Heinrich Nordhoff

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Heinrich Nordhoff, in the background the south facade of the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg (1948)

Heinrich Nordhoff (born January 6, 1899 in Hildesheim , † April 12, 1968 in Wolfsburg ) was General Director ( Managing Director ) of Volkswagenwerk GmbH from 1948 and Chairman of the Board of Management of Volkswagenwerk AG from 1960 . He was largely responsible for building the company.

Life

Early years

Heinrich Nordhoff was the second of three sons of the bank authorized representative and later insurance manager Johannes Nordhoff . The family moved to Berlin in 1911 , where he studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Berlin from 1920 to 1927 . Here he became an active member of the Askania-Burgundia Berlin Catholic student association in the Cartel Association of Catholic German Student Associations , of which he was a member until death.

Career in the automotive industry

After a first stop at BMW - Flugmotorenbau he went in 1929 to General Motors (GM). There he compiled Opel customer service manuals and also worked on the assembly line in a factory to better understand the subject during the holidays. A trip to the USA , financed by GM, served to study production and sales methods at General Motors, from which he later benefited as VW boss. In 1930 he married Charlotte Fassunge. In April 1942 he became a member of the board of directors at Adam Opel AG , from July 1942 he was head of the Opel truck plant in Brandenburg an der Havel, built in 1935, and thus also a military manager .

After the war

In the course of a denazification process , Nordhoff had to resign from his board position in October 1945. In the denazification process he was, although initially grouped as a major offender, classified as relieved on 31 January 1947th After 1945, Nordhoff was managing director of the Opel general agency Ernst Dello & Co. in Hamburg , since his position as a manager of the economy in the National Socialist German Reich meant that continued employment at Adam Opel AG was out of the question for US policy. However , this was not an obstacle for the British occupying forces . In autumn 1947, Ivan Hirst , an officer in the British Control Commission and after 1945 acting head of the Volkswagenwerk GmbH , was looking for a technical manager for the Volkswagenwerk, whom he found in Nordhoff, whom he eventually became the British Control Commission even proposed as the new General Director. The appointment as successor to Hermann Münch took place on November 7, 1947. Münch was only informed of his dismissal on November 25, 1947. During this time he introduced Nordhoff to the company and maintained a "friendly and harmonious cooperation" with him.

From January 1, 1948, Nordhoff was General Director of Volkswagenwerk GmbH . Over the next two decades, the experienced technician expanded the plant to become the top-selling automobile factory in Europe. In his era, the Brazilian VW plant in São Bernardo do Campo , the Mexican VW plant in Puebla and the South African VW plant in Uitenhage were built. In 1952 the construction department of Volkswagenwerk GmbH built a villa in the Steimker Berg district of Wolfsburg , which he lived in until his death.

What is viewed critically about his work is that he stuck to the rear-wheel drive concept of the Beetle for too long and did not allow any marketable alternatives to be developed. While other manufacturers built vehicles with transversely installed in- line engines and front-wheel drive that were more economical in terms of space and finances , the VW range with its air-cooled boxer engines in the rear (e.g. the VW Type 3 and VW Type 4 series ) was based on the at the end of the 1960s KdF car by Ferdinand Porsche in the 1930s. On the other hand, Nordhoff had Volkswagenwerk AG buy Auto Union GmbH in Ingolstadt at the beginning of 1965 , solely for the purpose of producing the Beetle, which was still well-selling at the time, in the local plant. Of course, he had also acquired the technology that his second successor Rudolf Leiding was later able to use to modernize the VW Group's range of vehicles.

