Amélie Thyssen
Amélie Thyssen (born September 11, 1877 in Mülheim am Rhein ; † August 25, 1965 at Puchhof Castle near Straubing ) was born as the daughter of the manufacturer family zur Helle and was the wife of Fritz Thyssen .
Life
She married in 1900 against the resistance of her future father-in-law, the industrialist August Thyssen , his son Fritz. Their daughter Anita was born on May 13, 1909 .
When Fritz Thyssen in 1939 because of the outbreak of war the Nazis against Poland in Switzerland emigrated , accompanied Amélie her husband and lost with him their German citizenship .
Together with her husband, she fled to the south of France to emigrate from there to Argentina . Still in France at the end of 1940, they were among the first Germans to be arrested by the Vichy regime and extradited to Germany. Her property was confiscated. The family was held in a closed ward of a sanatorium near Berlin for two years before they were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp , from where they were deported to Buchenwald concentration camp in February 1945 and finally to Dachau concentration camp . During the transport of prisoners via Schönberg in the Bavarian Forest to the Reichenau concentration camp near Innsbruck , the couple and other celebrities were freed by the Wehrmacht , which was disarmed by the United States Army shortly afterwards .
After Fritz Thyssen had justified himself in a denazification procedure , the couple traveled via Brussels , from where they fought over the return of their property, to Buenos Aires in January 1950 , where daughter Anita had lived with her husband, the Hungarian Count Gábor Zichy , since 1936 . After the death of her husband on February 8, 1951, Amélie reorganized the group together with her daughter Anita Countess Zichy-Thyssen, which was only returned to the relatives of Fritz Thyssen by the Allies after his death. Amélie founded a new group company under the traditional name Phoenix-Rheinrohr , for which the "Dreischeibenhaus" was built in Düsseldorf . In 1964 Phoenix-Rheinrohr was merged with the Duisburg August-Thyssen-Hütte , in which Countess Anita Zichy-Thyssen held the majority. The Dreischeibenhaus in Düsseldorf remained the administrative seat.
On July 7, 1959, Amélie and her daughter founded the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Research with shares with a nominal value of almost DM 100 million, the first large, private individual scientific foundation in post-war Germany. On August 7, 1960, Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer presented Amélie Thyssen with the Federal Cross of Merit with star and shoulder ribbon at Puchhof Palace near Straubing .
She died on August 25, 1965 as a stateless person, because after the National Socialists withdrew her citizenship , she never applied for her citizenship again.
Like her husband, she was buried at Landsberg Castle.
literature
- Amélie Thyssen , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 42/1965 of October 11, 1965, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)
- Hans Günter Hockerts: A legacy for science . The Fritz Thyssen Foundation in the Bonn Republic (Family - Company - Public: Thyssen in the 20th Century, Vol. 8), Paderborn 2018
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Thyssen, Amélie |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Amélie to the light |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Founder, wife of Fritz Thyssen |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 11, 1877 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mülheim am Rhein |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 25, 1965 |
| Place of death | Puchhof Castle near Straubing |