Location: Aug 15, 8410 Wildon
In 1938, the Guggenbacher machine paper factory Adolf Ruhmann and with it the Trattenmühle were taken over by Dr. Adolf Sandner. The change of ownership was practically tantamount to “Aryanization”. It was not until 1951 that the mill was restituted to Karl Ruhmann after a lengthy restitution process.
The Jewish industrialist Adolf Ruhmann founded his first own paper mill in 1853 and bought the insolvent Sommer’sche Maschinenpapierfabrik in 1876. Adolf Ruhmann’s sons, Moritz and Otto, joined the renamed “Guggenbacher Maschinenpapier-Fabrik Adolf Ruhmann” at the end of the 1880s and successively expanded the company.
In 1928, the factory had around 1,600 employees, in addition to the Vienna headquarters and the main plant in Guggenbach. Moritz Ruhmann’s sons Franz, Alfred and Karl joined the company after 1919. Karl designed cardboard beer coasters and had them produced in the Trattenmühle. The Ruhmann family also used the manor house in Wildon as a vacation home from 1897. After the “Anschluss” of Austria to the German Reich, the brothers Franz, Alfred and Karl Ruhmann were considered Jews under the “Nuremberg Racial Laws”, despite being baptized Catholics. Dr. Adolf Sandner, a member of the NSDAP since 1932 and a former Austrian “legionnaire”, successfully urged the Ruhmann family to sell the “Guggenbacher Maschinenpapier-Fabrik Adolf Ruhmann” in June 1938. The change of ownership was practically tantamount to “Aryanization”. Sandner had the three brothers deported to Zagreb, but the payments were not made. Living in great uncertainty, including financially, the three brothers fled to Italian-occupied Dalmatia after the German attack on Yugoslavia in June 1941.
When Dalmatia became part of Croatia in 1943 as a result of Italy’s change of alliance, the brothers and their families fled independently in different directions. Karl and his wife Katharina fled to Switzerland, Alfred died in Croatia in 1945, Franz committed suicide in view of the human and material losses – many relatives had been murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. After the end of Nazi rule, Dr. Karl and Katharina Ruhmann, as well as Alfred’s widow Martha Ruhmann, immediately began efforts to restitute the property lost in 1938. It was only after almost six years of legal proceedings that the comparatively small Trattenmühle mill, the manor house and an outdated cellulose farm in Krems were returned in 1951. Later, parts of the large art collections were also returned to the Ruhmann family. Adolf Sandner was brought before the People’s Court at the Graz Regional Criminal Court and sentenced to two years in prison. The cardboard production of the Trattenmühle continued until Karl Ruhmann’s death in 1972. In 1988, his widow set up the Dr. Karl Ruhmann Zinn Museum in a former farm building.
Literature: Elmar L. Sartorius, Nur die Zinnsammlung überlebte… Aufstieg, Verfolgung und Erlöschen der Industriellefamilie Ruhmann (1st part), in: Hengist Magazin 13/3 (2016), 16–23. Elmar L. Sartorius, Nur die Zinnsammlung überlebte… Aufstieg, Verfolgung und Erlöschen der Industriellefamilie Ruhmann (2nd part), in: Hengist Magazin 14/1 (2017), 20–23.
Sources: Verordnugns- und Amtsblatt für das Land Steiermark, 41/1946, 463.
Text: Markus Rieger-Roschitz / Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on War Consequences
