Wilhelm Schaeffler

Wilhelm Schaeffler (born April 3, 1908 in Bourdonnay at Marimont Castle; † October 22, 1981 in Herzogenaurach ) was a German entrepreneur .

Life

He began his studies in 1928 at the University of Cologne and at the law faculty of the Paris Sorbonne . The graduation as a business graduate was followed in December 1937 by a doctorate with the thesis "Borderline cases of accounting".

Parallel to his studies, he began his professional career in 1932 when he joined Deutsche Revisions- und Treuhand AG. Here he had the task of preparing expert reports on the profitability of industrial companies.

After moving to the Berlin headquarters of Dresdner Bank , he remained active in the field of performance auditing, examining medium-sized and large industrial companies throughout the Reich. In 1939, with the participation of his parents, he acquired Davistan AG , a four-plant textile company with around 40,000 square meters of production space in Katscher in Upper Silesia . The former Jewish owners had already left Germany in 1933. Davistan was under the management of a bank consortium and was heavily indebted. Davistan initially produced textiles for the Wehrmacht and shortly after the beginning of the Second World War switched its production program to goods essential for the war effort. In 1941 Wilhelm Schaeffler became a member of the NSDAP . In the same year, his younger brother Georg Schaeffler joined the company. In 1942 the company was renamed "Wilhelm Schaeffler AG".

In January 1945, Schaeffler received the order to relocate needle roller bearing production to Schwarzenhammer in Upper Franconia . In the summer of 1946 the brothers Wilhelm and Georg Schaeffler founded INA (see Schaeffler Group ) and resumed needle bearing production here.

Also in 1946 Wilhelm Schaeffler was extradited by the Americans to Poland and charged there with allegedly participating in the “liquidation of property belonging to the Polish state and Polish citizens” “on behalf of the German government”. The April 1949 ruling by the responsible district court extended the charge to “Jewish property”. Wilhelm Schaeffler was released on July 23, 1951 after staying in the prisons in Bialystok and Warsaw.

Back at the company, he expanded carpet production as the Schaeffler Group's second mainstay. Schaeffler developed into the largest manufacturers of carpets and carpets in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1970s.

Web links

• Klaus-Peter Gäbelein: 50 years of Schaeffler Herzogenaurach . (PDF; 207 kB) In: Stadt Herzogenaurach (Hrsg.): Herzogenauracher Heimatblatt , vol. 25, no. 18, November 6, 1997 (supplement in the official gazette no. 45/1997)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Official Gazette of the City of Herzogenaurach , No. 13/2008 ( Memento of March 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF)