trade during the 19th century in Germany. In: TU Darmstadt, dissertation pp. 60–68. 2001, accessed February 4, 2016 .
  9. ↑ Brockhaus' Konversationslexikon (1894). FA Brockhaus in Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna, 14th edition, 1894-1896, keyword: Geestendorf (Bremerhaven) p. 640
  10. ↑ correspondence Kumnack - Pundt & Kohn
  11. ^ Opening letter to bankruptcy proceedings of April 6, 1909
  12. ↑ Grigo, Sabine (1986): The furniture industry in Grönegau and the neighboring Ravensberg-Lippe. In: Der Grönegau - Meller Jahrbuch, Volume 4, 1986: 46–58
  13. ↑ P&K trade tax files , 1929–1932, City Archives, Bremerhaven
  14. ^ P&K war damage files, March 24, 1945 ff, Bremerhaven City Archives
  15. ^ Heinrich Kloppenburg: The disaster night of Bremerhaven (Wesermünde) on September 18, 1944. In: Unpublished typewriter manuscript from 1945/46, owned by the Rebehn family (Bremerhaven), with kind permission for psm-data; digital implementation GM. 1945, accessed February 4, 2016 .
  16. ^ Load balancing files, P&K, City Archives, Bremerhaven
  17. ↑ 60 years of municipal self-government in Melle. Meller Kreisblatt , October 11, 2006
  18. ↑ Meller Kreisblatt in an article on the 70th birthday of Gerhard Kohnert, from September 2, 1953.

Coordinates: 53 ° 32 ′ 6 ″  N , 8 ° 35 ′ 13 ″  E