Axel Wenner-Gren
Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren (5 June 1881 – 24 November 1961) was a Swedish entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest men in the world during the 1930s.
Early life[edit]
He was born on 5 June 1881 in Uddevalla, a town on the west coast of Sweden.[1] He was the fourth of six children (four girls and two boys) born to Leonard and the much younger Alice Wenner-Gren (née Albin); only three of the children survived to adulthood: Axel, his oldest sister (Anna), and his younger brother (Hugo).[2] His father owned a farm and exported timber to England, which made the family wealthy.
Having spent his school years in Uddevalla, Wenner-Gren moved to Gothenburg where he was employed for five years in the spice importing company of a maternal uncle. During this time, he learned English, French, and German at the local Berlitz school, and music at the local YMCA.[1][3]
In 1902, at the age of 21, he left Sweden to further his studies in Germany. He first studied in the university town of Greifswald, where he took some summer courses before moving on to Berlin, where he studied at the Berliner Handelsakademie, from which he graduated early.[3]
Career[edit]
After some difficulty, he found work with the German subsidiary of Alfa Laval Separator where he developed skills as a salesman, before quitting in 1904 to work selling agricultural machinery near Stuttgart which, with financial support from his father, had become his first financial enterprise.[4]
In 1908, he traveled to America where he learned about engines for agricultural use, returning to Europe the same year. While in Vienna in 1908 he saw the Santo vacuum cleaner in the shop of Gustaf Paalen who had exclusive rights to distribute them throughout Europe.[1][5] After initially failing to become a European distributor for the Santo vacuum cleaner in his own right, he entered into a partnership with Paalen, purchasing a twenty percent interest in the company.
Earlier in his life he notably collaborated with Fredrik Ljungström.
Wenner-Gren amassed a fortune from his early insight that the industrial vacuum cleaner could be adapted for domestic use. Soon after the First World War he persuaded the Swedish lighting company (called Lux at the time, but with his suggestion to rename it to Electrolux) for which he then worked (securing the contract to floodlight the opening ceremony of the Panama Canal, among other successes), to buy the patent to a home vacuum cleaner. He asked that instead of compensating him in cash, he would receive company stock based on the sales of the vacuum cleaner. The Electrolux cleaner was so successful that by the early 1930s, Wenner-Gren had become the majority owner of Electrolux, and the firm was a leading brand in both vacuum cleaner and refrigerator technology.
Wenner-Gren also diversified his interests into the ownership of newspapers, banks and arms manufacturers, and acquired many of the holdings of the disgraced safety-match tycoon Ivar Kreuger. In Mexico in the 1930s, he was in economic alliance with Maximino Ávila Camacho, strongman of the Mexican state of Puebla, whose brother Manuel Ávila Camacho became President of Mexico in 1940.[6]
World War II blacklisting[edit]
Wenner-Gren was reported to be a friend of Hermann Göring, whose first wife was a Swede, and in the late 1930s convinced himself that he could avert the coming world war by acting as a conduit between Göring and the British and American governments. His efforts proved unsuccessful, with all parties regarding him as a self-promoting nuisance without much influence on the plans of the Nazi regime.[7] However, others are suspicious of his role in the war, citing how (his) original Bank of the Bahamas was used to fund the Nazis and his friendship with Göring as potential proof of his private support for the Nazis.[8]
A disconsolate Wenner-Gren retired to his estate in The Bahamas, in Hog Island (now Paradise Island), where he resumed his friendship with the islands' governor, the Duke of Windsor, and former King of the United Kingdom, Edward VIII. Early in the war his rumored friendship with Göring and the German sympathies of the Duke led first the Americans and, following their lead, the British, to place him on an economic blacklist, enabling them to freeze his assets in Nassau.
There proved to be little or no foundation to their suspicions that Wenner-Gren was a Nazi agent,[7] notwithstanding the appearance of his steam yacht Southern Cross (the world's largest at the time) along with ships from the Allied Navies at the site of the sinking of the liner SS Athenia on the first day of the war. Wenner-Gren's yacht Southern Cross rescued over three hundred survivors of the sinking and transferred some to nearby Allied ships and others continued to the U.S.
