Baron Edmund Gutmann von Gelse und Belišće (Velika Kaniža, Hungary, March 3, 1841 - Belišće, January 17, 1918) was a Croatian nobleman and industrialist of Jewish origin and, together with his family (father and brothers), the founder of the settlement that became Belišće[1]
Baron Gutmann was born in the Jewish family of Salamon Heinrich and Nanette Gutmann, as the oldest of nine children. He had four brothers and four sisters: Isidor (born 1845), Vilim (born 1846), Ladislav (born 1855), Alfred (born 1857), Hedvig, Ema (born 1848), Berta and Ida.
His father founded the wood processing company "H.S. Gutmann" in Hungary. After his father's retirement, Baron Gutmann and his brothers take over the company. He bought a ten-year lease of a complex of oak forests from Valpovac baron Gustav Hillenprand Prandau in February 1884. Shortly after the construction of the first residential houses in Gutman's settlement, the following were built: a fire station, a post office, an elementary school building, a chapel at the cemetery, an electricity network and a water supply system with sewage. The company "H.S. Gutmann" built the first kilometers of the forest industrial railway, which quickly grew into a local railway station with public transport.[2]
The Gutmann Palace in the center of Belišće was built by Baron Gutmann for his son Artur and daughter-in-law Stefanija.[3] Francis Joseph I declared Baron Gutmann a knight and decorated him with the hereditary pen of Baron von Gelse und Belišće.[4]
After him, the management of the company was taken over by his son Artur Gutmann, and after Artur's death, his nephew Viktor Gutmann, who survived the Second World War, but was killed by the communists in 1946 under the false accusation that he collaborated with the Nazis.