Public welfare

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Volksfürsorge AG

logo
legal form Corporation
founding May 22, 1913
resolution December 31, 2014
Reason for dissolution Merger with Generali Insurance
Seat Hamburg
Branch Insurance

Former Volksfürsorge administration building at Besenbinderhof - now Generali Haus 2018
Adolph von Elm-Büste stood in front of the head office of Volksfürsorge in Hamburg an der Alster - now in the Hamburg Cooperative Museum

The Volksfürsorge (also old people care, people care AG, Volksfürsorge Insurance Group and most recently Volksfürsorge distribution company ) was a German insurance company , which was founded in 1913 as a union-cooperative corporation. In 1988 the majority of the then Aachen and Munich group was taken over, in 2009 it was converted into a 100% subsidiary of Generali Germany and continued as a pure sales company. With around three million customers most recently, it was one of the largest sales companies in Germany.

As of December 31, 2014, it was merged with Generali Insurance and the name Volksfürsorge was given up in favor of the Generali brand.

Business area and organization

As a pure sales company, Volksfürsorge AG recently brokered the provision and financial products of Generali Insurance and the product partners from Generali Germany . These were the Advocard legal protection insurance , the Deutsche Bausparkasse Badenia , the Central Krankenversicherung and Generali Investments.

A total of around 33,000 employees looked after Volksfürsorge customers throughout Germany. The contact point for the sellers were the nationwide 236 district offices, which were also open to customers as regional locations from Flensburg to Freiburg and from Düsseldorf to Dresden. 3 Sales Directorates (Northeast, Central and South) and 25 Regional Directorates also acted as a sales control unit. The company's headquarters were in Hamburg. Volksfürsorge ran its sales company from here.

history

A caricature from the magazine Derreal Jacob from June 24, 1914 on public welfare
Historical public welfare poster (probably before 1914, original in the Hamburg cooperative museum )
Old Volksfürsorge logo

Volksfürsorge Lebensversicherungs AG was notarized on May 22, 1913 and, after approval by the supervisory authority, was able to start operations on July 1, 1913 as a trade union cooperative insurance company. Half of the initial capital of 1 million marks was raised by the unions and the consumer cooperatives of the Hamburg direction . Within two years, 170,000 insurance policies worth 24.5 million marks have been taken out.

The background to this was the experience that the capitalist insurance companies offered such unfavorable conditions for the small life insurance policies taken out by the workers that the insurers made enormous profits from these insurance policies, but the benefits for the workers insured were very dubious. The project was fiercely opposed by the insurance industry, with the later putschist Wolfgang Kapp (" Kapp-Putsch " 1920) at the top . The main advantage of Volksfürsorge was that the insurance company did not set up an expensive field service apparatus for the sale of insurance policies, but rather used the existing structures of the union shop stewards.

The first managing directors were Adolph von Elm and Friedrich Lesche in 1913 . Adolph von Elm wanted a Red National Insurance . Based on his experience with the Hamburger Spar- und Konsumgenossenschaft Produktion , he considered the type of company to be insignificant, since the unions and cooperatives had enough capital to set up a public welfare insurance in the legally possible and sensible form. Friedrich Lesche saw in Volksfürsorge AG, despite the form of AG chosen by it, a cooperative enterprise. He named the large-scale purchasing society of German consumer associations and the Volksfürsorge in the same breath as socialist in character. After the seizure of power of the Nazis , the free trade unions were banned in 1933 and the People's Welfare in May 1933, the German Labor Front incorporated (DAF). With 7.1 million policyholders, it rose to become the largest German insurance company. In 1936 the subsidiary of Volksfürsorge für Sachversicherungen , “Volksfürsorge Allgemeine Versicherung”, was split off and merged with “ Deutscher Ring Allgemeine Versicherung AG” and “Deutsche Feuerversicherung AG” to form Deutsche Sachversicherung AG.

After the war with the Control Council Directive No. 50, it was re-established in 1947 as Alte Volksfürsorge and (in West Germany) returned to the property of the trade unions and the consumer cooperative movement. In 1968 it was called Volksfürsorge again . In 1974 the Beteiligungsgesellschaft für Gemeinwirtschaft (BGAG) was founded, which became the main shareholder of Volksfürsorge. At the end of the 1970s, BGAG arranged for the former GEG - Großeinkaufs-Gesellschaft Deutscher Konsumgenossenschaften to buy and move to the large administration building at Besenbinderhof in Hamburg. With this, capital was to be added to the consumer cooperative goods and economic center GEG and there a sales profit to support the battered balance sheets.

After the ongoing crisis in the public sector, the Aachener und Münchener Beteiligungsgesellschaft and later AMB Generali took over the majority of the shares in 1988 . In 2002 the general meeting resolved to squeeze out the remaining minority shareholders, which was entered in the commercial register in 2003.

On September 28, 2007 it was announced that the Volksfürsorge insurance group was merging with the Generali insurance group. The insurance parent company Generali merged Hamburger Volksfürsorge with the further subsidiary "Generali Versicherung AG" on December 31, 2008.

Volksfürsorge Bausparkasse AG was separated from the group as early as 1990 and incorporated into the official home office (BHW). There the Volksfürsorge Bausparkasse AG was continued under the new name “Allgemeine Heimstättenwerk” (AHW) and later merged with BHW Bausparkasse AG in Hameln.

On December 31, 2014, shortly after its 100th anniversary, Volksfürsorge was dissolved in favor of Generali Insurance .

Individual evidence

  1. Generali Deutschland press release of May 8, 2014 , last accessed on January 26, 2015.
  2. Rudolf Herbig: Notes from the social, economic and trade union history from the 14th century to the present , DGB, Düsseldorf 1973, p. 117
  3. ^ Adolph von Elm: Rote Volksversicherung . In: Socialist monthly books. - 15 = 17 (1911) H. 18/2019111820, pp. 1177-1180; Accessed April 22, 2008 [1]
  4. ^ Heinrich Kaufmann : The large purchasing company of German consumer associations mb H. GEG. For the 25th anniversary 1894–1919 . Hamburg 1919, p. 560. Greetings from Friedrich Lesche as a member of the Volksfürsorge board at the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the GEG.
  5. Ingo Böhle: The Volksfürsorge Lebensversicherungs AG - a company of the German Labor Front (DAF) in the "Third Reich". In: Zeitschrift für Unternehmensgeschichte (ZUG), No. 1/2000. Pp. 49-78.
  6. ^ Achim von Loesch : The public enterprise of the German trade unions : emergence, functions, problems ; Cologne 1979; Bund-Verlag; ISBN 3-7663-0296-5 .
  7. Generali: Hamburg remains a central location and an important employer - the merger creates one of the largest German insurers ( Memento of December 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), press release of December 19, 2008.
  8. Generali Deutschland press release of May 8, 2014 , last accessed on January 26, 2015.

literature

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