Carl Friedrich von Siemens: The Liberal at the Head of a War Machine
On 7 November 1933, at a Berlin rally where the business community called for economic peace and equal standing, a photographer caught the head of Germany's electrical giant in conversation with Franz von Mendelssohn, the respected Jewish banker. Six years later Mendelssohn's firm was seized under Aryanisation. The picture is a small monument to a large question: what a decent liberal industrialist could and could not do inside the Third Reich.
The Youngest Son
Carl Friedrich von Siemens was born in Berlin on 5 September 1872, the youngest son of Werner von Siemens — inventor, founder of the firm, one of the architects of the electrical age — by his second wife and relative Antonie Siemens. His uncles included Carl and William Siemens, who had built the family's Russian and British operations. He was, in other words, born into the third great electrical dynasty of Europe and near the bottom of its succession queue.
He studied engineering and natural sciences, and joined Siemens & Halske AG in 1899. From 1901 to 1908 he ran the firm's British operations from London and Stafford — the same apprenticeship abroad his uncle William had served, and one that left him more cosmopolitan than most of his German peers. Returning home, he built the company's overseas department between 1908 and 1912, then took the chief executive's post at Siemens-Schuckertwerke in Berlin in 1912. In 1919, following the deaths of his elder brothers, he assumed the chairmanship of both of the group's major divisions.
Rebuilding After the Defeat
The firm he inherited in 1919 was in a wrecked country: a defeated Germany stripped of foreign assets, facing reparations, hyperinflation and the collapse of its export markets. Carl Friedrich led the postwar recovery, and did it while expanding globally the two sectors his father had made the company's own — communications and energy technology. Under his direction Siemens returned to the front rank of world industry.
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Here he departs sharply from type. Siemens was a member of the Deutsche Demokratische Partei, the left-liberal party of the Weimar Republic, and sat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1924 — an industrial magnate voluntarily submitting himself to parliamentary politics on the liberal side, which very few of his class did. He championed fair working conditions in his own factories. From 1924 to 1934 he chaired the administrative board of the German State Railways, the Reichsbahn, then the largest enterprise in Europe and the vehicle through which reparations payments were channelled. In 1926 the Kaiser Wilhelm Society made him a Senator, and he became a regular presence at Harnack House, the meeting ground of German science and industry.
His record is not uniformly liberal. In 1919, amid the revolutionary chaos following the defeat, he helped finance the far-right Anti-Bolshevik Fund — a reminder that Weimar liberalism and fear of the left were not mutually exclusive.
After 1933
When the Nazis took power, Siemens distanced himself from the regime and resigned from a number of positions, including the supervisory board of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke, the steel combine. He gave up the Reichsbahn chairmanship in 1934. This was principled, and it was also limited: he did not resign from Siemens, and Siemens did not withdraw from Germany.
What followed is the part of the story that cannot be softened. The Siemens corporation became the Third Reich's most important producer of electrotechnical components for weapons. From 1940 the firm employed foreign forced labourers and prisoners of war. From 1942 — after Carl Friedrich's death — it used Jewish forced labourers and concentration camp inmates, with a dedicated camp established at Ravensbrück. He was at the head of the company when the forced labour began, and dead before its worst phase. Both facts belong in the same sentence.
Why Carl Is Called a Genius
The faculty in question is organisational rather than inventive, and the distinction matters especially here, because his father was the inventor. Werner von Siemens produced the pointer telegraph and the dynamo principle; Carl Friedrich produced no comparable technical breakthrough. What he had was the ability to hold together and re-grow an enormous multinational manufacturing concern through the most violent thirty years in modern German history — defeat, revolution, hyperinflation, depression and dictatorship — while running it, by the standards of his peers, decently. Taking a company from wartime collapse in 1919 to global leadership by the late 1920s, and simultaneously chairing Europe's largest enterprise in the Reichsbahn, is a demonstration of administrative capacity at a scale few people in any era have managed.
The counter-case is unusually heavy. First, he began at the top: the name, the capital and the succession were given, not earned, and the question of what he would have built from nothing has no answer. Second, and far more seriously, whatever his personal distaste for the Nazis — and the record of his resignations is real — the enterprise he had spent his life strengthening became indispensable to the German war machine and used slave labour. A leader is judged partly by what his institution does. On that test the moral verdict is severe, whatever one concludes about the man. The honest description is a gifted administrator whose gift outlasted his ability to control what it had built.
Legacy
Carl Friedrich von Siemens died on 9 September 1941 at Heinendorf, near Potsdam, four days after his sixty-ninth birthday and in the middle of the war his company was equipping. He was succeeded at the head of the firm by his cousin Hermann von Siemens. His son Ernst Albrecht von Siemens would in turn lead the company through its postwar rebuilding, and his name endures in Germany today chiefly through the arts foundation that carries it. The firm his father founded is still one of the largest industrial enterprises on earth — and still, in its published histories, reckoning with the years when Carl Friedrich's successors put concentration camp prisoners on the line.
Achievements
- Affiliated with Deutsche Reichsbahn
- Worked as politician, entrepreneur and electrical engineer
