Hans Gustav Röhr

Hans Gustav Röhr (10 February 1895 – 10 August 1937) was a German aviation pioneer. After the First World War international treaty obligations imposed on Germany made this impossible and he applied his talents to automobiles. In 1926 he founded his own automobile manufacturing business, but this succumbed to bankruptcy in 1931. After that he worked for Adler. Here his responsibilities included design and development of new models. One of the cars he designed and developed, launched in 1932, was the Adler Trumpf which was both technologically innovative and successful commercially. He moved, as Technical Director, to Daimler-Benz in 1935, but his career was cut short by Pneumonia to which he succumbed, according to at least one report, after a drive in an open-topped car, and as a result of which he died.

Biography Provenance and early years Hans Gustav Röhr was born at Uerdingen near Krefeld (into which it has subsequently been subsumed), close to the River Rhine. His father owned a lead rolling mill in the town. His father hoped that he would, in due course, take over the family business, and with that in mind Hans Gustav attended the (lower secondary school) in Uerdingen between 1905 and 1911. By the time he left school, however, it was clear that he had little enthusiasm for producing lead coils. By contrast, the aviation business – still in its infancy – had completely grabbed his enthusiasm. and it featured a rod-supported single main wing plane while others believed that the future belonged to the biplanes. ) The result of their endeavours was a futuristic underslung chassis frame ("Tiefbettrahmen") using sheet steel and incorporating independent suspension, lightweight construction and, by the time they built their second prototype after moving to Berlin in 1920, hydraulically controlled brakes on all four wheels. The brakes proved problematic, however. As Germany lurched from sustained economic crisis to mere acute austerity, they were unable to find any automobile producer sufficiently adventurous to produce the Röhr design.

It quickly became apparent that the factory space at the Ober-Ramstadt was not suitable for high volume production, so Röhr sent his chief construction engineer Joseph Dauben back to the drawing board to adapt their existing prototype as an eight-cylinder car that could be produced in relatively small quantities. The result was the . The design reflected the experience gained from the prototype vehicles already built, and featured light weight construction using an underslung chassis frame formed from sheet steel. It had, in consequence, an unusually low centre of gravity by the standards of the time. The independent suspension at both ends of the car was also innovative as was the rack and pinion steering. One more recent source refers to its "stunning roadability".

Adlerwerke AG In or shortly before May 1931 Hans Gustav Röhr joined Adlerwerke AG in Frankfurt as Head of Product Development ("Chefkonstrukteur"), Technical Director and a deputy member of the board. which in terms of unit sales ranked fourth (behind Opel, DKW and Mercedes-Benz) in the German auto-market through most of the 1930s. With him came Dauben and the "hard-core" of their technical team, notably Otto Winkelmann, Walter Kurtze und Laurenz Niessen.

It was the technically more advanced Trumpf that won plaudits from the experts and enthusiasts. No one seemed to mind that the front-wheel drive system appeared to have been shamelessly copied from the DKW F1 and the Stoewer V 5. The DKW was small and (deceptively) simple to look at, while Stoewer was a fringe manufacturer producing only between 1,000 and 2,000 cars per year. Hans Gustav Röhr and Joseph Dauben found themselves acknowledged as experts on front-wheel drive both in Germany and internationally. According to at least one source even André Citroën, the man who had introduced assembly-line manufacturing to Europe (and especially to Opel), seriously considered assembling the Adler Trumpf under licence in Paris, before selecting the (financially more perilous) option of creating his own front-wheel drive model. By the middle of 1935 Adler had withdrawn from the Gerner project. Röhr's Relations with Adler were further damaged after the company entered into agreements with Impéria and Rosengart under which the Trumpf and Trumpf Junior were to be produced in Belgium and France. The agreements were between the companies involved. Röhr, who had been excluded from them, believed that he should be entitled to a share in the royalties due. Management disagreed and the "Röhr team" left the company. Daimler-Benz was also a highly politicised company. Since 1933 Germany had become a dictatorship with strange and – as was by now becoming increasingly apparent – murderously demented ideas on race. There was no suggestion that Hans Gustav Röhr might be Jewish; but he had nevertheless married a French wife which in Hitler's Germany could readily be questioned as unpatriotic. Care was taken when drafting employment contracts for Röhr and Dauben that they should be denied access to any military projects in which the company might be involved.

Between 1935 and 1937 Röhr and his team worked intensively on developing various front wheel drive designs for Daimler Benz with 4, 6 and even 8 cylinder engines. Several of the were completed. They featured independently suspended wheels and in some cases weight-saving monocoque steel bodies. Most German automakers had responded to the introduction of all-steel car bodies a few years earlier by entering into a contract with the Berlin-based specialised steel-body maker, Ambi Budd. Daimler Benz were unusual among German auto-makers in having insisted, from the outset, on including their own car-bodybuilding facilities as part of their own plant. Back in the late 1930s it was left to Opel to demonstrate the cost saving potential of using monocoque bodies for mainstream automobiles. The board decision not to progress his designs to production, taken in 1936, was a hard blow for Röhr, reflecting his continuing position as an outsider and, some have argued, a certain personal inflexibility. By 1937 it seems to have been mutually accepted that in due course he would be leaving the company.

However, on 10 August 1937, Hans Gustav Röhr died unexpectedly, still aged only 42. He had been driving an open-topped car to the Nürburgring and then suffered from a fatal pneumonia. Elsewhere it is stated that the cause of his death was a viral infection. At Daimler Benz his front-wheel drive designs and the engine/transmission package that went with one of them were very quickly forgotten. Josef Dauben remained with the company, working on development of the high-powered V-12 engines that were used to power search-light generators during the war years.