Martin Mende

Martin Mende (born December 30, 1898 in Dresden ; † February 14, 1982 in Bremen ) was a German entrepreneur in the broadcasting industry.

biography

Mende was the son of a wood sculptor. In 1920 he became a partner in an electrical appliance company. Soon afterwards he switched to the radio equipment factory Radio H. Mende & Co. in Dresden, a company owned by his uncle Otto Hermann Mende (1885–1940). He became the head of this company. The plant was destroyed in the Second World War .

Mende moved to Bremen. After the war he began to build up the new company Norddeutsche Mende Rundfunk GmbH, Bremen, in 1947 . Since the GDR opposed the use of the company name Mende, the name Nordmende or Radio Mende was used in West Germany from 1945 . At the end of the 1950s, the company was renamed Norddeutsche Mende Rundfunk KG . The factory produced in the former halls of the Focke-Wulf aircraft works on Diedrich-Wilkens-Strasse in Bremen- Hemelingen . In the post-war period, Nordmende was one of the leading German manufacturers of radios, televisions, tape recorders and record players. In 1948, the first was radio , in 1953, the first TV and 1967, the first color television. In 1969 Mendes sons took over the management of the company.

The deteriorating earnings situation was the reason that the family sold shares in the company to the French Thomson Brandt group in 1977 . In 1978 the remaining shares were also sold. A closure of the Bremen plant by Thomson initially failed due to resistance from the employees and the Bremen Senate . The Bremen plant became the headquarters for color television assembly in the early 1980s, until it was closed in the late 1980s.

literature

• Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .