Wilhelm Lepenau

Wilhelm Heinrich Lepenau (born July 30, 1838 in Hanau as Wilhelm Heinrich Levinau , † October 19, 1901 in Baden-Baden ) was a German chemist and entrepreneur. In 1860 he founded the Salzbergen refinery , the world's oldest specialty refinery still in production. Lepenau was a pioneer in the refining of crude oil in Germany and developed the leptometer named after him, which was used to measure the viscosity of oils well into the 1920s.

Life

Origin, youth and studies

Wilhelm was born as the fourth and youngest child of the Jewish banker and particulars Benaia Heinrich Levinau (* around 1790 in Fürth , grew up in Augsburg ; † July 17, 1848 in Mainz ) and his wife Rebecca Cassel (* July 2, 1809 in Nuremberg as the daughter of Jewish businessman Baruch Joseph Cassel and his wife Sophie née Löb, grew up in Cologne ; † October 18, 1879 in Wiesbaden ). He evidently grew up in a wealthy family. If you can still find the job title banker in the marriage contract of the parents from 1829, the term “particular” is already listed for the father in Lepenau's birth entry in the Hanau synagogue book, and later he is referred to as a reindeer . Both terms say that the person in question does not pursue an actual job, but rather lives from his property.

The Levinau family often changed their place of residence. After marrying in Darmstadt in 1829 , she first lived in Offenbach , where her daughter Emma was born in 1830 († 1870). The two following sons Carl Heinrich (1831-1870) and Gustav Heinrich (* 1833) were in Frankfurt am Main , later the family lived in Hanau and finally in Mainz.

In 1855 Wilhelm enrolled to study surgery at the University of Giessen , but soon switched to chemistry . He received his doctorate after only two years of study on 30 July 1857 his 19th birthday. Among the examining professors was Heinrich Will , who had followed the well-known chemist Justus von Liebig to the chair of chemistry at the University of Giessen. During his studies Levinau lived as a sublet with the merchant Hirsch in Gießen.

In 1858, Wilhelm Heinrich Levinau successfully applied for the name change . Six years after his brother Carl, a few months after his brother Gustav he changed his family name to Lepenau and converted in the sequel to the Evangelical Lutheran Christianity .

family

In 1865 Lepenau married in Cologne Clara Kaufmann (born November 30, 1843 in Cologne ; † June 5, 1889 in Berlin ), the daughter of the Jewish businessman and landowner Marcus Kaufmann from Cologne and his wife, the banker's daughter Friederike Scheuer from Düsseldorf . Her sister Ida Amalia married the mathematics professor Max Noether from Erlangen in 1880 .

Late years of life

In 1882 the Lepenau family moved to Berlin. In the following years Lepenau suffered a few blows of fate. In 1887 his eldest daughter's suicide, his wife Clara died in 1889, only 46 years old, in Berlin and in 1891 the Salzbergen refinery, his life's work, burned down to a large extent.

In 1890 or 1891 Lepenau moved back to Salzbergen, in 1893 to Osnabrück, in a villa on Karlsstraße near the cathedral .

At that time Lepenau was doing charitable work. After his wife's death, he set up the Clara Lepenau Foundation, which supported needy women who had recently given birth in the Salzbergen community. The volunteer fire department Salzbergen could expand their equipment with new syringes using Lepenaus. The Protestant Lepenau donated one of the windows for the newly built Catholic parish church of St. Cyriakus. And the opening of a Protestant school in Salzbergen was also significantly driven by Lepenau's advocacy and financial support.

On February 25, 1900, the Salzbergen City Council decided to grant Wilhelm Heinrich Lepenau an honorary citizen in recognition of his services .

Lepenau died on October 19, 1901 during a stay at a spa in Baden-Baden . His body was transferred to Osnabrück and buried in the Hasefriedhof . The neo-Gothic grave chapel, where six other members of the Lepenau family are buried, has been preserved and is to be restored in the near future on the initiative of the Hasefriedhof-Johannesfriedhof eV support group.

Lepenau and the Salzbergen refinery

founding

In 1861 Lepenau joined a consortium of five business partners that operated the paraffin and photogen factory in Salzbergen in the Emsland . A year earlier, on June 3, 1860, the consortium, headed by the businessman Leopold Gompertz, had received permission from the Royal Office in Lingen to extract oil from the bituminous shale found in Salzbergen . The Hummeldorfer farmer and brickworks owner Bernhard Dieckmann, who acted as a kind of negotiator between the authorities and the consortium, played a not unimportant role in this context. However, he could not prevent Gompertz from being denied the resident settlement in Salzbergen, namely after Gompertz clearly recognized the " Mosaic faith " (this formulation can be found in Gompertz's letter to the royal office in Lingen in December 1860) would have. Despite several submissions, also at a higher level, Gompertz did not receive a permit to settle. Rather, the Royal Landdrostei in Osnabrück wrote on January 31, 1861 to the Royal Office in Lingen: “In response to the report of 31st BC. M. we cannot find ourselves motivated, by virtue of the authorization granted to us by the Royal Ministry of the Interior to allow exceptions to the provision in Section 71 of the Law on the Legal Relationships of Jews of September 30, 1842, the Israelite businessman and manufacturer Leopold Gompertz from Cleve to allow the establishment in Salzbergen. The royal office has to open such a thing to Gompertz ”. Gompertz then withdrew from the consortium. He was replaced by Lepenau, who was only 23 years old and was soon responsible for driving the factory's business forward. It can be assumed that Lepenau had already converted at this point in time or that he was able to successfully hide his Jewish origins because he was given permission to settle.

