Hans Trippel

Hans Trippel ; Hanns Trippel (* July 19, 1908 in Groß-Umstadt ; † June 30, 2001 in Erbach ) was a German car designer. He devoted his life primarily to developing amphibious vehicles . As a member of the SA and SS as well as the head of expropriated or forced labor companies, he was involved in the crimes of National Socialism .

Life

Trippel was the son of a grocer and trained retail salesman. In technical terms he was self-taught. During the Great Depression, he had gotten by as a traveler for cigarettes for a while. In 1932 he went into business for himself and began building cars in a rented horse stable in Darmstadt. He bought a 600 cm³ DKW chassis and built a body out of sheet aluminum on it and named this vehicle Land-Wasser-Zepp. A propeller for the water drive was attached to the pointed stern. The first driving and swimming tests took place on the Oberwaldhaus pond in Darmstadt and on the Rhine near Oppenheim and were satisfactory. He also started with this vehicle in 1932 at the Wiesbaden Motorsport Days.

In 1934 he built a streamlined racing car based on an Adler Trumpf Junior with a supercharged engine, with which he achieved six victories in the following years. In 1935, the first floating off-road vehicle was created, also based on the Adler with a two-liter engine.

Trippel in National Socialism

The designer, who had been a party member since 1930 and also a member of the SA , also caught the attention of the National Socialists and received an invitation to Berlin in October 1936. There he showed his vehicle to Adolf Hitler in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery . The armament of the Wehrmacht was in full swing and Trippel received a development grant of 10,000 Reichsmarks from Hitler. With this money and bank credit, he bought an old slaughterhouse in Homburg and built and developed his swimming car there with 250 employees. On the basis of the Trippel SG 6 , a two-meter widened version called the Amphibium was built. This vehicle was a special development for the military and could transport up to 16 people in the water. He delivered 20 vehicles of the type SG-6 Amphibium to the Wehrmacht .

In 1938 he presented the SG-6 to the Italian armed forces . To prove the reliability, he even wanted to cross the Mediterranean to Africa. But since this was forbidden, he drove from Naples to Capri on September 25, 1938 . In the same year the SK-8 was created, a convertible with a streamlined body and a 2.5-liter Adler engine. This car should combine the characteristics of a fast sports car and a seaworthy boat. Both vehicles, the SG-6 and the SK-8, attracted a lot of attention at the 1939 automobile exhibition in Berlin.

Since the beginning of the war, Trippel only developed and built vehicles for the military. His political contacts and the German occupation of Alsace brought Trippel to head the Bugatti plants in Molsheim in 1940 as " operations manager " . However, after disputes with SA chief Lutze , Trippel had meanwhile transferred to the SS and was leader of the SS main office. At times he enjoyed the personal support of the head of the SS main office, Gottlob Berger , and the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler . Berger had recommended the Trippel-Schwimmwagen as " particularly suitable for fighting partisans (...)". The factory in Molsheim, which had more than 2,000 employees, had previously belonged to Ettore Bugatti . Although Bugatti refused to remain in German-occupied Alsace and had relocated its vehicle production, including most of the machinery, to Bordeaux, as a citizen of Italy, an ally of Germany, he was compensated by the Berlin Ministry of Armaments with 7.5 million RM for his work.

On January 15, 1941, the Trippel-Werke GmbH was founded in Molsheim and the production of floating cars started. It is debatable whether 1000 SG-6 floating cars were actually built here. In Berghoff / Rauh-Kühne, which is based on French files from the post-war period and on Trippel's verdict chamber file, it can be read that the Trippel-Schwimmwagen was only produced in small numbers of around 200 during the war and never reached series production. In 1942 the SG-7 was developed for the propaganda companies. This was a sedan with a sunroof and an air-cooled Tatra V8 engine in the rear. The further development was the floating armored car type E3 with all-wheel drive and two propellers. Other variants were the E3M ammunition transporter and a buoyant propeller sled for the Air Force . In addition to the wheels, this had four snow and floating runners and was driven by an air propeller. But Trippel's reputation as a technician as well as an "operator" had quickly declined. Although he was awarded the SS skull ring by the Reichsführer SS field command on June 20, 1944 , around the same time Himmler was asked by General Aircraft Master Erhard Milch to replace Trippel with "a more suitable person" for reasons of performance. On July 31, 1944, Himmler Milch announced that “he has no reservations about the proposed change in the management of the Trippelwerke in Molsheim”. In the last months of the war, at Trippel's instigation, part of the Molsheim production was relocated to Sulz am Neckar, where the SS assigned him an underground lime tunnel as a production facility. The workforce of the "Trippelwerke" consisted to a large extent of prisoners who were sent from various concentration camps to a concentration camp sub -camp set up at Trippel's instigation, where they had to live and work under life-threatening conditions.

