Walter Rohland

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Walter Rohland (born December 14, 1898 in Inden (Rhineland) , † February 26, 1981 in Ratingen ) was a German entrepreneur and functionary in the armaments and mining industry . In the National Socialist German Reich he held leading positions in Speer's Reich Ministry for Armaments and Ammunition .

Life

Paul Walter (actually Walther ) Rohland was the son of a textile manufacturer and took part in the First World War as a volunteer from 1917 to 1918 . After the end of the war, he studied metallurgy in Aachen until 1923 and obtained a doctorate in engineering . As a metallurgist, he held various positions at Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG and subsidiaries of the group. So he directed z. B. the plant of the subsidiary Deutsche Edelstahlwerke AG in Krefeld from 1930 to 1940 and was a member of the board of this stock corporation from 1933 to 1940.

In 1933 Walter Rohland became a member of the NSDAP and from 1940 to 1943 took over the management of the "Special (later Main) Armored Car Committee" in the Reich Ministry of Armaments and Ammunition and was thus responsible for the rationalization and organization of tank production. Since 1942 he was also chairman of the industrial council in the OKH and is therefore considered to be jointly responsible for forced labor and the exploitation of the occupied territories. In 1943 he received the Knight's Cross of the War Merit Cross .

Parallel to his political career, his career in the United Stahlwerke AG developed ; In 1941 he became a member of the board and took over the chairmanship from 1943.

Rohland is considered to be Albert Speer's confidante and, together with the Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition, prevented the consequent implementation of the Nero order of March 19, 1945, a. intended to destroy the industrial foundations on the Ruhr.

After the end of the war, Rohland was briefly imprisoned and appeared as a witness in the Nuremberg trial in the proceedings against Friedrich Flick and Alfried Krupp von Bohlen and Halbach . In 1948, as part of the denazification process, he was classified as a “fellow traveler” and has since worked with his “West German engineering office Dr. Rohland GmbH (Wedexro) “successful as a consultant to the industry. In the Federal Republic he found social recognition, so he was z. B. Patron and honorary citizen of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen .

In the post-war period, Walter Rohland financially supported the relatives of his former superior Albert Speer as part of the “Rudolf Wolters School Money Fund”.

Others

Rohland occasionally appears as Panzer Rohland or as a tank dictator in popular World War II literature .

Rohland played a special role as an exonerating witness for Albert Speer, who always claimed that he had no precise knowledge of the Holocaust . Rohland signed an affidavit that he and Speer had left the Gauleiter Conference on October 6, 1943, even before Heinrich Himmler openly and unequivocally confessed to the murder of European Jews in his second Poznan speech .

In the 1950s Rohland had the then still private Poensgenpark in Ratingen significantly redesigned. The city of Ratingen acquired the park and made it available to the public.

literature

  • Walter Rohland: Turbulent times. Memories of an ironworker. Stuttgart, Seewald 1978 (autobiography)
  • Manfred Rasch (Hrsg.): Finding aid for the estate of Walter Rohland (1898–1981) and the inventory of Ruhr-Consulting GmbH. Publications from the archive of ThyssenKrupp AG, Vol. 5, Duisburg 2001. Edited by Dietmar Bleidick, Ralf Stremmel and Oliver Dißars with the assistance of Andreas Zilt and Astrid Dörnemann with contributions by Dietmar Bleidick and Manfred Rasch.
  • Manfred Rasch:  Rohland, Walter. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 766 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manfred Rasch:  Rohland, Walter. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 766 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ↑ Ten years of Wedexro . In: Die Zeit , No. 3/1961
  3. ↑ German history in broken memory . RWTH press releases
  4. ↑ Magnus Brechtken : Albert Speer. A German career . Siedler Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-8275-0040-3 , p. 313f.
  5. ^ Turnverein Ratingen 1865 eV: Interesting facts from beautiful Ratingen, The Cromford Park ( Memento from March 9, 2001 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Rohland, Walter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rohland, Paul Walter; Rohland, Paul Walther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German metallurgist and entrepreneur, politician of the NSDAP
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Inden (Rhineland)
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1981
Place of death Ratingen