Hermann Röchling (12 November 1872 – 24 August 1955) was a German steel manufacturer in the Saar (Germany) and Lorraine (France) in the 20th century.

After the war he was tried and convicted for human rights violations, although as an old man he was released before serving his full term.

[3] In August 1897 Hermann Röchling oversaw construction of a new Carlshütte kiln plant in Diedenhofen (Thionville) in Lorraine.

[7] He and his cousin Robert were charged with destroying several factories in the northeast of France when they were evacuated by German troops.

[12] In 1919 France accused the brothers Robert and Hermann Röchling of the war crimes of serious theft and damage.

[3] On 23 December 1919 the council of war in Amiens condemned them to 10 years imprisonment, a 10 million franc fine and exile from Saarland.

He was glad to see the Treaty of Versailles dismantled and welcomed a war that would allow him to take final revenge on France.

[14] After the expiry of the League of Nations mandate over the Saar in 1935, Hermann Röchling committed himself to the return of Saarland to Germany.

[3] Röchling was violently antisemitic, and when the Nazis temporarily reduced their attacks on Jews before the January 1935 plebiscite on the return he protested that the Saar risked turning into a "Jewish nature reserve".

[3] As Wehrwirtschaftsführer (defense economy leader) he headed the "South West District of the steel industry economic grouping".

[17] After the defeat of France Röchling was made appointed General Manager of Iron and Steel for the Lorraine and Meurthe-de-Moselle regions, excluding Longwy, on 1 July 1940, and held this post until 1942.

François and Humbert de Wendel were given permits to travel to Hayange, where they were shown an authorization by Göring on 12 July 1940 for Röchling to take control of the works.

However, in December 1940 Paul Raabe warned him that in the end Göring would assign the spoils of the Wendel family to his own firm.

[23] After Göring's allocation of the industrial plants, in January 1941 Hermann Röchling was relieved of control in Moselle, retaining only Meurthe-et-Moselle.

[3] By the spring of 1942 Röchling saw the struggle in Russia as a trial between Capitalism and Communism, and was concerned at the success of the Soviets in supplying aircraft and tanks to their forces.

He disagreed with the state-controlled approach of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring and wanted to prove that private enterprise, left to organize itself without interference and allowed to make profits, was the best way to supply the armed forces with what they needed.

[26] In 1942 Speer proposed to form a Reich Iron Association (RVE) to cut through the confusion of competing interests in the iron and steel industry, controlling everything from raw material to sales, and proposed Albert Vögler of United Steel as head.

[26] On 18 June 1942 Röchling was also given charge of the iron and steel industry in the occupied territories at the recommendation of Goering.

The Reich Iron Association held its first presidium meeting in August 1942, attended by Röchling, Krupp, Rohland, Friedrich Flick, Wilhelm Zangen, Paul Pleiger and Alfred Pott as well as representatives from the German Labour Front and from Saxony and Austria.

[28][14] Röchling's crash program drained industrial reserves of coal, and in 1943 the problem worsened as coal miners went on strike, shortages developed in mining material such as pit props, and Allied bombing raids increased in preparation for the landings in Normandy.

[29] The concept of the V-3 cannon, a 416 feet (127 m) gun barrel that would fire a 9 feet (2.7 m) long dart-shaped shell, originated with August Coenders, a machine gun engineer and developer of the Röchling shell who worked for Hermann Roechling.

A huge emplacement was built near Moyecques in the Pays de Calais using German workers, prisoners of war and slave labourers.

The indictment stated that, "[i]f the 'Directors of German Enterprises'... plead that they only attached themselves to Hitler in order to oppose communism or 'Social Democracy', there exists no doubt that the profound reason for their attitude can be sought in their desire, long before the coming of national socialism, to extend their undertakings beyond the frontiers of the Reich.

"[33] At his trial in Nuremberg in June 1946 Speer said that he and Hermann Röchling had resisted demands by Hitler to use violence in disciplining French labour and to abandon "humanitarian muddle-headedness" in dealing with saboteurs.

[34] Humbert de Wendell stated in an affidavit that he considered, "the defendant [to be] a pan-Germanist of the old school, who gave total support to Hitler because he saw in him a man capable of achieving the 'Deutschland über Alles!'.

De Wendell said Röchling had resisted the expulsion of French personnel by Gauleiter Josef Bürckel, had stopped the Gestapo from placing their agents in the factories, had often intervened on behalf of French employees with the police and had appointed excellent German administrators.

[1] In 1952 he received the Werner von Siemens Ring, one of the highest German honors awarded in the field of technical sciences.

[39] In April 1955 the French and German governments bought Völklingen from the Rochling family for 200 million Swiss francs.