Alfred Teves

Alfred Teves (27 January 1868 – 5 November 1953) was a German ship's captain who after a short naval career from 1898 reinvented himself as an auto industry entrepreneur. The "Alfred Teves Maschinen- und Armaturenfabrik" company became one of the largest suppliers of components and sub-assemblies to the German auto-industry. It was rebranded during the early 1920s, more succinctly, as "ATE".

Life

Provenance and early years Alfred Teves was born in Trittau, a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, located some 30 km (20 miles) east of Hamburg. Friedrich Wilhelm Teves (1814–1871), his father, who died while he was still a small child, was a local government official. ).

Between 1877 and 1883 Alfred Teves attended for the prestigious "Katharineum" (secondary school) and the "Großheim’schen Realschule" (secondary school) in the nearby city of Lübeck and then switched to a specialist sea-faring school in Steinwerder, emerging qualified for work as a helmsman. He went to sea in 1885, employed at different stages as a second officer and, after acquiring the necessary additional qualifications at the Royal Navigation College in Altona, as a ship's captain, both on sailing ships and steam ships. Like many auto-industry executives at the dawn of the motoring age, Teves participated in a number of automobile races during the early part of the twentieth century.

Car parts entrepreneur In October 1906 Alfred Teves set up his own business, still in Frankfurt. "Alfred Teves, Automobil-Technisches Material und Zubehörteile" was a distributor for automobile equipment and accessories. Not for the last time, Teves' timing was impeccable. Automobile manufacturing was undergoing a phase of rapid expansion, and Frankfurt was a major centre of industrial and commercial opportunity. The business flourished. It continued to prosper under the same name till 1925, although it was far from the only business with which Teves would involve himself through that eventful period.

In December 1909 Teves teamed up with his friend the engineer Matthäus Braun, who moved across from the Stuttgart-based "Süddeutsche Kühlerfabrik Julius Fr. Behr" to establish the "Mitteldeutsche Kühlerfabrik" ("Central Germany Radiator Factory") in Stuttgart. The factory started off with a workforce of 120, and was soon manufacturing radiators not just for automobiles but also for aeroplanes. By this time the focus of the Teves businesses was on manufacturing rather than on wholesaling or retailing the product of other suppliers. It was also in 1911 that Teves purchased a workshop for the manufacture of manual compression adjustment valves . This factory was relaunched in 1912 and rebranded as the "Alfred Teves Maschinen- und Armaturenfabrik". During the war that broke out two years later this factory, under the capable direction of Chief Engineer Nathan Sally Stern (1879– 1975) whom Teves knew from Adlerwerke AG, would be modified to produce fuses and cartridges for munitions, along with various associated precision components. The war years were a period of rapid expansion for the factory, which became by 1918 one of the principal manufacturing businesses in Frankfurt, with approximately 2,000 people on the payroll.

An end to the good times In 1928, for the first time, the German auto industry produced more than 100,000 passenger cars. It would be another six years before that level of output would be exceeded. The Wall Street crash of 1929 was followed by a return to acute economic austerity and a collapse in consumer demand during the Great Depression, as unemployment peaked in 1932 at well above five million. The auto-industry was particularly badly hit. Brennabor, which is believed to have been Germany's largest auto-producer in the middle 1920s, saw its business collapse at the end of the decade and would never return to volume production. The Teves industrial empire emerged from the economic carnage relatively unscathed, and Alfred Teves himself by this time enjoyed a reputation for a singular combination of entrepreneurial flair and prescience which he would retain through the difficult years that followed. Despite the success of his diversification into refrigeration technology, car parts remained at the heart of the Teves business empire, which shared in the auto-sector recovery. In 1934 a substantial new manufacturing facility was set up in Berlin under the leadership of Alfred Teves' eldest son, Heinz Wilhelm Teves (1906–1978). In 1939 a large plant to produce refrigeration products was erected at Frankfurt-Fechenheim. In or before 1939 Teves accepted the designation of "Wehrwirtschaftsführer", a title conferred by government on senior businessmen responsible for factories which might be converted for production of armaments and munitions in the event of war preparations becoming necessary.

Over the next couple of years the German auto-industry was transformed for war production. Although the exercise lacked the pre-planned slick efficiency of the equivalent process in England, by 1942 virtually no passenger cars were being produced in Germany. The Teves factories that had produced car components were switched to war production, which seems to have involved aircraft engine components, although there is a surprising shortage of detail available as to precisely what was produced. The plants producing refrigeration equipment were now producing air conditioning systems for research facilities and testing rooms and for bomb shelters. As the war progressed there was an increasing call for more elaborate air conditioning systems to process the air in underground communications centres and command centres. There were also freezer compartments to be installed in submarines. During 1942 the government's racist strategy became more systematic. The scale and brutality of the antisemitism greatly intensified. A recent study by Paul Erker of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München reports a hitherto little known episode: Alfred Teves was warned that he must fire his Jewish employees or he would not be permitted to display the banners of the government mandated German Labour Front in his factory. Teves is reported to have exploded: "You can hang your rags wherever you want. I will not do it." In 1940 Alfred Teves was forced by the government to surrender control of his business to his younger son, Ernst. In 1942 the business lost its legal status as a limited liability company (GmbH), becoming instead a "Limited Partnership" ("Kommanditgesellschaft"/ KG).

As a high-profile "Wehrwirtschaftsführer", Alfred Teves came under pressure to join the party, and his membership application was submitted in 1939. In 1941, slightly unusually, he was still listed as a "Parteianwärter" (loosely, candidate for party membership). There is no indication that his membership application was ever progressed further, and following publication in 2020 of the results of detailed archival study undertaken by Paul Erker, it has become possible to assert that neither Teves nor his sons ever joined Hitler's National Socialist Party.

After the war In May 1945 war ended in military defeat. The eastern third of Germany was subsumed into a reconfigured version of Poland, while the western two thirds were divided into zones of military occupation, administered respectively by the Americans, the Soviets, the British and the French. The Teves plants in the Frankfurt conurbation were subject to administration by the U.S. army while the Berlin plant was under Soviet military administration. A small subsidiary plant which had been set up at Brombach (Lörrach) near Basel during the closing months of the war in order to avoid the savage aerial bombing of Frankfurt during 1944/45 was now in the French zone, which was hermetically sealed off from the adjoining American zone.

Directly after the war the assets of Alfred Teves KG were sequestered by the military administrators representing the occupying powers. It was only after the so-called "Spruchkammer" had determined that Alfred Teves had been merely a "Mitläufer" ("fellow-traveller" of the Hitler regime) – in other words, not a committed Nazi – that in 1947 Teves was able formally to resume his position at the head of the company's board.

Car parts production continued to expand and diversify through the "Wirtschaftswunder" years. In addition, during 1953/54 the Fechenheim plant, now known as "Ate-Haushaltskühlschrank", began production of domestic refrigerators. Whether by luck or judgement the firm's timing was, not for the first time, perfect, as over the next few years domestic refrigerators became "normal" features of domestic kitchens across virtually the entire spread of household incomes. During the 1960s the pace of economic recovery slowed, however, and in 1967, during a period of consolidation the business was acquired by the "International Standard Electric Corporation", a subsidiary of the U.S. based International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation. Slightly more than three decades later, in 1998, it was sold on to Continental AG of Hanover and rebranded as "Continental Teves AG & Co. oHG".