Siemens, 1918-1945

Wilfried Feldenkirchen continues the examination of the House of Siemens that he started in his previous work Werner von Siemens: Inventor and International Entrepreneur. This new volume covers the period during the two world wars. Even before World War I, the House of Siemens was one of the largest and most important German industrial enterprises in terms of total assets, sales, and the size of its labor force. Consisting of two parent companies, Siemens & Halske and Siemens-Schuckertwerke (plus a host of subsidiaries and affiliated companies), the Siemens corporation successfully developed into a multinational concern that spanned the field of electrical engineering. In 1913 the company posted total sales of 410 million marks and employed a labor force of 82,000, a quarter of which worked abroad. Taking as his point of departure the situation following World War I, Feldenkirchen describes the cyclical movements that characterized the period of high inflation, the subsequent so-called Weimar boom, the Great Depression, the period of economic recovery under National Socialist rule, and World War II. Drawing on a wide range of previously inaccessible and unpublished sources, Feldenkirchen analyzes the company's actions and reactions in a period in which its success was determined extensively by outside influences. This book makes an important contribution to an assessment of the company's role in this period of history and at the same time provides important insight into the social and economic history of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Wilfried Feldenkirchen is professor of business history at Friedrich Alexander Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. His doctoral thesis, "The Iron and Steel Industry in the Ruhr District," earned him the Maier-Leibnitz Prize, awarded by Germany's Federal Minister for Science and Research, and he received the Harvard School of Business's Newcomer Prize in 1988.