Heinz Hermann Thiele had worked his way up to become one of the richest people in Germany. He made his fortune of an estimated 16 billion euros with the Munich vehicle supplier Knorr-Bremse, among others. Born in Mainz, he began his career after studying law in 1969 as a clerk in the company’s patent department, took over management of the commercial vehicles division just six years later and joined the management board in 1979 as head of sales. In the years that followed, he mediated between the two quarreling family owners: the founder’s grandson, Jens von Bandemer, who managed the company, and his uncle Joachim Vielmetter. With the help of loans, he took over the majority of the company in the mid-1980s. In 1989, Thiele converted the holding company into a stock corporation, and the Thiele family now held 100 percent of the capital.
Until 2005 he managed the operational business, from 2007 to 2016 he was chairman of the supervisory board, then honorary chairman. Because of the Corona crisis, he returned to the committee at the end of June 2020. Thiele turned the company into a world market leader for train and truck brake systems with 30,000 employees and seven billion euros in sales (2019).
After Knorr- Bremse went public in 2018, the entrepreneur still held 59 percent of the shares in the company. He also owned the majority in the Vossloh railway technology group and most recently ten percent in Lufthansa, where he joined at the beginning of the pandemic.
Thiele also maintained a cattle farm with 13 hectares and more than 10,000 cattle in Uruguay for many years, as well as a boat engine factory in Brazil. He also ran a private development project in South Africa until 2018, where 600 workers grew mangoes, avocados and citrus fruits.
It was Stefan Kamm who took care of Thiele’s money full-time. He has been operationally managing his family office, Stella Vermögensverwaltung, since 2006. Because he wanted to get out, he trained his successor in 2020 and then left after Thiele’s death in March 2021. The assets of the then 79-year-old Thiele are transferred to a family foundation.