Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen

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Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen, 1906

Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen (born July 30, 1878 in Nakskov , † August 12, 1964 in Copenhagen ) was a Danish engineer and industrialist who worked for much of his life in Germany ( German Empire ) . In 1903 he founded the company Rasmussen & Ernst , from which Zschopauer Motorenwerke J. S. Rasmussen AG emerged in 1923 , which with its DKW brand temporarily advanced to become the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world.

family

He was the son of the captain Hans Peder Rasmussen and his second wife Maren Johanne nee. Skafte. Rasmussen's father, Hans Peder, died when Jørgen Skafte was a toddler; he lost his mother at the age of 19.

Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen attended secondary school in Nakskov and probably began an apprenticeship with Smidt, Mygind & Hüttemeier in Copenhagen in 1894 . After his mother's death, he moved to his half-sister in Nykøbing / Falster and continued his apprenticeship at Guldborg . There he completed his training in 1898 and left Denmark immediately afterwards.

Rasmussen with his wife Therese, 1904

From 1898 to 1900 Rasmussen studied mechanical engineering and electrical engineering at the Technikum Mittweida and then switched to the newly founded engineering school in Zwickau . There he passed the engineering exam in 1902. He then probably worked for the Rheinische Metallwaren- & Maschinenfabrik in Düsseldorf , but apparently soon returned to Zwickau. On September 10, 1904, Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen married the merchant's daughter Johanna Clementine Therese Liebe (1884–1973) in Chemnitz.

He left Zschopau in 1938 and bought a property in Sacrow near Potsdam, which the family lived in until 1945. In 1945 he fled to Flensburg with his wife, returned to Denmark in 1947 and lived in Hareskovby from 1948 . After his 75th birthday, he moved to Copenhagen with his wife.

The marriage resulted in four children, the daughter Hildegard Ilse (1905-1939), the sons Hans Werner Skafte (1906-1945), Ove Skafte (1909-1995) and Arne Skafte (1912-1994). Hans Werner and Arne received technical training, Ove studied economics and founded Rasmussen GmbH in 1949 . After completing their training, the children worked in the family's businesses. Hans Werner Rasmussen was arrested by the Soviet occupying forces on June 2, 1945 as managing director of Framo and died on September 21, 1945 in the Toszek internment camp .

Act

With the businessman Carl Ernst, who came from Cologne , Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen founded the company Rasmussen & Ernst (RE) in 1903 , which manufactured and sold steam boiler fittings and metal goods. According to Ove Rasmussen , the foundation of the company, which had its first headquarters in the Am Markt 15 building in Chemnitz , was financed by a Swiss man named Keller, whom his father met while traveling by train. In the year it was founded, Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen applied for his first utility model for a turning tool holder. In 1904 Carl Ernst left the company. After his departure, Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen and the company moved into new rooms in the Alte Kunsthütte at Annaberger Straße 25 in Chemnitz. He mainly produced accessories for steam engines and registered numerous inventions from 1906, including a grater for field crops, a knife and fork cleaning machine and an acetylene oxygen burner for headlights. In 1907 he received his first patent with the number DRP 190 137. It concerned a centrifugal machine for de-oiling and drying textiles, which was used as a cleaning agent . A second patent was granted to Rasmussen in 1915. Numerous utility models were also registered for him. Rasmussen was particularly successful with its high-pressure blow-down valves, a feed water cleaner and oil cleaning devices. In 1913 he advertised that the Imperator , the largest German passenger steamer at the time, was equipped with Rasmussen exhaust steam separators.

In 1906 Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen bought the disused Barth'sche cloth factory in the Tischau valley in Zschopau in order to expand production there. Because the textile industry that dominated the region suffered from a crisis, Rasmussen was able to recruit enough factory workers in and around Zschopau. On April 13, 1907, Rasmussen had his company entered in the commercial register at the district court in Zschopau under the name Rasmussen & Ernst . Household and workshop equipment, fenders, vehicle lighting, exhaust steam separators for steam power plants, vulcanizing equipment and centrifuges were manufactured.

In 1912 Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen founded the Zschopauer machine factory JS Rasmussen and continued to run the company on his own. The Rasmussen & Ernst company existed until 1953.

