National-Bank
Regional bank in Germany
National-Bank is a German regional bank that provides services in North Rhine-Westphalia. It is a medium-sized bank with around 600 employees and 18 branches, it provides services for approximately 100,000 retail clients, freelancers, corporate clients and institutional investors with a focus on medium-sized companies.
History
The National Bank was founded in 1921 under the name Deutsche Volksbank as the bank of the Christian trade union movement for the so-called "little people". In the same year, Adam Stegerwald commissioned Heinrich Brüning, later Chancellor of the Reich, to found the Vereinsbank für deutsche Arbeit AG in Berlin, where the headquarters of the General Association of Christian Trade Unions was also located. Later in the same year, the institute was given the name Deutsche Volksbank AG. In October 1922, the general meeting voted to move its headquarters to Essen. However, the occupation of the Ruhr region and hyperinflation proved to be considerable burdens. In addition, most of the managers were not banking specialists, but functionaries of trade union organisations; moreover, the business model fluctuated between a trade union "savings bank" and a financing instrument for cooperative and social projects. In 1931, the bank was on the brink of collapsing.
In 1933, when the NSDAP seized power, the name was changed to National-Bank and a strategic reorientation as a regional bank for small and medium-sized enterprises took place. Essen's Gauleiter, Josef Terboven, installed his confidant and publishing director Wolfgang Müller-Clemm as controller in the bank.
“National-Bank” enters the record as regional bank in Germany. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what National-Bank, Regional and bank can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“National-Bank” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, National-Bank, Regional and bank provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1966870. VIAF identifies the subject as 7308147484346649360008. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1922, 1931 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “National-Bank” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.