Felix Meyer (industrialist)

Felix Meyer came from a liberal Jewish family with roots traceable to sixteenth-century Westphalia. The brothers Elias and Moses (later Moritz) Meyer established themselves at Aachen, founding a successful textile factory. Moritz Meyer’s son, Eduard, joined the firm, married Esther Pauline Salomon in 1874 and a daughter, Else, was born the same year, followed by five other children, of whom Felix, born in 1875, was the eldest, the others being Georg, Dora, Meta and Erna.

Early Years

Eduard Meyer’s family lived well, in a 16-room house, with servants, a large garden and stables. While they were not religiously fervent, they did not convert to Christianity. In later reminiscences, Felix spoke of a happy, even boysterous, childhood, though the upbringing for boys was severe, involving regular corporal punishment, though he himself proved to be an indulgent father. In particular, he left his daughters free to choose their husbands. A rebel at school, he followed his own father to the extent of undertaking several technical apprenticeships as a dyer, spinner and weaver. He also took jobs in several different companies in Germany, but also in England, before joining his father’s then flagging business at the age of 22.

New Energies

The once flourishing firm had not found in Felix’s father an entrepreneural talent to equal the firm’s founder, and as Felix put it, ‘...the money disappeared rapidly since nobody knew how to earn it, but only how to spend it’. Felix Meyer rose to the occasion with innovation. For one thing he invented a twin loom, but the sale of the patent was insufficient to relaunch the factory’s fortunes and in 1905 he convinced his father to sell the mill, taking on the remaining debts himself. In 1906, Felix married Marguerite Darmstaedter, a Belgian national, and they set up home in the Kurbrunnenstrasse, in Aachen. Though the dwelling was modest, it was near the Cologne-Liège railway and there was a shed that Felix used for developing his inventions, which were many and varied, including forays into mechanics, chemical processes and even medical appliances. While the definitive number of patetents registered under various names is uncertain, it probably reached several hundred, including new designs of loom, processes for manufacturing multi-coloured yarns or fabrics. Meyer worked quite a lot exploiting the possibilities of cellulose, with applications in the form of artificial limbs, for which he also constructed new joints. In the 1920s and 1930s, Meyer was occupied with the enhanced manufacture of glass tubes, ampoules, etc. and for filling and sealing these. Already in 1906, the newly weds could evidently make a living from the success of the inventions. The firm Rotawerke was founded in 1909 and thereafter Meyer heeded the earlier business decline of his family in that he did not draw a salary, but simply fed his own pension fund. A daughter Kläre (later known as Claire) was born in 1907 and another, Margot, in 1909.

The united German Empire proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, followed its destiny, especially during the reign of William II, towards becoming a vast militaristic-industrial complex and simultaneously largely losing control of its own foreign policy. When the summer of 1914 saw the outbreak of the Great War, this was hailed with enthusiasm by the patriotic German public, and theere was no doubt that the course of events would echo those of the rapid victory of 1870. Felix Meyer was a fervent patriot whose spirit was undaunted by defeat or postwar conditions. The debts from his father’s time were finally paid off, and the family and its business prospered. Rotawerke had branches in Belgium and France and business ties to Britain. Meyer was wealthy enough to support young artists.

The Rude Awakening

Meyer remained a German patriot, and refused like other assimilated Jews to believe that the rise to power of the Nazi party constituted a danger. In Meyer’s case, he even returned to Germany in 1938 from a journey to the United States with his wife. That same year, however, events caught up with him, especially after the so-called Kristallnacht of 9–10 November, during which he spent some hours under arrest. This must certainly have been a great shock for Meyer and his wife. He had taken the precaution of carrying a capsule with poison on him and in a letter to his daughters he asked them to show understanding if he or his wife should decide to commit suicide. By the end of the year Meyer had been forced out of the firm under the so-called ‘’Arianization’’ process, and its management had been reluctantly taken over for the greater part by his son-in-law John Hennig, husband since 1933 of Meyer’s daughter Kläre, and with her a convert to Catholicism, in Hennig’s case from Lutheranism.

Emigration of the Meyers and the Hennigs

In February 1939 Meyer was allowed to emigrate legally to Belgium, being married to a Belgian woman, and with the complicity of officials he knew. However, already in May Germany invaded the Netherlands and Belgium and the couple failed in an attempt to escape to France. They were now stranded as German Jews in German-occupied Belgium, a situation which lasted till the liberation by the Allies in 1944.

Later that same year, in October 1939, Hennig himself legally emigrated to the Irish Free State to prepare a home there for his wife and family, who joined him a month later. Despite the separation and the many difficulties of these years, Felix Meyer and his wife Marguerite had a strongly affectionate relationship with their daighter and her family.

Wartime Belgium

Meyer showed remarkable strength of character and a courage that almost defies belief. His exploits included complaining in person to the Gestapo about illegal detention of Jews. In that strange mental world of ice-cold cruelty and pseudo-bureaucratic meticulousness, Meyer succeeded in having well over a hundred Belgian and foreign Jews released one by one, arguing in detail their cases, alleviated the conditions of others, sometimes adducing the rights implied by military decorations awarded prior to the advent of Nazism. A man of the world, Meyer exploited the rivalry between committed Nazis and other military and civilian personnel. Perhaps, too, the fear of some individuals of legal retribution after the war. Nor were Meyer’s initiatives solely of benefit to small numbers of people. Rather, he arranged shelter and medical care for hundreds.

The end of hostilities in Europe brought little immediate alleviation in general conditions, though Meyer fought for his humanitarian projects and to retrieve possession of his family firm and eventually met with success, though the struggle contributed to his early death in Brussels on 14 April 1950. He is buried in the Alter Jüdischer Friedhof (Old Jewish Cemetery) Aachen, along with his wife, who died in 1966.

The Firm Survives

Some years passed before in 1956 the Hennigs made the decision to return to the Continent, largely for the sake of their daughters’ future, but also to allow Hennig to take control of the Meyer business, now restored to family ownership. A plant of the firm, known as Rota, had been established at Säckingen in Germany, on the southern edge of the Black Forest area. John Hennig took on its manageament, but the events of the Nazi period were such that the family could not bring itself to refound their family life on German soil. Instead, they took up residence in nearby Basel, Switzerland, Hennig commuting from there over the border daily to manage the firm. The work was not of the kind that Hennig relished, but it ensured the family’s financial stability and was in any case seen by him as a duty to the memory of his revered father-in-law. The firm later became a subsidiary of the Japanese Yokogawa group.

As to Felix Meyer’s humanitarian activities in wartime Belgium, many testimonies are conserved at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem memorial site.