Background
Hugo Stinnes was born in Mühlheim on 2 February 1870.
Hugo Stinnes was born in Mühlheim on 2 February 1870.
The prototype of the Ruhr business tycoon who regarded the State as an appendage to his own interests and politics as an extension of economics by other means, Stinnes entered the Reichstag in 1920 as a delegate of the German Volkspartei (People's Party). Stinnes's financial empire included coal mines, coal depots, iron and steel factories, shipping vessels, hotels and newspapers - and he was the leading figure in the Rheinisch-Westfälische Elektrizitätswerk AG, which supplied electricity and gas to many towns in Rhineland-Westphalia.
After his death in Berlin on 10 April 1924, the business conducted by his sons ran into serious difficulties and had to be liquidated, and a new company was formed in 1925 with the Stinnes family retaining a 40 per cent interest. The eldest son, Hugo Stinnes (born 1897), still controlled vast enterprises including coal mines, Rhine and sea shipping lanes, a glass factory, chemical and hydrogenation plants which produced aviation fuel, and engineering industries employing a large work-force that included foreign workers and prisoners of war. It was alleged that Stinnes was one of the chief beneficiaries of the ‘Aryanization' programme introduced by the Nazis after their take-over and there is no doubt that he complied with government directives not to employ Jews in his concerns.
Taken into custody by the British occupation authorities in the summer of 1945, Stinnes’s links with the Nazi Party could not be clearly established. In June 1948 he was freed under the de- Nazihcation law.