After 1945

At the end of the war, Trippel withdrew to Bavaria in front of the approaching French armed forces. Here he was arrested by American troops and handed over to the French, who in spring 1947 sentenced Trippel to five years' imprisonment and a fine of 20,000 RM for crimes against humanity . However, Trippel was pardoned and released early in December 1948 after three years in prison. At the end of the war, the Trippel-Werke were in debt with 8.5 million RM. In 1949, Trippel's denazification proceedings were carried out in front of the central tribunal of North Württemberg in Ludwigsburg . On December 27, 1949, the Chamber downgraded him from the alleged “main culprit”, according to the application of November 15, 1949, to a “fellow traveler”. The course and outcome of the proceedings left room for speculation as to whether Trippel profited from a bribery affair in which the then chief prosecutor of this ruling chamber was involved. Even before Trippel's denazification was complete, he married the daughter of the Trossingen cigarette paper manufacturer Fritz Kiehn, a prominent former Nazi functionary who, in the Third Reich, had been president of the Stuttgart Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a member of the Friends of the Reichsführer SS. The two had met in an Allied detention camp.

Together with Kiehn and with the granting of state loans from the state of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, Trippel was able to take over the run-down Chiron works in Tuttlingen with the help of a million dollar loan and try to design a small car there - again unsuccessfully economically. Since Germany was banned from building floating cars after the war, he built a small two-seater with a 600 cm³ Horex engine, the Trippel SK 10. The car, which was supposed to cost only 2800  DM , attracted a lot of people at exhibitions, but the car, only 1.1 m high, was too small. The attempt with a larger version also failed. The business relationship with Kiehn was broken as early as 1951 and the marriage to Kiehn's daughter was divorced again. The state loan to Kiehn gave the state of Württemberg-Hohenzollern its first and only parliamentary committee of inquiry.

Even after leaving the Chiron works, Trippel did not give up his car dreams. In Stuttgart he tried to set up a new company, but went bankrupt after only 15 SK 10 sold. In 1953 an informant informed the Baden-Württemberg judicial authorities that he had "accumulated a lot of debts due to his incompetent commercial nature". In September 1954, the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Justice ordered the unrecoverable procedural costs of Trippel's denazification to be canceled. These had been reduced in stages from the original DM 42,250 to DM 300, the authority found.

In 1953, some French wanted to acquire the license for a floating car from Trippel. Among them was an expert who had helped develop the plastic body of the Chevrolet Corvette . It was decided to build the new car with an appropriate body. On August 1st, the Trippel Corsaire was published in France . This company soon ran out of money and Trippel moved from Paris to Stuttgart. There he developed the Corsaire further.

The brothers Fritz and Reinhold Weidner, owners of a trailer factory, were interested in this vehicle, and so the Weidner Condor appeared on the market in March 1957 . With a price of 7500 DM the car could not compete with the VW Karmann-Ghia , Goliath Hansa or the Sportprinz . Production ended after 200 vehicles.

Eurocar GmbH

In 1958, Trippel founded Eurocar GmbH and introduced the Alligator floating car . After meeting the industrialist Harald Quandt in Berlin, whom he had already met 19 years earlier, the Amphicar 770 was built in 1961 , of which around 3500 were built at Quandt in Lübeck and Berlin. However, since Trippel was not satisfied with the further development, he withdrew and worked for a few years as a consultant for floating vehicles in the German armed forces . In 1974 he developed another off-road vehicle that was to be used both civilly and militarily, the T-74.

In later years Trippel continued to develop new water-land vehicles. He designed the last prototype in 1990 - at the age of 81.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Trippel, Hans. Hessian biography (as of April 24, 2012). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS). Hessian State Office for Historical Cultural Studies (HLGL), accessed on July 16, 2012 . 
2. ↑ Hartmut Berghoff / Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, Fritz K. A German Life in the Twentieth Century, Munich 2000, pp. 251–255.
3. ↑ Hartmut Berghoff / Cornelia Rauh-Kühne, Fritz K. A German Life in the Twentieth Century, Munich 2000, p. 252 u. Note 27, p. 413.

swell

• Automobile and motorcycle chronicle 1977, issue No. 10; ISSN  0171-8428
• Automobile and motorcycle chronicle 1975, issue No. 4

literature

• Hartmut Berghoff, Cornelia Rauh-Kühne: Fritz K. A German Life in the Twentieth Century . Munich: DVA. ISBN 3-421-05339-1 . Chapter 11.12.
• The triple car . Work magazine of the Trippelwerke GmbH, Molsheim. - 1st episode August / September 1943
• Hanns Peter Rosellen: German small cars after 1945 loved, praised and forgotten ... . Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1st edition 1977. ISBN 3-921097-38-X .- Pages 322 to 340
• Walter Drawer: Small Cars International. Mobile, cabin scooters and driving machines from the 40s, 50s and 60s from over 250 manufacturers from all over the world . Stuttgart: Motorbuch-Verlag 1999.

Web links

• Overview with all Trippel vehicles
• Triple SK-10