Albert Ballin
Albert Ballin · Economics & Business
Director of HAPAG who built the world's largest shipping line and invented the modern pleasure cruise
15 août 1857, Hambourg, Allemagne — 9 novembre 1918, Hambourg, Allemagne
Hambourg
Albert Ballin is recognized among Jewish contributors to Economics & Business — Director of HAPAG who built the world's largest shipping line and invented the modern pleasure cruise
Origins and early life
Albert Ballin was born on 15 August 1857 in Hamburg, youngest child of a Danish Jewish immigrant, and never converted — a Jew at the summit of imperial Germany.
Work and career
Starting in his father's small emigration agency, he rose to lead the Hamburg-America Line, HAPAG, from 1899, and made it the largest shipping company in the world, carrying millions of emigrants — so many of them Jews fleeing the Russian Empire — across the Atlantic in conditions he transformed. He invented an industry along the way: the pleasure cruise, first tried with the Augusta Victoria's Mediterranean voyage of 1891, and he built the greatest liners of the age, the Imperator, the Vaterland and the Bismarck.
A confidant of Kaiser Wilhelm II — mocked by antisemites as 'the Kaiser's Jew' — he spent the last peacetime years trying to slow the Anglo-German naval race and avert the catastrophe he saw coming. When the empire collapsed in November 1918, the work of his life in ruins, he took his own life on 9 November, the day of the abdication.
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Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ballin-albert
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Director of HAPAG who built the world's largest shipping line and invented the modern pleasure cruise
Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ballin-albert
