At the age of 86
Ex-Deutsche Bank boss Kopper has died
Former CEO of Deutsche Bank, Hilmar Kopper. Photo: Frank Rumpenhorst / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
His “peanuts” utterance is legendary. As head of Deutsche Bank, he made the group more international, and at the much smaller HSH Nordbank, as chief controller, he bit his teeth.
He was always a doer and a man of clear words: Hilmar Kopper pulled the strings at important switching points in the German economy for decades – especially as head of Deutsche Bank (1989-1997) and chief supervisor of the car manufacturer Daimler (1990-2007).
Kopper died yesterday at the age of 86. The tall Kopper enjoyed an excellent reputation as a top banker and industrial supervisor. But again and again he was offensive. Above all, one statement has not been forgotten: In 1994, Kopper dismissed open tradesmen’s bills in the double-digit million range in connection with the bankruptcy of the building lion Jürgen Schneider as “peanuts”. The banker was not only met with incomprehension by tradespeople who had to shut down their business because of such “minor issues”.
“Peanuts” became the “bad word of the year” in 1994, and the jury criticized: “Such a disparaging valuation of sums of money, which the average citizen can only dream of, is unfortunately not so rare in financial circles.”
Kopper took the criticism calmly and later showed himself to be quite self-deprecating: for the “FAZ” advertising campaign “There’s always a clever head behind it”, he had himself photographed on a mountain of peanuts. In 1996, Kopper told “Spiegel”: “I should have used a more sophisticated word, maybe Coconuts would have been better.” And in 2012 he was quoted as saying for the German pellet industry: “I calculate in peanuts. That’s why I heat with pellets. “
Born on March 13, 1935 as the son of a farmer in Oslanin, West Prussia, Kopper’s career began unspectacularly: as an apprentice in a branch of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Bank in Cologne-Mülheim, which later became part of Deutsche Bank. He found the first few days as a trainee in April 1954 to be “terrible.” In 1957 he went to New York as a trainee, after returning his career began at Deutsche Bank. In 1977 Kopper moved up to the board of directors – a rare career, after all, Kopper never completed a degree.
The murder of the then spokesman for the board, Alfred Herrhausen, in November 1989 changed the situation suddenly: Kopper was appointed as his successor. He put the internationalization of the bank initiated by Herrhausen into practice – a decisive step for Germany’s leading financial institution. After eight years, Kopper handed over the chief position to Rolf Breuer in May 1997 and moved to the top of the Deutsche Bank Supervisory Board (1997-2002).
Kopper steered the Daimler supervisory board for 17 years. The then car boss Jürgen Schrempp personally presented the idea of a merger between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler in 1998 during a home visit. Kopper agreed and opened a bottle of 1975 Château Lafite to celebrate the day. When Schrempp’s plans for a “world corporation” failed, Kopper defended the manager against criticism.
The states of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg activated the retired person living in the Westerwald with the hobby of hiking – and brought him to the head of the supervisory board of their tumbling Landesbank HSH Nordbank in July 2009. According to Kopper, he wanted to make the bank “a functioning credit institution again”. He would never have hired a bank with no future, he emphasized: “Nobody needs WestLB” – again one of those clear Kopper words.
But Kopper was especially uncomfortable with the Greens, who sat in the respective state government at the beginning of his tenure at HSH in Hamburg and at the end in Schleswig-Holstein. In February 2013, Kopper prematurely gave up his chairmanship of the HSH supervisory board. The HSH in its former form is now history.
Kopper has a daughter and two sons from his first marriage, and in his second marriage he was married to Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt, the widow of the former Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt (SPD), since 2003.