Word: steeled
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...rule Herr Thyssen became economic dictator of heavy industry, member of the Prussian State Council, a Reichstag member, chairman of a dozen boards. He had no more labor troubles on his hands, since the Nazis suppressed the unions. Rearmament brought millions of marks' worth of orders to the steel mills. The Thyssen empire prospered again...