Hans Koch (entrepreneur)

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Hans Koch (born April 21, 1897 , † February 9, 1995 in Meinerzhagen in the Sauerland) was a German inventor, entrepreneur and co-founder of an anarchist-communist commune. In 1948 he founded the company Hans Koch & Sohn (today Hako GmbH in Bad Oldesloe) in Pinneberg .

Life

Hans Koch, son of a lawyer, joined the Wandervogel movement as a teenager . His friend Peter Kollwitz , son of Käthe Kollwitz , was shot next to him in the First World War in the first year of 1914. Koch himself was discharged from the army in 1916 after his second wound. Because of these experiences, Koch became a pacifist and a socialist .

During the war he went to Berlin, where he lived with friends in an alternative residential community, which of them as " community - Anarchist " was called. This alternative residential community rejected the centralized order as well as the bourgeois society with its constraints and the parties. As a rebellious, rebellious group, the Berlin shared apartment was soon targeted by the secret police. Hans Koch and his friends then fled to Bavaria. In Blankenburg (south of Donauwörth ) a mission procuratorate that had gone bankrupt was up for sale. In southern Germany he also got to know the writer, patron and salonnière Hertha Koenig . The writer from northern Germany lived for around 10 years on the Einödhof Aich in Prutting in Upper Bavaria .

Even then, Hans Koch was a charismatic personality with great persuasive power. Although Hertha König and the writer Georg Kaiser hardly knew him from the literary salon, he persuaded both of them to give the Communards the considerable purchase price for the property in Blankenburg in order to establish a rural commune there - as a great social proposal.

Around 20 young people were employed in this rural commune, including Friedrich Bauermeister , Alfred Kurella and Georg Platzer, among others . The rural municipality in Blankenburg, however, quickly came under surveillance by the local authorities. After the defeat of the Munich Soviet Republic in May 1919, the authorities accused the municipality of hiding Max Levien , the leader of the Soviet Republic and Munich Communist Party . The Communards were held in custody for a few days. Hans Koch defended himself so impressively in court that the public prosecutor then asked him whether his daughter could come to Blankenburg as well. The process ended with 1½ years on probation, deportations, etc. The sentences were relatively light, not least because of a prominent exonerating witness from Koch's relatives and his good defense speech.

In 1920 the municipality in Blankenburg was at an end; Koch had left her earlier, however. He went back to Berlin and tried to set up a chocolate factory and a communal cinema there, neither of which came about. He then joined the agricultural community in Harxbüttel (now part of Braunschweig ). In Harxbüttel, the socialist Hans Löhr founded a rural commune on his parents' property (parcel “Horstkamp”) in the early 1920s. There he and other Communards mainly planted asparagus, which was then processed in his own canning factory.

Establishment of Hako

HAKOrette 5004

In the Harxbüttel community, Hans Koch then implemented the practical side of the more idealistic rural commune movement by starting to mechanize the strenuous tillage. Not least because of his war injury, Koch wanted to make the hard work in the fields much easier by using machines. Already from Blankenburg he therefore visited the inventor Konrad Viktor von Meyenburg, the son of Victor von Meyenburg in Switzerland, who had developed a tiller in 1919.

In Harxbüttel he finally developed his first tiller, for which he received his first patent on August 6, 1924. The functional principle can still be seen today in many agricultural and gardening equipment: A motor with worm gear, which is carried on the back, drives the chopping knives via a flexible shaft, which loosen the soil and pull out the weeds. For the financing of the development he was able to win the Reich manager of the small peasant associations, the later Federal President Heinrich Lübke . A Berlin company built and sold the hoe. The first motorized hedge trimmer with various accessories to be connected was also developed in Harxbüttel. On June 23, 1925, he successfully applied for a patent for the invention of the first motorized hedge trimmer.

From 1926 to 1930 Hans Koch was the authorized signatory of a company in Hagen that manufactured tiller. In 1930 he went into business for himself and founded the company DiMoHa, "The motorized hand". The small motor hoe was manufactured under license by a Berlin company. On a farm in Mecklenburg he worked on their further development. In 1940 he presented a new motor hoe for patenting.

Shortly before the end of the war, Hans Koch fled to Pinneberg from the advancing Soviet troops. In 1948 he founded the mechanical engineering company Hans Koch & Sohn, abbreviation: Hako, the later Hako -Werke. The new company was entered in the commercial register on Christmas Eve 1948. In 1954 the company moved to Bad Oldesloe, where the international company still has its headquarters today. The company's ascent began in 1956 with the Hakorette, a single-axle tiller. Both the DiMoHa and the Hakorette are in the Deutsches Museum in Munich - as a special technical achievement.

Shortly after the war, he met the young Tyll Necker , who later became President of the BDI. Necker and Koch's daughter Karin both went to the Odenwald School in Heppenheim . After Tyll Necker married Hans Koch's daughter in 1955 and became a co-partner of Hako-Werke in 1960, Hans Koch withdrew more and more from the company until he finally left the company in 1966. In 1995 he died in Meinerzhagen (Sauerland).

Milestones as an entrepreneur

HAKOrecord

With the development of the "Hakorette" and the "Hakorecord", Hans Koch was able to lay the foundations for his later large company, Hako GmbH in Bad Oldesloe, in the mid and late 1950s .

Hans Koch developed one of the first comprehensive single-axle tractors as early as 1956. The "Hakorette" consisted of an axle with large wheels with farm tires, an engine, gearbox, clutch and steering. It was the first single-axle tractor to receive the highest DLG award in 1959 . From 1956 it was sold for 765 DM.

With the "Hakorecord", a single-axle tractor, Hans Koch advanced into the middle class of tillage vehicles in the early 1960s. Equipped with similar basic equipment as the “Hakorette”, the “Hakorecord” had three gears (field gear, high gear up to 18 km / h, reverse gear and one idle). Since it was considerably more expensive than the similarly built "Hakorette", starting at DM 1695, its number was lower than that of the Hakorette. For comparison: A VW Beetle type car was available from DM 3,950 at the time. Both the "Hakorette" and the "Hakorecord" are still very popular with collectors today and some of them are extensively restored.

anecdote

Hans Koch wrote in a letter in 1972: "Every year of successful business life I can and will forget - Blankenburg never."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In Memoriam Hans Koch on www.lions.de; accessed on January 13, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Koch, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German inventor, entrepreneur and co-founder of an anarchist-communist commune
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1897
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 1995
Place of death Meinerzhagen in the Sauerland