Background
Werner Otto was born as the son of the retailer Wilhelm Otto and his wife Frieda.
Werner Otto was born as the son of the retailer Wilhelm Otto and his wife Frieda.
He founded Otto GmbH in 1949, which eventually became the world’s largest mail order group. Otto and his family persistently ranked among the wealthiest Germans. After a commercial apprenticeship, he started his own business as a retail merchant in Szczecin.
Because dissemination of leaflets Otto was sentenced in 1934 to two years imprisonment.
The end of the war saw Otto with a head injury in a military hospital. Motto for his life was "Panta rhei" — everything flows.
Otto foundet the mail order company "Otto Versand" (Otto GmbH & Company Knight of the Order of the Garter) in Hamburg on 17 August 1949. In the 1960s he started the Sagitta Group, today"s Park Property, one of the largest real estate companies in Canada.
Through his North American experiences, Werner Otto got the idea to found another enterprise, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Projekt Management GmbH & Company
Knight of the Order of the Garter, which builds and manages shopping malls. Finance and staff, regardless of the company Otto. The Electrical and Computer Engineering is now one of the leading developers, implementers, owners and operators of large commercial real estate in Europe.
Katherina is a filmmaker in New York, Alexander got from his father the real estate company Electrical and Computer Engineering entrusted.
In his range of social causes he founded in 1969 the Werner Otto Foundation, which supports medical research. In 1973, when he was over 60, Werner Otto developed the Paramount Group in New York, to invest in United States. real estate.
At Harvard University he donated a new museum building, the Werner Otto Hall, for the art of German Expressionism, out of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The building has now been demolished as part of a redevelopment project led by Renzo Piano.