Günther Ziehl: The Engineer Who Rebuilt a Company Twice
In 1945 a young German engineer stood in a factory in Berlin-Weißensee and supervised its destruction. The works had been his father's, built up over three decades — a hundred-metre assembly hall, its own power station, motors and dynamos from a tenth of a horsepower to a hundred. Soviet occupation authorities required it dismantled and shipped east. Günther Ziehl complied, and walked away with the only assets they could not crate up: the technical documents, and what he carried in his head. Four years later he restarted the company in a disused mill four hundred kilometres to the south-west. It is today a world leader in fan and drive technology.
Weißensee
Ziehl was born on 5 September 1913 in Berlin-Weißensee, three years after his father Emil founded ZIEHL-ABEGG in the same district. Emil Ziehl (1873–1939) was one of the more consequential electrical engineers of the imperial era: trained at Berlin's technical college, formerly a design engineer at AEG and then at Berliner Maschinenbau AG, he had worked out the external rotor motor — a configuration in which the rotor spins around the outside of the stator rather than inside it — and applied it to the first electrically driven gyroscope system. The company's own history dates the American patent to 1900 and the German to 1904; the VDE's records place the original design as early as 1897. On 2 January 1910 Emil founded the firm in Weißensee with a Swiss partner, Eduard Abegg, who departed within the year but whose initial survives in the blue "Z over A" logo.
An Inheritance in 1939
Günther took his Abitur and, from 1934, studied engineering at the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg — today's Technische Universität Berlin — qualifying in 1939. It was the year his father died, and the two events collided: he graduated as an engineer and inherited the running of a substantial manufacturer in the same twelve months, at twenty-five by his own biography's reckoning, though the company's official history puts him at twenty-eight. Under his direction in the early 1940s ZIEHL-ABEGG produced most of Germany's lift motors, alongside the submarine motors, electric-vehicle motors and frequency converters the Weißensee works had long made.
Dismantling
The end of the war ended the company as it had existed. Weißensee lay in the Soviet sector; the plant was seized and expropriated. What followed is the least glamorous and most revealing period of Ziehl's life. He made his way to Füssen in Bavaria and worked as a transport labourer. In his spare hours he repaired electrical devices for local farmers — a man who had run one of Berlin's significant motor manufacturers, fixing agricultural equipment for payment in kind. In 1947 he registered an official electrical business. It was the seed of the second company.
Künzelsau, 1949
In 1949 Günther and his brother Heinz, who had joined him after the war, moved the enterprise to Künzelsau in Baden-Württemberg, rebuilding production in a former mill. The choice of a small Hohenlohe town over a major industrial centre was characteristic and turned out to be permanent: ZIEHL-ABEGG remains headquartered there. The decisive commercial insight came from Heinz, who recognised that the family's external rotor motor — compact, with the rotating mass on the outside where fan blades could be mounted directly — was ideally suited to ventilation. Fan development began in the late 1950s; the company's history dates the start of that work to 1957, the VDE the production launch of the external rotor fan motor to 1960. It was the breakthrough that made the modern firm.
The Other Career
Ziehl's second, quieter vocation was the care of the elderly in his adopted district. He founded and championed a Haus der Begegnung — a House of Encounter — as a meeting place for senior citizens, and organised annual visits to nursing homes across the region. It was for this, not for the motors, that he received the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany's principal civil honour. He died on 20 July 2002 at his home in Künzelsau, aged 88. In 2014 a street in the Hohenlohe industrial park was named Günther-Ziehl-Straße.
Why Günther Is Called a Genius
The honest assessment is that the word sits awkwardly on him, and that the reason he is remembered has little to do with invention. The genuinely original mind in the family was Emil, whose external rotor motor — patented in the first years of the twentieth century — remains foundational to drive technology more than a hundred years on. Günther inherited that idea; he did not conceive it. What he possessed instead was a rarer and less celebrated form of judgement: the ability to identify, at the moment of total loss, which parts of a destroyed enterprise were the actual enterprise. Machinery, buildings and a hundred-metre hall could be requisitioned. The technical knowledge and the drawings could not, and he preserved them through the dismantling. That is a specific analytical act — correctly distinguishing an industrial company's capital from its capability — and everything that followed depended on it. The counter-case is straightforward. He was an heir, not a founder. The commercial insight that made post-war ZIEHL-ABEGG successful — applying the external rotor motor to ventilation — is credited to his brother Heinz, not to him. His engineering degree produced no patents that appear in the record. And the honour he actually received from the German state was for elderly care, not for industry. What the sources support is a portrait of a competent engineer, a serious and durable manager, and a man of some civic conscience, who did the single most important thing correctly at the single most important moment.
Legacy
The company Günther Ziehl carried out of Berlin in 1945 and restarted in a Künzelsau mill in 1949 is now a global manufacturer of fans and drive systems, still headquartered in the town he chose. The trajectory from a hundred-metre hall in Weißensee, through a transport worker's job in Füssen and a farm-repair round, to a rebuilt industrial firm in Hohenlohe is one of the more compressed illustrations of what happened to German manufacturing in the twentieth century. He kept a house for old people in the same town, and the district named a street for him twelve years after he died. Both, in his case, belong on the same ledger.
Achievements
- Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
