Fritz Thyssen

Friedrich "Fritz" Thyssen (9 November 1873 – 8 February 1951) was a German businessman, born into one of Germany's leading industrial families. He was an early supporter of the Nazi Party but later broke with it. Biography Youth Thyssen was born in Mülheim in the Ruhr area. His father, August, was head of the Thyssen mining and steelmaking company, founded by his father Friedrich and based in the Ruhr city of Duisburg. Friedrich studied mining and metallurgy in London, Liège, and Berlin, and after a short period in the German Army, joined the family business. On 18 January 1900 in Düsseldorf he married Amelie Helle or Zurhelle (Mülheim am Rhein, 11 December 1877 – Puchdorf bei Straubing, 25 August 1965), daughter of a factory owner. Their only child, Anna (Anita; later Anita Gräfin Zichy-Thyssen), was born in 1909. Thyssen again joined the army in 1914, but was soon discharged on account of a lung condition. Weimar Germany Thyssen was a German nationalist who supported Nazism, believing that limited government control of production and ownership of banking and transportation was a means of preventing the spread of full-fledged communism. In 1923, when French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr to punish Germany for not meeting its reparations payments in full, he took part in the nationalist resistance against the occupiers, leading the Ruhr steelmakers in refusing to co-operate in producing coal and steel for them. He was arrested, imprisoned and received a large fine for his activities, which made him a national hero. Through the 1920s, the Thyssen companies continued to expand. Thyssen took over the Thyssen companies on his father's death in 1926, and that same year he formed United Steelworks (Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG), controlling more than 75 percent of Germany's iron ore reserves and employing 200,000 people. He played a prominent role in German commercial life, as head of the German Iron and Steel Industry Association and the Reich Association of German Industry, and as a board member of the Reichsbank.