Paul Schoeller

Sir Paul Eduard von Schoeller (15 June 1853 - 2 November 1920) was an Austrian mining industrialist.

Early life Schoeller was born on 15 June 1853 in Vienna. He came from the Viennese line of the Schoeller family and was the son of the merchant Johann Paul von Schoeller (1808–1882), who was born in Düren and worked in Vienna, and was ennobled in 1867, and his wife Pauline (née Schoeller) Schoeller (1812–1877). His maternal grandfather was Düren cloth manufacturer Johann Peter Schoeller, a brother of Leopold Schoeller and thus a distant cousin. In return, he received Krupp's shares in the Ternitzer Steel and Iron Works from Schoeller & Co., making that the entire company family owned. After Gustav Adolph had already begun modernisation measures at the Ternitzer plant in his final years and had also founded an independent shell factory to produce war material, Paul Eduard pushed ahead with expansion. He replaced the previous mechanical use of hydropower with a modern turbine-driven power plant and swapped the outdated Bessemer process for the new Siemens-Martin process. This enabled his steel types to establish themselves on the world market and the associated ammunition factory also became a major supplier of large-caliber grenades and other armaments for World War I. Under Paul Eduard's leadership, the family business reached its greatest economic expansion. He appointed his cousin from the Brno branch of the family, Richard von Schoeller, as manager of the main plant in Ternitz, which later, in 1924, merged with the Bleckmann steelworks to form Schoeller-Bleckmann Steelworks. Furthermore, in 1902, due to his political commitment to the Liberal Constitutional Party in Austria, he was appointed a lifelong member of the House of Lords of the Imperial Council of Austria.

Personal life Schoeller died, without issue, on 2 November 1920 in Vienna and was buried in the Grinzing Cemetery. After his death in 1920, his cousin Richard von Schoeller became the sole heir to the family empire. Another cousin, Robert von Schoeller, succeeded him as director of the Leipnik-Lundenburg Sugar Factory. His nephew and adopted son, Gustav Neufeldt (son of his sister Emma and the Lüdenscheid wholesaler and Norwegian consul in Vienna Karl Neufeldt), inherited his palace in Vienna and received his noble title and name in 1911. Since then, the surviving descendants have called themselves Neufeldt-Schoeller.