Rasmussen on an exhibition board of the Framo Museum in Frankenberg with the reference to the establishment of his own factory in 1923

During the First World War , the company produced a. a. Primers and grenade detonators and led the experiments carried out since 1912 with D ampf k raft w recite on, the Danish engineer Svend Aage Mathiesen ran. In Zschopau, he was supposed to set up the series production of steam vehicles based on the Rollin H. Whites model . At least two prototypes were made in 1916.

After the end of the war, Rasmussen gave up work on the steam-powered vehicles and turned to internal combustion engines. The engineer Emil Fischer and the two-stroke pioneer Hugo Ruppe further developed a two-stroke engine for him , which was designed as a toy, as a bicycle auxiliary engine. However, Bosch did not want to manufacture the flywheel ignition system in Stuttgart, so Rasmussen and Richard Blau founded Rota Magnet-Apparatebau GmbH in 1919 in Zschopau . After he presented a 1 HP auxiliary motor for bicycles at the Leipzig Trade Fair in 1919, there were soon numerous imitators; As early as 1921, 20 companies were offering auxiliary bicycles. From 1921, Rasmussen produced bicycles with auxiliary motors - popularly known as Arschwärmer - in series and sold them very successfully under the slogan “ DKW , the little wonder, goes uphill like others downhill!”. In 1919 Bruno Cavani in Bologna became the first DKW representative outside Germany. In 1921 Rasmussen made his first trip to the USA. Then he introduced assembly line production in his company.

In 1919 Rasmussen got to know the small electric vehicle from SB-Automobil-Gesellschaft mbH in Berlin-Charlottenburg . Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen bought 100 of the vehicles with a self-supporting body made of triplex plastic. The collaboration led to Rasmussen joining the company as a partner. The company sold vehicles in large numbers in the following years. After an earthquake in Japan in 1923 and inflation-related difficulties, this company ran into trouble. Rasmussen supported the company and also had small cars with DKW petrol engines manufactured. Emil Fischer constructed a cycle car in Zschopau called “The Little Mountain Climber”. That did not prevent bankruptcy in June 1924. A total of vehicles were produced in 2005, 266 of them with DKW engines. Rasmussen took over the bankruptcy estate and added it to his group as JS Rasmussen AG, Berlin branch , and had electric trucks and delivery vans produced there. In 1926 the company moved to the newly established branch of Zschopauer Motorenwerke J. S. Rasmussen AG in Berlin-Spandau. From 1928 the two-seater DKW Type P with a self-supporting wooden body and DKW two-cylinder two-stroke engine were produced there under the direction of Rudolf Slaby .

From 1921 he built the so-called chair wheels Golem and the successor Lomos , both without great success. In 1922, the engineer Hermann Weber constructed a light motorcycle with a single-cylinder two-stroke engine with a displacement of 148 cm³. It reached speeds of up to 65 km / h. This vehicle was later named after the won ADAC Reichsfahrt Reichsfahrtmodell . From 1921, the Austrian Carl Hahn took care of the establishment of a dealer network . Immediately after the introduction of the Rentenmark at the end of the hyperinflation period , Zschopauer Motorenwerke J. S. Rasmussen AG was founded on December 22, 1923 with Rasmussen as the main shareholder. After the beginning of the economic upswing, Rasmussen increased motorcycle production considerably from 1924 with the DKW model SM as the technical basis and in 1927 with the model E 200 reduced to 200 cm³. By the end of 1927, 100,000 motorcycles had been produced. In 1936, 34.6% of all motorcycles registered in the German Reich were from DKW.

To manufacture motorcycle fittings, screws and turned parts, Rasmussen founded the Zöblitz metal works in 1922 , to which the Marienberg and Hüttengrund factories were added in 1924 . The metal works in Frankenberg / Saxony , which were converted into Framo-Werke GmbH in 1934 , emerged from a former saddle factory . In the mid-1920s, Rasmussen bought the Scharfenstein plant from the Chemnitz mechanical engineering company Moll . The subsidiary Deutsche Kühl- und Kraftmaschinen GmbH (DKK) emerged from this in 1931 . In 1927/28 Nestler  &  Breitfeld  AG followed with Eisenwerk Erla , from which Eisen- und Flugzeugwerk Erla GmbH emerged in 1933 , Schüttoff A.-G. in Chemnitz and Audiwerke AG Zwickau . In 1926 he also took a stake in the Berlin machine works Prometheus GmbH , Elcamo-Motor-Aggregatebau GmbH and the Annaberg iron foundry.

Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen's group of companies grew from a medium-sized company to a group within a few years. After 1928, the Zschopauer Motorenwerke became the largest manufacturer in the world with their DKW motorcycles. Up to 300 motorcycles and 350 engines were produced every day. Rasmussen went into debt on a large scale. In 1935, the director of Commerzbank Friedrich von Au certified him “a considerable portion of superficiality”. From 1931 DKW front cars were produced at Audi in Zwickau , while the branch in Berlin-Spandau built the DKW models with rear-wheel drive . The Luma works in Stuttgart, founded in 1930, produced the DKW “Dynastart” generators . Auto Union later bought the Luma plant, relocated it together with the Zschopauer Rota-Apparatebau to the former Schüttoff plant in Chemnitz Rößlerstraße and from 1934 expanded this plant into the main supplier for the electrotechnical equipment of all vehicles of the Auto Union group .

Rasmussen was involved in new technologies: in 1929 he was the first in Europe to introduce a household refrigerator , which became a household name as "DKW cooling". The subsidiary Deutsche Kühl- und Kältemaschinen GmbH (later DKK Scharfenstein ) manufactured cooling technology for homes and businesses.

The Great Depression of 1929 also hit Rasmussen's company hard. On the initiative of the Sächsische Staatsbank , which had financed the expansion of the plants as the house bank, the Zschopauer Motorenwerke with its subsidiary Audiwerke AG Zwickau , the Horchwerke AG (also Zwickau) and the Automobilwerk Siegmar der Wanderer- The plants in Schönau near Chemnitz merged to form Auto Union AG, Chemnitz . The main administration was housed in the DKW factory in Zschopau until 1936 and Rasmussen was appointed a member of the board, but by the end of 1934 differences with other board members led to his dismissal from the board. After several years of disputes with the company, he received a severance payment totaling 1.3 million Reichsmarks from Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner at the start of 1938 on Adolf Hitler's instructions , which, adjusted for inflation, corresponds to around 5,600,000 euros in today's currency.

In the 1950s he built in collaboration with the Confederation of Danish Industries Syndicate A / S Motorcycles under the name DISA .

Awards

The Institute for Production Technology at the West Saxon University of Applied Sciences in Zwickau has been awarding the Rasmussen Prize for the best thesis of the year in the field of production technology every year since 2007. The buildings of the Faculty of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering, to which the institute belongs, were named after Rasmussen.

literature

  • Jan-Peter Domschke among others: Mittweida's engineers all over the world . University of Applied Sciences Mittweida (ed.), Mittweida 2014
  • Peter Kirchberg: Auto-Union Grand Prix Report: 1934 - 1939 . Motorbuch, Stuttgart 1982, ISBN 3-87943-876-5
  • Peter Kirchberg, Paul Gränz: Ancestors of our cars - a technical history documentation . Transpress-Verlag, Berlin 1981. (without ISBN)
  • Steffen Ottinger: DKW Motorradsport 1920–1939 - from the first victories of the Zschopau two-stroke engine in track races to European championship successes . HB-Werbung und Verlag, Chemnitz 2009, ISBN 978-3-00-028611-7
  • Hans Christoph Graf von Seherr-Thoß:  Rasmussen, Jörgen Skafte. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 162 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Immo Sievers: Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen. Life and work of the DKW founder , Delius Klasing, Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 3-7688-1828-4 .

Web links

Commons : Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen  - collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sievers 2006, pp. 13 and 16 f.
  2. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 16 f.
  3. ^ Hans Christoph Graf von Seherr-Thoß: Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen . In: Neue Deutsche Biografie (NDB), Vol. 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , pp. 162 f. From: deutsche-biographie.de, accessed on May 14, 2017
  4. ↑ Barbara Supp: The time of the ghosts . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1996 ( online - about the forgotten dead of the Soviet prison camp Tost in Silesia).
  5. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 29
  6. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 26
  7. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 47
  8. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 49
  9. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 32
  10. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 65
  11. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 74
  12. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 88 f.
  13. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 95
  14. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 92 f.
  15. ↑ Sievers 2006, p. 94
  16. ↑ The amount was based on the template: Inflation determined, has been rounded to a full 100,000 euros and relates to last January.
personal data
SURNAME Rasmussen, Jørgen Skafte
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish engineer and industrialist
DATE OF BIRTH July 30, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Nakskov , Denmark
DATE OF DEATH August 12, 1964
Place of death Copenhagen