Rudolph Firle

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Rudolph Firle (born September 14, 1881 in Bonn , † July 2, 1969 in Bremen ; full name: Rudolph Ernst Adolph Firle ) was a German naval officer , economist and business manager who initially worked for shipping companies in the Röchling Group and from 1933 to 1940 was chairman of the board of the North German Lloyd .

biography

Family, education and work

Firle was the son of the doctor Ernst Firle and his wife Lucie Firle geb. Wehlin. His paternal great-grandfather was Ernst Wachler .

Rudolph Firle attended high school in Bonn and passed his Abitur there. In 1900 he joined the Imperial Navy as a midshipman . In 1909 he married Anne-Marie Rehder and in 1916 the banker's daughter Else Custodis was his second marriage.

After completing his military service, he studied political science and economics at the University of Berlin . In 1921 he received his doctorate. rer. pole. This was followed by training in banking and trading in Duisburg, Munich, Ludwigshafen and Mannheim. In 1921 he became an employee of the Röchling Group in the shipping company Röchling, Menzell & Co. in Hamburg. From 1923 to 1927 he was an authorized signatory and from 1928 director of the Röchling company Schiffs-Gesellschaft Gebrüder Röchling "Pontos" in Bremen .

Naval service

Rudolph Firle, Ali Riza (Talayman), and Ahmed Saffet (Ohkay)

From May 1912 to March 1914 Firle was Lieutenant Commander of the Otter river gunboat on the Yangtze in China .

During the First World War , he commanded the Turkish torpedo half-flotilla in İstanbul from 1914 to 1916. In 1915 he was in command of the torpedo boat Muavenet-i Milliye with a German-Turkish crew. With the torpedo boat led by him, he was able to sink the British battleship HMS Goliath off the Dardanelles (570 dead).

In the Bulgarian Navy he was a liaison officer in Varna from 1916 to 1918. He then worked as an admiral staff officer in Libau for the Baltic Sea area. He was promoted to Korvettenkapitän on April 28, 1918, taken over into the Reichsmarine after the war and discharged from it on February 20, 1921.

NSDAP membership and economic connections

In 1932 he became a member of the NSDAP . On March 15, 1933, he became Bremen's acting representative at the Reichsrat . When the Cairo was launched on May 11, 1934 at the AG Weser , at which all members of the Bremen Senate under Mayor Richard Markert were present, Firle emphasized: “Just as the rivets permanently connect the many thousands of steel plates of the hull, so are all of them today Germans welded together in the belief in the Führer who created the unity that a country needs that wants to go out to sea. "

Hamburg's mayor, Carl Vincent Krogmann wrote in his memoirs that Firle in 1935 at the Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party participated. Since he was in contact with Wilhelm Keppler , he is said to have belonged to the Friends of the Reichsführer SS .

In 1935 he was elected to the Haus Seefahrt Foundation . Heinrich Himmler , Wilhelm Keppler, Emil Helfferich and Hjalmar Schacht took part in the Schaffermahlzeit in 1936 .

North German Lloyd

In July 1933 Firle was appointed a member of the board of directors of North German Lloyd . On October 30, 1933 he took over the chairmanship of the board of the shipping company. During his time in 1935, the turbine fast ships Scharnhorst , Gneisenau and Potsdam were put into service for East Asia. The further modernization of the fleet took place, which in 1939 had 70 ships with 562,371 GRT. In July 1940 he left the board and became a member of the supervisory board. He was followed on the board of directors by Otto Dettmer and, in 1942, by Johannes Kulenkampff and Richard Bertram . As an expert for ocean shipping, he worked for the Reich Ministry of Transport. He was also a member of the Academy for German Law . At the end of 1944 he retired into private life.

Works

  • The war at sea 1914–1918. In: The War in the Baltic Sea. Volume 1, From the beginning of the war to mid-March 1915 (Ed.): Marine - Archive , Berlin 1921.
  • The war in the Baltic Sea , Berlin 1922.
  • Influence of the World War on shipping and trade in the Baltic Sea . Berlin 1922.
  • Travel impressions from East Asia. In: Journal of Geopolitics. 11th year, 1934, pp. 591-592.
  • History of the Firle family . Bremen 1934.

Awards

literature

Web links

Commons : Rudolph Firle  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Kuckuk (ed.): Bremen large shipyards in the Third Reich . (Contributions to the social history of Bremen 15), Edition Temmen, 1993, ISBN 3-86108-203-9 , p. 29.
  2. ↑ Hartmut Rübner: Concentration and Crisis of German Shipping. Maritime economy and politics in the German Empire, in the Weimar Republic and in National Socialism . Bremen 2005, ISBN 3-89757-238-9 .
  3. ^ Karl H. Schwebel : "Haus Seefahrt", Bremen, his merchants and captains. Four hundred years of service to the German seaman, 1545–1945 . Verlag H. Krohn, Bremen 1947, p. 76.
  4. ↑ Weekly edition of the Weser newspaper : Schaffermahlzeit 1936 in Haus Seefahrt from February 19, 1936, p. 6 suub.uni-bremen.de
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Ranking list of the Imperial German Navy , Ed .: Marinekabinett , Ernst Siegfried Mittler and Son, Berlin 1918, p. 28.
personal data
SURNAME Firle, Rudolph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Firle, Rudolph Ernst Adolph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German naval officer, publicist and director of North German Lloyd
DATE OF BIRTH September 14, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH 2nd July 1969
Place of death Bremen