BUSINESS ABROAD: Return of the Rochlings

The Röchling family is to the steel-rich Saar what the Fords are to Dearborn, Mich. Longtime producers of one-third of the Saar's steel, the Röchlings hold the key to the basin's rich economy, the deciding weight in the industrial balance of power between France and Germany. Both in 1919 and 1946, France took over the Röchling empire in an effort to swallow the Saar. Just 20 months ago Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay promised the French Senate, "The Röchlings will never return to the Saar." But six months after he spoke, the German-speaking Saarlanders voted down a French attempt to link their economies permanently.

This week France admitted the defeat of its hopes for economic control of the Saar, which will be incorporated into West Germany Jan. 1. France handed back to the Röchlings, several of them alumni of French jails as war criminals, the iron and steel works at Völklingen, employing 14,000 workers and producing 1,000,000 tons of steel a year.

Divesting the Dismantler. Völklingen, the Saar's biggest single industrial operation, is the base of the Röchlings' 250-year-old empire, which spills into West Germany with a coal field near Aachen, a steel business at Mannheim, an iron works at Wetzlar. The family's real rise to power began under sword-scarred Hermann Röchling, prime mover of the Saar's vast industrial buildup of the early 1900s. As a war mobilizer in the Kaiser's army in World War I, Captain Röchling ordered the scrapping of French iron and steel plants in occupied areas. Later the victorious French sentenced Hermann Röchling in absentia to ten years in prison, confiscated the Röchlings' big iron works and ore fields in Lorraine, plus 60% of their Völklingen steel plant and some coal mines in the neighboring Saar.

Stripped almost clean, the Röchlings were still idolized by the Saarlanders, who remembered the family's benevolent approach to labor, their record for holding employment steady. In the 1930s, when German and French steel plants were laying off workers, Röchling held its full labor force by falling back on reserves, developing new, cost-cutting production techniques. Playing on popular sympathy to achieve political leadership, Hermann Röchling cried for Anschluss with the German Fatherland. In 1935 the Saarlanders voted overwhelmingly to join Germany.

During World War II, Rochling bossed Lorraine's iron and steel production plus Saarland industry. At war's end, an Allied court found Hermann Röchling guilty of waging aggressive war, the first industrialist so convicted, jailed him for two years. After Hermann's death at 83 last year, administration of the family empire fell to his nephew Ernst Röchling, 66, who in 1949 had been sentenced to five years behind French barbed wire.