In the spring of 1967, Nordhoff presented a range of 36 different prototypes that the development department had constructed in order to then explain: “The Beetle's star shines brightly and you can observe for yourself day after day what vitality is in this car, which one more often than any of those competing models - models that no one remembers today ”. And in another conversation he said: “We are poor and America is rich. Germany should therefore follow where VW is leading - and not the other way around ”.

tomb

Heinrich Nordhoff died on April 12, 1968, Good Friday , at the age of 69 as a result of a heart attack and was first laid out in the technical development department of the Wolfsburg Volkswagen factory so that his workforce could say goodbye to him. On April 18, the funeral service for Nordhoff took place at the Volkswagen factory with 1,700 participants, at which Kurt Schmücker represented the Federal Republic of Germany and Fritz Berg represented the Federation of German Industry . Tens of thousands then gave Nordhoff the final escort when the funeral procession with Nordhoff's coffin drove slowly on an open, converted VW T2 from the Volkswagen factory through Heinrich-Nordhoff-Strasse and Porschestrasse to St.-Christophorus-Kirche , where Bishop Heinrich Maria Janssen celebrated the Requiem for Nordhoff. On the evening of the same day, the burial took place in the Wolfsburg forest cemetery. His grave, which has been preserved to this day, is adorned with a cross-crowned globe made of Swedish granite.

As early as 1955, on the occasion of the production of the 1,000,000th Volkswagen, the City Council of Wolfsburg made him its first honorary citizen . The street on the Mittelland Canal opposite the VW plant - previously Fallersleber Strasse - was renamed after him on the morning of April 18, 1968, as the funeral procession with Nordhoff's coffin passed through this street in the afternoon of the same day. A school in the Westhagen district of Wolfsburg also bears his name.

It was only Nordhoff's successor, Kurt Lotz , who turned away from air cooling and rear-engined engines by taking over NSU Motorenwerke and their fully developed K 70 with water cooling and front-wheel drive and hardly changing the car, but when VW had it manufactured in the Volkswagen factory in Salzgitter built for this purpose from summer 1970 . Financial success was only achieved with the adaptation of Audi technology in the Scirocco and Golf models and the takeover of two complete Audi cars ( Audi 80 as Passat and Audi 50 as Polo ).

Others

On January 17, 1956, Pope Pius XII received him . to a private audience .

In 1957 he was appointed Knight of the Papal Order of Knights of the Holy Sepulcher by Cardinal Grand Master Nicola Cardinal Canali and invested in Cologne on December 7, 1957 by Lorenz Jaeger , Grand Prior of the German Lieutenancy .

In 1959 Ernst Piëch, brother of Ferdinand Piëch and a grandson of Ferdinand Porsche , married Nordhoff's youngest daughter Elisabeth.

Honors

Works

  • Heinz Nordhoff: The management of large companies while taking human problems into account. In: Schweizer Bauzeitung. 73, issue 22, May 28, 1955, ISSN  0251-0960
  • Heinrich Nordhoff: speeches and essays. Evidence of an era . ECON Verlag , Düsseldorf / Vienna / New York / Moscow 1992, ISBN 3-430-17156-3 ( limited preview in the Google book search).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Heinrich Nordhoff . In: Joseph Oppenhoff (Ed.): History of the Catholic Student Association Burgundia in Berlin 1853–1928. sn Aachen, 1928.
  2. ^ Markus Lupa: Change of lane on British orders. The transformation of the Volkswagen factory into a market company 1945–1949. Ed .: Manfred Grieger, Ulrike Gutzmann, Dirk Schlinkert. 1st edition. Volkswagen AG, Wolfsburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-935112-41-3 , p. 121 ff .
  3. ↑ Hans Mommsen , Manfred Grieger: The Volkswagen factory and its workers in the Third Reich. Econ-Verlag, Düsseldorf 1996, p. 974.
  4. ^ Beetles between consumption and cult ( Memento from December 10, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Jerry Sloniger: The VW Story. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-87943-737-8 , p. 170.
  6. ↑ Nordhoff's last way through the factory and town. In: Wolfsburger Nachrichten. Issued April 19, 1968.
personal data
SURNAME Nordhoff, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Hildesheim
DATE OF DEATH April 12, 1968
Place of death Wolfsburg