August Thyssen

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August Thyssen at Landsberg Castle

August Thyssen (born May 17, 1842 in Eschweiler ; † April 4, 1926 at Landsberg Castle ) was a German industrialist from the Thyssen family .

Life

August Thyssen's house in the old town of Eschweiler

After studying at the Polytechnic School in Karlsruhe and the commercial college in Antwerp , August Thyssen initially worked like his brother Joseph Thyssen in the banking house of his father Friedrich Thyssen .

In 1867 he and several relatives founded the ironworks "Thyssen-Fossoul & Co" in Duisburg in what was then the Prussian Rhine Province . In 1870 the company was dissolved and Thyssen founded the rolling mill Thyssen & Co. with the capital redeemed in Styrum near Mülheim an der Ruhr , which was to form the nucleus for one of the largest integrated European mining groups , the August Thyssen-Hütte . In contrast to other groups, Thyssen only formed a holding shortly before his death . Most of the time, its parts of the company existed in parallel and were managed decentrally. The largest company here was the German Emperors ' Union , which was taken over in 1891 and which in the same year founded their steel-making operations in the Beeck mayor's office in the Bruckhausen district of the city of Ruhrort. Hamborn , the seat of his colliery, gained in importance due to its industrialization that had already taken place and was given as the company headquarters.

Together with Hugo Stinnes , Thyssen was one of the founders of RWE .

On November 29, 1872 Thyssen married the 18-year-old Hedwig Pelzer (1854-1940), daughter of the Mülheim tannery owner Johann Heinrich Pelzer (1821-1884) and his wife Hedwig née Troost. The marriage was divorced again in 1885. The marriage had four children: Fritz (1873–1951), August junior (1874–1943), Heinrich (1875–1947) and Hedwig (1878–1960). In order to avoid the dissolution of the Thyssen group through the divorce, Thyssen transferred ownership of the group to his children, but retained the usufruct and thus excluded the children from managing the company. This arrangement created considerable conflict between the generations.

In 1926, the Thyssen group was largely integrated into the Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG . The companies, which were newly founded after the Second World War, merged with KruppHoesch in 1999 to form ThyssenKrupp AG .

literature

  • Wilhelm Treue: The fires never go out. August Thyssen-Hütte 1890–1926. Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1966.
  • Kurt Unbehau: The honorary citizens of the city of Mülheim an der Ruhr . Mülheim an der Ruhr, 1974, pp. 35-40.
  • Manfred Rasch , Gerald D. Feldman (Eds.): August Thyssen and Hugo Stinnes. An exchange of letters from 1898–1922. CH Beck, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-406-49637-7 .
  • Stephan Wegener (ed.): August and Josef Thyssen. The family and their company. Klartext, Essen 2004, ISBN 3-89861-312-7 .
  • Jörg Lesczenski: August Thyssen 1842–1926. Life world of a business citizen. Klartext, Essen 2008, ISBN 978-3-89861-920-2 .
  • Manfred Rasch (Ed.): August Thyssen and Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. Letters from a family of industrialists 1919–1926. Klartext, Essen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8375-0331-9 .
  • Stephan Wegener (ed.): The Thyssen siblings. A century of family history. Klartext, Essen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8375-0894-9 .

Movie

  • German Dynasties - The Thyssens. Documentary, Germany, 2010, 44 min., Script and direction: Julia Melchior and Sebastian Dehnhardt , production: WDR , series: Deutsche Dynastien, first broadcast: ARD , November 8, 2010, summary ( memento of August 23, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) the ARD.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Thyssen, August
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH May 17, 1842
PLACE OF BIRTH Eschweiler
DATE OF DEATH April 4, 1926
Place of death Landsberg Castle