Wolfgang Reuter (industrialist)

Wolfgang Reuter (born May 26, 1924 in Wittlaer near Düsseldorf ) is a German industrialist and the last general director of Deutsche Maschinenbau Aktiengesellschaft (DEMAG) .

Römerhof (Wittlaer district)

Life

As the son of Hans Reuter , Wolfgang Reuter grew up in what was then the village of Wittlaer, a current district of Düsseldorf, on the Römerhof , which his grandfather Wolfgang Andreas Reuter had built as a family seat.

Although Reuter actually wanted to become a ship officer, after graduating from high school , his father first urged him to go on a training tour through the various areas of the family company, in which the son should gradually prove himself from the commercial assistant to the manager. Drafted during the war , Reuter had been in unprivileged service as a simple tank hunter since 1942 and was taken prisoner as a corporal in 1945 . After his release, he completed a commercial apprenticeship at the Cologne steel company Otto Wolf , as the Allies refused him an apprenticeship in the DEMAG group. According to another version, he was not admitted to university because of his leading position with the Jungvolk or the Hitler Youth .

Act

Reuter's father had been arrested by the Gestapo for sabotage shortly before the end of the war , because he had refused to carry out the order to blow up his industrial facilities when the Allies approached. The latter released him from Gestapo custody, but as a former military economist , took him back into custody, which he served in the internment camp of the British military secret service in Bad Nenndorf . After completing his apprenticeship, son Wolfgang initially worked in the export department of DEMAG.

After extensive stays abroad and work assignments in Italy, Sweden, England, South America and India, where Reuter helped build the Rourkela steelworks in 1954 , he urged his return to Germany in 1956: "I want to go back to Germany, otherwise I will miss the boat". His father placed him in the finance department of DEMAG as an assistant with the title of authorized signatory and gave him entrepreneurship lessons every evening. When his father left in 1962, Wolfgang was appointed to the Group's board of directors. In 1964 he took over the metallurgical division and was appointed general director and chairman of the board of the DEMAG group in 1967 .

As the new DEMAG boss, Reuter initially pursued a sharp expansion course, which indeed led to a doubling of the group's annual sales, but which in the long term was associated with falling earnings. While DEMAG had a profit of DM 4.30 out of DM 100.00 sales in 1969 , two years later it was only DM 1.40. In the same period, the company's debts increased three and a half times, from DM 134 million to 479 million. Since 1972, Mannesmann AG has therefore quietly bought a good 30 percent of DEMAG shares and increased its stake to over 50 percent in the following years. Wolfgang Reuter finally resigned and sold the proportionate share capital of the family (at last around 10 percent) to the new parent company. In 1974 DEMAG AG was integrated into the Mannesmann Group, one year later Reuter resigned from the DEMAG management board and switched to the supervisory board, of which he remained a member until the end of 1979. After that he was no longer active in business.

family

Wolfgang Reuter, son of the couple Hans Reuter and Helga, b. Gran, is married to Christa Reuter. You have three children.

literature

• Horst A. Wessel : Continuity in Transition: 100 Years of Mannesmann 1890–1990 . Mannesmann AG, Düsseldorf 1990
• ders .: Mannesmann-Demag AG Duisburg in: Duisburger Forschung 43 (1994), pp. 69-97

Web links

• Manager - DEMAG - Der Spiegel No. 31 (1967)
• Reuter, Wolfgang Munzinger Archive

Individual evidence

1. ↑ DEMAG: Serving and Earning , Der Spiegel No. 31 (July 24, 1967) p. 54