Reinhold Becker (entrepreneur)

This article deals with the entrepreneur Reinhold Becker, for the swimmer of the same name see Reinhold Becker (swimmer) .

Reinhold Becker (born February 15, 1866 in Hagen ; † February 1, 1924 in Meerbusch ) was a German entrepreneur and manager .

After various activities in the steel industry and in the pig iron association, Becker was the commercial director of Krefelder Stahlwerk AG from 1903 to 1908 , which manufactured high-quality steels for mechanical engineering and tool production in Krefeld-Fischeln . It was under the influence of several large mining companies, including Klöckner , Thyssen and Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks-AG , Becker was appointed at the suggestion of August Thyssen .

In 1908 Becker founded his own company, Stahlwerke Becker AG , together with his brothers Wilhelm Becker and Julius Becker , which he managed as CEO (General Director). The company was headquartered in Krefeld , and an extensive steel and rolling mill was built in Willich , which was supplemented by its own iron and steel works, called Reinholdhütte , at the Rheinhafen in Uerdingen from 1913 . As subsidiaries z. B. the Becker Steel Company of America in Charleston (West Virginia) , which was expropriated in 1919, and the Industrielle Bankgesellschaft mbH in Düsseldorf . In addition, a tungsten and tin mine in the Ore Mountains was attached to the company. The Becker cannon was developed in 1914 .

Not least because of the armaments requirement of the First World War, the enormous investments in the newly built production facilities brought returns relatively quickly. The commercial success was also reflected in the fact that in the middle of the war in 1916, Becker acquired a twelve-hectare property north of the garden city of Meererbusch and had it built with a mansion that was extraordinarily representative even by the standards of the mining industry . The Senate of the Technical University of Aachen awarded Reinhold Becker an honorary doctorate in 1917 (as Dr.-Ing.Eh ) in recognition of his outstanding services to the development and promotion of the manufacture of high-speed steel and the extraction of tungsten metal, which was very important in the interests of war .

After the end of the war and arms production ceased, the company's situation became more difficult. In order to secure the energy supply, Reinhold Becker acquired the Bochumer Bergbau-AG with the mines " President " in Bochum and " Herbeder Steinkohlenbergwerke " in Witten in 1919 and a year later the lignite mine "Colonia" near Brühl .

After Becker's death, the company, which was tailor-made for him, finally got into trouble, and from May 1924 to February 1925 it was under business supervision. In November 1924, a redevelopment concept was decided upon, after which the initially shut down plants could resume operations. The holdings and subsidiaries were sold, and Becker's manor was up for auction.

literature

• Reinhold Becker. In: German business leaders. Weltbühne publishing house, Berlin 1924, pp. 117–125. (first published as an essay in the Weltbühne 1922; online version , accessed on September 7, 2013)
• Handbook of German stock corporations , 30th edition 1925, Volume 1, pp. 598-560.
• Conrad Matschoss : men of technology. Berlin 1925, p. 16. ( Excerpt from p. 16–21 as PDF)
• Stahl und Eisen , 94th year 1974, p. 26 f.
• Frank Morgner: House Marein in the garden city of Meererbusch. In: Meerbuscher Geschichtshefte , Heft 2 (1985), p. 44 ff.
• Axel Föhl: The great Gatsby of the steel industry or a steelworks - as big as the Ritz. In: Andreas Beyer, Vittorio M. Lampugnani, Gunter Schweikhart (eds.): Abundance. Festschrift for Tilmann Buddensieg. Alfter, VDG 1993, ISBN 3-929742-06-3 , pp. 219-230.

Web links

• Literature by and about Reinhold Becker in the catalog of the German National Library
• Early documents and newspaper articles on Stahlwerk Becker AG in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• History of the company Stahlwerk Becker AG , last accessed on March 7, 2018

Individual evidence

1. ^ US gets secret of German steel. In: New York Times, July 19, 1918.
2. ↑ Automobiltechnische Zeitschrift , Volume 20, 1917, p. 158.
3. ↑ Christoph Reichmann among others: History of the city of Willich and its old communities. Willicher Kulturstiftung, Willich 2003, ISBN 9783933969347 , p. 538.