Willy Kaus

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Wilhelm Kaus (born January 5, 1900 in Langenselbold near Hanau , † December 1978 ) was a German entrepreneur and industrialist.

Life

After training as a civil engineer at the State Building School in Frankfurt, Willy Kaus became a partner in his father's construction company in 1924. At the age of 28, he started his own business by purchasing a paper factory with two paper machines .

In the course of the Aryanization , Kaus acquired several companies, including the Union Brewery Groß-Gerau in 1936 together with Willi Orschler, who died in 1943 and which he took over as sole owner in 1951. In 1938 Kaus acquired the majority of shares in Val. Mehler AG from Fulda from Arthur Kayser . As a former military economic leader, Kaus went through the denazification process of the Allies after the Second World War and had to return a large part of the company shares he had acquired through Aryanization between 1933 and 1945. In 1948, the Frankfurt Chamber of Justice personally classified him only as a “fellow traveler”. After the war, Willy Kaus claimed to have legally acquired Kayser's shares. In the legal dispute over the Mehler shares, however, Kaus was defeated and in 1952 had to return the majority of his Mehler shares to the Kayser heirs.

After selling the remaining Mehler shares, Kaus invested briefly in the mail order company Neckermann. The business partners parted ways in 1954, but it was still a lucrative business for Kaus. 1956/57 he purchased from the Hirsch Group , the Metzeler AG Rubber Works, which should form the core of its business activity in the following years. In 1965, Metzeler took over the chemical company Wolff & Co. AG in Walsrode from the Stinnes group of companies. In 1966 Kaus' group of companies comprised 17,000 employees with a turnover of 750 million DM.

After Kau's economic success began to crumble at the end of the 1960s, Metzeler AG had to carry out a capital increase in 1972, which enabled Bayer AG to increase its stake in Metzeler AG to 35 percent. In the years that followed, Bayer AG further increased its Metzeler stake and in 1974 surprisingly took over three companies in the group. The activities aimed not least at the disempowerment of the executive chairman Kaus, who was in office until April 1974, the “toughest old entrepreneur in German industry”.

Kaus, who is characterized in the specialist literature as a “robust-sensitive self-made man” with a “rumbling-crazy kind”, did not want to submit to the disempowerment that began before 1974. After years of litigation, the supposedly “most litigious entrepreneur in West Germany” got the Hessian Investment and Commercial Bank (IHB) to pay him 23 million DM in 1977 after a settlement. Kaus derived his claims from the fact that his dealings with the IHB had contributed to the financial problems of Metzeler at the end of the 1960s. His dispute with Bayer AG about the takeover of the ailing Metzeler Group only came to a partial conclusion shortly before his death in late 1978. His son Peter and the two sons-in-law inherited the dispute after the 78-year-old died.

Dispute over behavior during the Nazi era

In May 2000, a month-long legal dispute between Willy Kaus' son Peter and the historian Christine Wittrock ended before the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court. Plaintiff Peter Kaus had tried in vain to remove any remaining contentious statements in Wittrock's monograph The Injustice Goes Along with Safe Steps . Willy Kaus was mentioned on various occasions in the local historical research originally commissioned by the Main-Kinzig-Kreis during the Nazi era. a. expressed the assumption that Kaus was responsible for a death sentence as a military economist.

The publicist Wolfgang Müller-Haeseler put forward in an article from 1966 exonerating: Willy Kaus is a man who “at a time when this was by no means a matter of course, campaigned for endangered workers and foreigners, personally in the Frankfurt district administration protested against the brown euthanasia program […] which the Gestapo imprisoned on various occasions, even if only for a short time ”.

Awards

  • Diesel Medal 1967
  • Bavarian Order of Merit
  • Honor of the entrepreneurial achievement by the Fachverband Schaumkunststoffe und Polyurethane (FSK) e. V. 1972

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Outsiders in chemistry and rubber. In: Die Zeit (No. 9/1966) of February 25, 1966.
  2. ↑ Sarah Westedt: The Union Brewery was a landmark in the wholesale Gerauer economic history . In detail on the history of the brewery including its Aryanization : The Marxsohn family in Groß-Gerau .
  3. ^ A b Thomas Schlemmer, Hans Woller: Society in Transition: 1949 to 1973. Munich 2002, p. 72 f.
  4. ↑ a b Are the shares void? In: Der Spiegel (No. 11/1957) of March 13, 1957.
  5. ↑ Sell or Die. In: Der Spiegel (No. 13/1974) of March 25, 1974.
  6. ↑ Shamelessly betrayed. In: Der Spiegel (No. 26/1977) from June 20, 1976.
  7. ↑ Managers and Markets. In: Die Zeit (No. 46/1978) of November 10, 1978.
  8. ↑ Managers and Markets. In: Die Zeit (No. 50/1978) of December 8, 1978.
  9. ↑ Nazi chronicle of a city: Historian may call fellow travelers perpetrators. In: Frankfurter Rundschau of May 26, 2000.
  10. ↑ The FSK honors Bau-Ing. Willy Kaus for his entrepreneurial achievement ( memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) on May 4, 1972.
personal data
SURNAME Kaus, Willy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kaus, Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur and industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH January 5, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Langenselbold near Hanau
DATE OF DEATH December 1978