Foreign News: Daddy's End

In the 1860s August Thyssen (pronounced tissen) started his steel business in a cow house outside Mulheim, in the Ruhr Valley, making hoop-iron at first. In 50 years he came to own coal fields in the Ruhr and iron-ore concessions in Lorraine and Northern France, and to employ 25,000 workers. When he died in 1926 at 84 he left an estate worth more than $100,000,000.

Miserly, always shabbily dressed, old August Thyssen used to drink beer and eat wurst with his workers. Consistently he kept away from politicians and society, and when it was suggested that he appear at the German Imperial Court he replied that he had no suitable clothes for such an occasion.

Of his three sons, two were disappointments. Heinrich, the eldest, married a Hungarian noblewoman, was made a baron of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire by Emperor Franz Josef, and thereafter showed more interest in collecting art than in making steel. At 60 he divorced his Baroness and married a Berlin mannequin, who was later severely injured in the motor accident in which Prince Serge Mdivani, ex-husband of Woolworth Heiress Barbara Hutton, was killed. The youngest, August Jr., became embittered at his father and had visions of founding an industrial empire of his own. Father August ran Son August into bankruptcy, and the son retaliated by contributing to the funds of striking workers at his father's plant.

But Fritz, the second son, buckled down, learned the steel business, eventually became sole manager of his father's empire. During World War I the Thyssen works boomed, Thyssen the Younger turned tough as his dad when the French occupied the Ruhr in 1921 and began issuing demands to German industrialists. Fritz Thyssen refused to obey, was hauled before a French court-martial, was tried and imprisoned for a short time. Thereafter he was a strident nationalist, consistently anti-French. Instead of accepting with resignation the Weimar Republic, which accepted the Versailles Treaty, he put his money for a time on the reactionary Stahlhelm veterans' organization, which was bent on restoring the monarchy.

In 1926, the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the gigantic German steel trust, was formed. Herr Thyssen headed this organization, which controlled 75% of Germany's iron-ore production and 50% of coal-mine output and which listed among its properties 33,000 acres of mines and factories, a 1,200-mile railway system, 14 private ports, 209 electric power stations, numerous cement factories, and tenements housing 60,000 employes' families. His total number of employes rose to 200,000. Fritz Thyssen's personal share of the property was 26%, valued at some $350,000,000.

But the rising social consciousness of Republican Germany, bringing with it legislation for providing better wages at fewer hours, ate heavily into the Thyssen profits. Depression began, and not only did Herr Thyssen see that the "Socialists are our great enemies," but he also saw the need for an armaments race if his business was to be saved. About that time he became the first big industrialist to believe that a young, up-&-coming agitator named Adolf Hitler was fundamentally safe & sound for Big Business, that the National Socialism which Herr Hitler preached would freeze the status quo, protect the haves from the havenots.