User:Eli185/Hans-Georg Karg

Hans-Georg Karg (born August 29, 1921 in Berlin; died June 25, 2003 in Ruhpolding) was a German businessman and owner of Hertie Waren- und Kaufhaus GmbH. Together with his wife Adelheid Karg (1921-2004), he founded the charitable Karg Foundation (Frankfurt am Main).

Early years

At this time, his father Georg Karg (1888-1972) was a buyer at Hermann Tietz Warenhäuser. In 1933, he joined the management of the department store group, which was in financial difficulties. The Nazi Reich Ministry of Economics demended that the management was “Aryanized”, so that the Tietz family,which was Jewish, was forced to sell their shares. Georg Karg acquired the Hertie company from Dresdner Bank by 1942

Hans-Georg Karg was born into a well-off middle-class family in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After finishing school, he completed a commercial apprenticeship at the Paul Reetz textile company in Liegnitz, Lower Silesia, from 1938 to 1941. After his apprenticeship, he was initially a recruit in Potsdam. Hans-Georg Karg spent the years 1943 and 1944 and the end of the war as a soldier in Italy. Like his father, he was not a member of the NSDAP or any other Nazi organization.

Reconstruction

After the war, Georg and Hans-Georg Karg rebuilt the Hertie company. Most of the Hertie department stores were located in East Germany and were expropriated; those in West Germany were destroyed or only functioned to a limited extent. In 1947, an agreement was reached with the Tietz family, who had fled to the USA and Switzerland, to whom shares in the department store group were transferred as part of a restitution, but who sold them to the Karg family in the 1950s. Hans-Georg Karg initially opened and operated the Hertie store in Munich, built up a network of suppliers and was able to successfully participate in the so-called German 'economic miracle' immediately after the currency reform (June 1948). The Hertie chain developed into one of the largest department store groups in West Germany, with a total of 25 department stores in the Federal Republic by 1955. In 1953, Hans-Georg Karg joined the management of Hertie Waren- und Kaufhaus GmbH, and in 1961 he became Managing Director of the entire Hertie Group, which, after stops in Hamburg and Berlin, finally moved to the centrally located Frankfurt am Main. In 1972, after the death of his father, Hans-Georg Karg succeeded his father in all leading positions.

Hans-Georg Karg's first wife Martha died in a car accident in 1949 at the age of just 25. On March 12, 1952, Hans-Georg Karg married Adelheid Sulovsky (1921-2004). The marriage remained childless.

The crisis in department stores, which had been ongoing since the 1970s at the latest and only briefly paused during the years surrounding German reunification, prompted Hans-Georg Karg to sell the whole of Hertie to its competitor Karstadt in 1993. At the time, it was a group with 100 department stores, 36,000 employees and annual sales of DM 5 billion. Most of the proceeds went to the non-profit Hertie Foundation in Frankfurt am Main.

From then on, Hans-Georg lived in seclusion with his wife in Bad Homburg, but mainly at Gut Sossau near Grabenstätt in Chiemgau. There he pursued his passion as a farmer. He also amassed an important collection of Max Liebermann's works. From 1989, Mr. and Mrs. Karg dedicated themselves to establishing the charitable Karg Foundation for the gifted, to which Hans-Georg Karg bequeathed his entire private fortune upon his death. In 2003, the businessman and benefactor Hans-Georg Karg died, marked by many years of serious illness. Adelheid Karg died in 2004.

Weblinks

• Karg-Stiftung

Literature

Alle Dokumente zum Lebensweg Hans-Georg Kargs liegen bei der Karg-Stiftung in Frankfurt am Main.

References

[[Category:Men]] [[Category:2003 deaths]] [[Category:1921 births]] [[Category:German people]]