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  3. Story 02Dr Georg Kress: The self-made entrepreneur
Dr Georg Kress: The self-made entrepreneur

Dr Georg Kress: The self-made entrepreneur

Dr. Georg Kress is born in 1901 as the second son of the farmer Peter Kress and grows up with two brothers and a half-sister on a farm in Neustadt an der Aisch near Erlangen. He would have been entitled to take over the farm, but he has a mind of his own - and a strong sense of ambition.

That's why he takes his A-levels and has to finance his attendance at evening school by himself as a postman. And during his studies of economics in Nuremberg, he works as a student trainee at AEG. He then completes his doctorate in Tübingen, where he earns his living as head of the student union - and meets his future wife Emma. After a stopover in Erlangen, the couple settles in Stuttgart-Degerloch. Dr Georg Kress, who now holds a doctorate, works for the auditing company Deutsche Treuhand AG Schitag. With ambition, great self-discipline and an intelligent bravado, which his daughter Marianne attests him, he has already come a long way.

However, it is also true that he becomes a party member of the NSDAP in May 1933 and joins the SA as an “assistant”. Both allegedly for professional reasons, because he does not want to lose his job as a working student. He does not hold a position in the party, and in 1947 he was categorised as a “follower” by the Spruchkammer (Court of arbitration) Aalen. Not least because many of his companions testify that he has never been politically active and that he has “never been seen to be in favour of National Socialist ideas”.

 

SECOND CAREER AS AN ENTREPRENEUR

Due to the war, Dr Georg Kress moves to Bopfingen, his wife's place of origin, and opens a thriving tax consultancy in Aalen. But: “After the war, he did the taxes for every baker and butcher in Bopfingen,” recalls his daughter Marianne Bechstein, “and that didn't satisfy him.”

“It is important and crucial for an employee that his action and endeavour takes place in a company where his strength is recognised and used in a meaningful way.” Dr Georg Kress

After MAPAL is founded in 1950, he leads his company as a strict, authoritarian patriarch, who, in addition to a strong thriftiness, also has strong humanistic values and a certain shrewdness. It was not without pride that the “old” Dr Kress later receives numerous honours, including the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon and the Cross of Merit 1st Class, the Silver Stauffer Coin of the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg, the Grand Badge of Honour in Silver of the City of Aalen and the Ferdinand von Steinbeis Medal of the University of Tübingen. He remains a managing associate of MAPAL until the end of his long life in 1992. His grave is adorned with a sandstone statue of St Urban - a gift from the workforce for his 85th birthday. And the desk from his office today still stands in the office of his daughter-in-law Ruth.