Lepenau quickly realized that the extraction of oil shale was not very lucrative. Every day 100 tons of slate were crushed with enormous effort, from which the oil was then distilled off in cast iron retorts. It was 200 liters per day, too little to be able to operate the plant economically in the long term. The extraction of oil shale was completely stopped in 1866. In the meantime, Lepenau had opened up another, much more productive business area. In 1859 Colonel Drake came across large amounts of oil while drilling in the American state of Pennsylvania . Only three years later, Lepenau did pioneering work and imported crude oil from the United States by sailing ship via Antwerp or Leer and was the first German entrepreneur to process it into gasoline , petroleum and lubricating oil by bubble distillation . The crude oil, filled in barrels, was taken from the ports to Salzbergen by rail. In the same year, Lepenau applied that the factory could also be operated on Sundays and public holidays. He was allowed to do this by the Royal Office. Business began to flourish, the factory expanded and the workforce grew. In 1863 there were seven men working in the factory, a few years later there were already 15.

In 1865 the work was entered in the commercial register under the new name Dr. W.-H. Lepenau factory . From then on, the sole owner was the namesake.

expansion

In 1867 Lepenau also relocated the commercial administration of his Salzbergen factory to Osnabrück . At the time, the technical management in Salzbergen was the responsibility of the chemist Louis Mengel. In 1874 the first branch of the factory was opened in Plagwitz near Leipzig. From here, the lubricating oil distribution in Saxony and exports to Austria-Hungary and Russia were handled. In 1877 the administration was relocated to Salzbergen at the same time as the Lepenau family moved to the newly built house on the factory premises in Salzbergen. The "Lepenau-Haus", named after its builder, still stands today despite severe damage at the end of the Second World War and is part of the refinery's administrative wing.

The oil refinery was firmly established in Salzbergen at the end of the 1870s. In addition to the men who earned their daily bread in the factory, some hiring workers and smaller farmers were also able to supplement their income through tensioning services that they carried out for Lepenau or auxiliary work in the factory. Unfortunately, there has only been a secure workforce since 1910, but based on the overall development of the plant, one can assume that around 25-30 men were working there 20 years after the plant went into operation.

In 1880 the Lepenau factory was able to conclude an extremely lucrative contract with the German railways, which from then on were supplied with lubricating oils. In the same year, Russian crude oil from Baku was processed for the first time, but in the following years it was increasingly displaced by German crude oil from Wietze . Baku crude oil was imported to Lübeck via St. Petersburg and later to Leer. The onward transport to Salzbergen took place by rail, from Leer also with Pünten over the Ems.

In 1885 the refinery's 25th anniversary was celebrated with a big party. On this occasion, Lepenau donated a new canopy for the Catholic Church. On an advertising card that was issued for the anniversary there is a reference to the leptometer , a device developed by Lepenau and named after him for determining the viscosity of oils. This device was still available in stores at the end of the 1920s for 132 Reichsmarks. It was pushed out of the market by the Engler viscometer .

In October 1891, large parts of the refinery were finally destroyed by fire. The factory burned for 12 hours. The night sky, brightly lit by the flames, could be seen well into the Rheine, 10 km away. The damage was covered by insurance, but operations could only be fully resumed after months.

Conversion into a corporation

In 1892 Lepenau's brother-in-law Robert Kaufmann became a partner. The commercial management was held by Clemens Masbaum, the technical management was taken over by the chemist Carl Osterland from Wulfen in Anhalt.

In the following years the refinery developed steadily. From 1897 the so-called diluvial oils were brought onto the market, special oils for rolling mills, the textile industry and dynamo machines. A bicycle oil produced by the Lepenau company received the honorary diploma with a silver medal for outstanding performance at the first bicycle tourism exhibition in Munich in the same year.

Lepenau, like his brother-in-law Robert Kaufmann, were both in poor health at the end of the 19th century. With a heavy heart, they converted the company into a limited liability company in 1899 , in which they retained a proportionate but strong stake.

Robert Kaufmann died on May 31, 1900 in Wiesbaden, Wilhelm Lepenau a year later on October 19, 1901.

meaning

Significance for the Salzbergen refinery

Lepenau did not come to Salzbergen until a few months after the factory went into operation, but he shaped the extraordinarily successful development of the factory for four decades and is considered to be its actual founder. His and Robert Kaufmann's heirs were shareholders in the factory alongside various Hamburg industrialists until the mid-1920s.

After several changes of owner, Wintershall AG entered into an existing lease in 1931 . In 1933 she bought the work. After being almost completely destroyed by enemy bombing during World War II, it was rebuilt in the post-war years and became one of the most modern and successful refineries in Europe.

In 1994, the "oil works", as the people of Salzbergen call it, were sold to the Hansen & Rosenthal Group from Hamburg and Scholten GmbH from Münster after a few economically poor years . After numerous restructuring and investments, the refinery , which now operates under the name of H & RChemPharm Group as a subsidiary of H&R WASAG AG , has a workforce of around 360 and is one of the largest employers in the Salzbergen community. In 2010 it celebrated its 150th anniversary as the world's oldest still producing factory of its kind.

Honors

The municipality of Salzbergen granted Lepenau honorary citizenship in 1900 . The Doktor-Lepenau-Straße leading from the village into the refinery area is named after Wilhelm Lepenau.

literature

• Karin Geerdes: Article Lepenau, Dr. Wilhelm Heinrich. In: Study Society for Emsland Regional History (Ed.): Emsland History. Volume 14. Haselünne 2007, pp. 275-283.