Wilhelm Regendanz

Wilhelm Guido Regendanz (born May 31, 1882 in Elberfeld , † 1955 in Florida , USA) was a German-British banker.

Life

Life in the Empire (1882 to 1918)

Regendanz graduated from high school in Mainz . He then studied law at the universities of Berlin , Kiel and Heidelberg . In 1906 he received his doctorate under Ernst von Beling in Tübingen for Dr. jur. After completing his studies, Regendanz joined the Reich Colonial Office as an assessor , which he left again in 1909 on the advice of Ernst Langwerth , to move to the MMWarburg & CO bank after a one-year vacation as in-house counsel . He carried out this activity until 1916. In addition, he became managing director of the Hamburg-Morocco Society founded by his son-in-law Max Warburg .

In his capacity as director of the Hamburg-Morocco Society, Regendanz played a more important role during the so-called Second Moroccan Crisis in 1911, which eased as a result of Franco-German disputes over French rule over Morocco: Regendanz was commissioned by the Foreign Office Year, a petition with vulnerable German interests in Morocco, in which he also pushed for the annexation of southern Morocco . In addition, Regendanz was on board the gunboat Panther of the German Navy, whose dispatch to the Moroccan port of Agadir was the external cause of the Franco-German political confrontation that year ( panther leap to Agadir ).

From 1916 to 1923 Regendanz was director of the Austrian Creditanstalt for Trade and Industry .

Interwar period and later years (1919 to 1955)

After the First World War , Regendanz promoted anti-Bolshevik national movements in Ukraine . He continued his widespread economic activity during the Weimar Republic : with Swedish support, he founded Norddeutsche Zündholzfabriken AG (NDZAG) and Süddeutsche Zündholzfabriken AG (SDZAG) in 1925. He was also a senior member of the board of directors of Amstelbank in Amsterdam and owner of the Transmare publishing house after having taken over various titles from the Kurt Wolff publishing house. In order to compensate for the loss of the German colonies in Africa, Regendanz also made great efforts in the interwar period to buy up large territories in Africa to compensate for this: To this end, he tried to bring together a German consortium to buy the majority of the shares in Nyassa Consolidated Ltd, and received support for this from the former diplomats Paul Wolff Graf Metternich zur Gracht , Friedrich Rosen and Wilhelm Solf as well as from the banker Oppell. Had it not finally failed, the territory of this society would have come informally into German possession, which would have made the German Reich, which was prohibited from colonial policy by the Treaty of Versailles , through the back door - if not de jure - into a colonial power again.

In the late phase of the Weimar Republic, Regendanz became involved in the People's Conservative Party , in which he took over the office of treasurer. He was also close to Kurt von Schleicher . For this he took on tasks as emissary and liaison man: for example, he held talks for Schleicher with Edvard Beneš . He was also politically networked through his membership in social meeting forums such as the gentlemen's club and the civil casino.

After the National Socialist " seizure of power ", Regendanz continued to maintain close contacts with Kurt von Schleicher, whom he often received in his house in Berlin-Dahlem. Among other things, he made it possible for Schleicher to meet the French ambassador André François-Poncet . In the summer of 1934, Regendanz fled to the United Kingdom during the Röhm affair , presumably after he had learned of the murder of his friend Schleicher and had witnessed the attempted arrest of former minister Gottfried Treviranus by the SS: Regendanz and Treviranus were playing tennis in the garden the latter, when the SS stormed his house, whereupon Treviranus fled over the garden wall.

In the United Kingdom, regendanz was naturalized before the outbreak of World War II.

family

Around 1912 Regendanz married Carmen Herrmann, the widow of Vice Admiral Alexander Werth, whose son he adopted , the later diplomat Alexander Werth (junior) . According to a résumé from 1933, he had a total of seven children. Some of his descendants, including grandchildren, still live in London and East Sussex.

Fonts

• Contributions to the teaching of participation in dangerous brawling , R. Zacharias, Magdeburg 1906. (Dissertation)
• The finances of Denmark , 1911.
• Exchange rates during the war , Büttner, 1916.
• Nyassaland . R. Zacharias, Magdeburg 1918.
• The incorporation of the East African mandate into the British Empire , Haussmann, Berlin 1929.
• British Policy on mandated Colonies , Heymann , Berlin 1929.
• English mandate policy , Heymann, Berlin 1929.
• Germany's military equality. An international legal investigation , Transmare Verlag, Berlin 1932. (together with Alexander Werth-Regendanz )
• Frederick (Fritz) Walter Pick [Ed.]: Searchlight on German Africa. The Diaries and Papers of Dr. W. Ch. Regendanz. A Study in Colonial Ambitions, etc , G. Allen & Unwin, London 1939.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Catalog card , dissertation catalog of the University Library Basel , accessed on May 25, 2015.
2. ^ Joseph Wechsberg : The Merchant bankers. 4th imprint. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1968, p. 197.
3. ^ Youssef Cassis (ed.): Finance and Financiers in European History, 1880–1960. 1. paperback edition. Cambridge University Press et al., Cambridge et al. 2002, ISBN 0-521-89373-9 , p. 266.
4. ^ Rolf Peter Tschapek : Building blocks of a future German Central Africa. German Imperialism and the Portuguese Colonies. German interest in the South African colonies of Portugal from the end of the 19th century to the First World War (= contributions to colonial and overseas history. Vol. 77). Steiner, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-515-07592-5 , p. 13 (also: Düsseldorf, Univ., Diss., 1998).
5. ↑ Gottfried Treviranus : For Germany in exile. Econ, Düsseldorf et al. 1973, ISBN 3-430-19116-5 , p. 26.