Manfréd Weiss
Manfréd Weiss · Economics & Business
Fondateur des usines de Csepel, plus grand complexe industriel de Hongrie et deuxième d'Autriche-Hongrie : conserves, munitions, moteurs, automobiles, bicyclettes et avions
11 avril 1857, Pest (Hongrie) — 25 décembre 1922, Budapest
Hongrie (Autriche-Hongrie)
Manfréd Weiss is recognized among Jewish contributors to Economics & Business — Fondateur des usines de Csepel, plus grand complexe industriel de Hongrie et deuxième d'Autriche-Hongrie : conserves, munitions, moteurs, automobiles, bicyclettes et avions
Origins and early life
Manfréd Weiss was born in Pest on 11 April 1857 into a Jewish family of merchants, and he remained a practising Jew all his life, supporting the community's institutions and refusing the conversion that would have smoothed his path into the Hungarian aristocracy.
Work and career
With his brother Berthold he began in 1882 with a canning factory, supplying tinned rations to the Austro-Hungarian army; from the tins came the cartridges, and in 1892, after an explosion at the Pest works, he moved production to the island of Csepel south of Budapest, on empty ground, and built there over thirty years the largest industrial complex in Hungary and the second largest in the Habsburg monarchy. Csepel made ammunition and artillery shells, then steel, machine tools, motors, bicycles, motorcycles, cars and aircraft engines; at its wartime peak it employed some thirty thousand people, and it had its own port, railway, power station, hospital, schools and workers' housing, which was advanced for its time. Franz Joseph ennobled him in 1896 and made him a baron in 1918.
Later years
This fiche notes plainly what came after: he died on 25 December 1922, and in 1944, under the German occupation, his heirs — his children and their families, several of whom had converted — were forced by the SS officer Kurt Becher to sign over the entire Weiss Manfréd concern to the SS in exchange for permission to leave for Portugal, one of the best-documented cases of Nazi economic extortion of a Jewish family. The Csepel works were nationalized after the war and remained the industrial heart of communist Hungary; workers of Csepel were among the first to rise in 1956.
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Source: Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon ; Encyclopaedia Judaica, « Weiss, Manfréd » ; Csepel Művek, archives historiques
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Fondateur des usines de Csepel, plus grand complexe industriel de Hongrie et deuxième d'Autriche-Hongrie : conserves, munitions, moteurs, automobiles, bicyclettes et avions
Source: Magyar Életrajzi Lexikon ; Encyclopaedia Judaica, « Weiss, Manfréd » ; Csepel Művek, archives historiques