Meter did not return any assign values

Sunday 24 July 2016


Berthold Beitz

Berthold Beitz, who has died aged 99, was a leading figure in Germany’s post-war industrial revival and one of the few Germans (another was Oskar Schindler) to be honoured at the Holocaust memorial in Israel.

Bertold Beitz
Image 1 of 2
Bertold Beitz Photo: ALAMY
Bertold Beitz
Image 1 of 2
Bertold Beitz (right) with Alfried Krupp Photo: TIME&LIFE PICTURES/GETTY

In the 1950s Beitz was brought in to manage the Krupp steel company, which had been heavily involved in weapons production during the war. He remained a leading force in the company for some 60 years, overseeing its merger with Thyssen in 1999 to form ThyssenKrupp, a company that came to be seen as a symbol of Germany’s technological preeminence.

Beitz liked to call himself “the last of the steel barons”, and with his natty suits, his autocratic air and ability to switch in an instant from chilly and overbearing to warm and charming, he certainly fitted the role. Many Germans criticised him for his pride, but then he had plenty to be proud about.

An oil executive in Germany before the Second World War, during the conflict Beitz was sent to manage an oil company at Boryslav, in occupied Poland (now part of Ukraine), becoming, effectively, head of oil supplies in the region. Throughout the war he is credited with protecting hundreds of Jewish workers from deportation to concentration camps by inventing jobs he claimed were essential to the war effort.

Together with his wife Else, he also hid dozens of Jews in the cellar of their family home and warned others of impending deportation. According to the website of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, in August 1942 he extricated 250 Jewish men and women from the transport train to the Belzec extermination camp by claiming he needed them as “professional workers”. On one occasion he was arrested and questioned but, thanks to a school friend in the Gestapo, was released.

In 1973 Beitz was recognised as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial — the highest honour given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

“My motives were not political, they were purely humane, moral motives,’’ Beitz explained later. “We watched from morning to evening as close as you can get what was happening to the Jews in Boryslav. When you see a woman with her child in her arms being shot, and you yourself have a child, then your response is bound to be completely different.” He would not have been able to live with himself, he said, if he had not tried to help: “It was a duty to our heart. It might sound pathetic, but these were our feelings as we were confronted daily with the misfortune.”

The son of a former Army officer and bank clerk, Berthold Beitz was born on September 26 1913 in Zemmin in the eastern part of Germany (now Ciemino, Poland), and began his career in Hamburg, where he joined the Shell Oil Company in 1938 after getting bored with an apprenticeship in banking. In early 1940 he was assigned to supervise the Boryslav oilfields that had fallen into German hands with the invasion of south-east Poland.

After the war Beitz became president of Iduna, Germany’s 16th largest insurance company. There, using methods that were unusual at the time, such as bonuses and competitions, he expanded the company into the third-largest group in the industry.

In 1952 he caught the eye of Alfried Krupp, then 45, the sole owner of the Krupp steel company, who had recently left prison after serving part of a 12-year sentence for war crimes to resume control of his conflict-ravaged steel empire. Krupp needed someone with an unblemished reputation to rebrand the business and restore a sense of purpose in its demoralised workforce. Though he continued as owner, Krupp made Beitz his personal representative and company chairman.

Beitz employed his unconventional approach to management to reorganise Krupp and rebuild its vast markets. In particular, his reputation gained him the confidence of Eastern European leaders, enabling him to help West Germany renew business and diplomatic ties severed by the war. In 1960, for example, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer sent him on a mission to explore the possibilities of restoring diplomatic ties with Poland. The ties were not resumed until 10 years later, but Beitz was credited with making the first, crucial contact.

In one of his greatest coups, against stiff international competition, he landed Krupp one of the largest Cold War contracts ever signed — a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars — to build steel mills in the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s Beitz was one of the first to note a growing worry in Moscow that the lure of Western trade, and higher living standards, could nurture longings for independence among its smaller allies. “Years ago, my grandparents used a brood hen to hatch duck eggs,” he recalled. “She viewed them as her own. But then they started to swim and the hen ran up and down the water’s edge. She couldn’t swim but she tried to get them back. After all, they were her chicks. The comparison may be primitive, but it’s as though the chicks were swimming away.”

Though Krupp continued to manufacture munitions, under Beitz’s leadership it became a diversified conglomerate, producing everything from microcomputers to ready-to-use steel plants. He used his control to wield considerable power, including bringing in outsiders when the company needed cash. During the European steel crisis in 1974, he was instrumental in persuading Iran to buy a stake in the company to bolster its finances. In the 1980s he negotiated a merger of its steel unit with Klöckner-Werke, another German steel company.

Before his death in 1967 Alfried Krupp had wanted to make his son Arndt his successor. However, when Arndt unexpectedly renounced his inheritance, Alfried turned to Beitz, making him executor of his will. In 1968 Beitz was named chairman of the Board of Trustees of the new Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation, a non-profit organisation to which Krupp had transferred the entire family holdings — and which now owns 25.3 per cent of ThyssenKrupp.

With Krupp’s fortune, Beitz embarked on a huge range of philanthropic ventures, worth around 615 million euros to date, including projects in Israel, and invested heavily in the arts and the revitalisation of the Ruhr Valley region.

He also served as a member of the International Olympic Committee from 1972 to 1988, the last four years as an IOC Vice-President. He was a member of the board of directors of the organising committee for the 1972 Olympics in Munich, games which were overshadowed by the deaths of 11 members of the Israeli squad in an attack by Palestinian terrorists.

Beitz remained a dominant figure in the business into his 90s and continued to travel to his office every day until shortly before his death. In 2010 the decision to move the headquarters of ThyssenKrupp to Essen, where the former Krupp company was born 195 years ago, was seen as a personal triumph.

Yet by the time of his death many felt that he had overstayed his welcome. Earlier this year a botched expansion in the Americas and bribery and price-fixing scandals pushed ThyssenKrupp to a 4.7 billion euro annual loss. As head of the Alfried Krupp foundation, Beitz was regarded as a symbol of the lax corporate governance that was blamed for the crisis. Yet, despite being described as a “totalitarian” and a “fossil”, Beitz showed no inclination to step aside from what he described as his personal mission. In an interview with Sueddeutsche Zeitung in March the 99-year-old steel baron insisted that he would “continue as long as I can”.

Berthold Beitz is survived by his wife, whom he married in 1939, and by their three daughters.

Berthold Beitz, born September 26 1913, died July 30 2013


More from the web


More from the web

Most-read Obituaries

More from the web

Back to top

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2016

Terms and Conditions

Today's News


Style Book

Weather Forecast