Ulrich Haberland

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Ulrich Klaus Walther Werner Haberland (born December 6, 1900 in Sollstedt ; † September 10, 1961 near Antweiler , today in Mechernich ) was a German chemist and industrial manager . During the Nazi era, he made a career at IG Farben . He was Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayer AG from 1951 to 1961 .

Life

Origin and studies

Ulrich Haberland came from a Protestant pastor's family from Saxony; on his mother's side, his ancestors were factory owners. After the death of his parents, he attended the Latin secondary school of the Francke Foundations in Halle (Saale) from 1911 (interrupted in 1918 by a war mission ). After graduating from high school from 1919 to 1924, he studied natural sciences with a major in chemistry at the University of Halle-Wittenberg . From 1923 he was a research assistant at the Institute for Chemistry, where he worked with Daniel Vorländer in 1924 with the dissertation Micro-determination of melting and transition points for Dr. phil. received his doctorate . Since his studies he was a member of the gymnastics club Saxo-Thuringia Halle zu Gießen in the Coburg Convent . In order to finance his studies, he was a working student at IG Farben .

Career at IG Farben

Ulrich Haberland during the Nuremberg Trials (presumably as a witness)

After graduating, he took a job at Meyer & Riemann, which produced sulfuric acid , superphosphates and mineral paints, in Linden near Hanover. In 1928 he moved to the Uerdingen plant of IG Farben , where he became department head in 1931. In 1938 he was promoted to plant manager. In 1943 he took over the management of the Leverkusen plant and the Niederrhein operating group, in which the Elberfeld (parent plant), Dormagen , Uerdingen and Leverkusen plants were combined. In the 1930s, he developed several iron oxide pigments from the by-products of aniline production , which were patented .

At the time of National Socialism , he was appointed to the IG Farben board. Since the appointment was only made orally and there was no memo, the Allies did not indict him like other board members in the IG Farben trials . He was also considered a future leader by the British occupying forces.

Rebuilding Bayer AG

Haberland then had a decisive influence after the Second World War , when he used his negotiating skills with the occupying powers to promote the continued existence of Bayer AG and to achieve it. Thereupon, when Bayer AG was re-established in 1951, he became its CEO . As such, he pushed development and research activities, whereupon products very soon made up half of sales that the predecessor company had not yet offered.

As early as 1953, two years after the founding of Bayer AG, Haberland started a model to make equity investments more popular on the one hand and to bind employees even more to the company on the other. Later forms of such employee shares were implemented in German industry through capital increases or investment wage models. He had a specially created trust company , Corona , buy Bayer shares on the stock exchange and then sell them to employees at a preferential price (initially at a price of 100 instead of 120). Anyone could buy three shares that they had to keep for 15 months. The trust took over tax duties. Even after this period, the shares were mostly kept. When abuse emerged later, Haberland reacted harshly.

Honorary professorship and association function

In 1953 Haberland received an honorary professorship at the mathematics and natural sciences faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn .

Haberland had various positions: He was chairman of the country's Confederation of Business Associations of North Rhine-Westphalia, President of the German Chemical Industry Association (VCI), board member of the Donors' Association for German Science , member of the German Atomic Commission and Senator of the Max Planck Society for Promotion of the sciences as well as chairman of the foreign trade advisory board at the Federal Ministry of Economics . In terms of economic policy, he advocated a unified European economic area.

From 1960 to 1961 he was a member of the board of trustees of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation .

Private

In 1961 Haberland died of heart failure in his country house in the Eifel. He was buried in the Leverkusen-Manfort cemetery. He was married to Ilse, née Koennecke (1905–1982). The couple had five children, including Gert Lothar Haberland .

Awards

Post fame

The Ulrich Haberland Stadium in Leverkusen , which is now called the BayArena, was named after him during his lifetime . The name was then taken over from the smaller arena used by the second team from Bayer 04 Leverkusen and in which the men's U-19 team and the professional women now play their home games. Streets in Leverkusen, Bergisch Gladbach , Bonn and Dormagen are named after Haberland .

Shortly before his death, Haberland initiated the construction of the student village of Efferen at the University of Cologne with a donation of one million  DM (1963–1965). The first four buildings were named "Ulrich Haberland Houses". Another donation went to the University of Bonn for the construction of the Haberland House there .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ manager magazin 6/1975, pp. 75-77
  2. ↑ Thomas A. Schröder (Ed.): Bomb warfare and end of war in Leverkusen. 1943-1945 . Opladen History Association from 1979, Leverkusen 2004, p. 50.
  3. ↑ cf. Klaus Tenfelde (Ed.): Is the chemistry right? Codetermination and Social Policy in the History of the Bayer Group . Klartext, Essen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89861-888-5 .
  4. ↑ a b Nina Grunenberg : The miracle workers. Networks of the German Economy 1942 to 1966 . Siedler, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-88680-765-9 , p. 94.
  5. ↑ Nero and the straw men . In: Der Spiegel . No. 9 , 1961 ( online ).
  6. ↑ Vita on Bayer website, last accessed July 4, 2008.
  7. ↑ According to who's who Leverkusen (left).
  8. ↑ According to the website Whoiswho in Leverkusen , access June 28 2017th
predecessor Office successor
Carl Duisberg CEO of Bayer AG
1951–1961 		Kurt Hansen
personal data
SURNAME Haberland, Ulrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Haberland, Ulrich Klaus Walther Werner (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German chemist
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Sollstedt , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH September 10, 1961
Place of death near Antweiler , Germany