Comeback of the Combine

Originally the Common Market pledged itself to prevent the rise of the great industrial cartels that were the bane of prewar Europe. But now a different philosophy guides the Eurocrats. It is that the whole world is the coming market, and that for Europeans to win a larger share of it they must build companies as big as the American giants. Last week the Common Market approved in principle a major reconcentration of the Ruhr's legendary but war-splintered Thyssen steel empire. The six-nation High Authority said that a "favorable decision" can be expected within a month on the petition of the August Thyssen Corp. to buy out the nearby Phoenix-Rheinrohr Corp., which was a part of the Thyssen empire before the Allied occupiers broke it up. The result: a 7,000,000-ton, $1 billion-a-year combine that will vie with Italy's Finsider as Europe's largest steelmaker.

Probably Inevitable. By mating, the two German companies can offer a complementary product line: Thyssen (pronounced Tiss-en) makes mostly sheets and beams; the strength of Phoenix is in tubes and heavy plate. Merger was probably inevitable anyway: despite the postwar decartelization attempts of the Western Allies, the majority ownership of both companies still rests with the descendants of August Thyssen, who was Germany's Andrew Carnegie.

A century ago, miserly August Thyssen gained hold of high-grade ore supplies in Sweden and France and built ore-skimpy Germany into a major steel power. His son, Fritz Thyssen, was the first industrialist to support Hitler, but in 1939 denounced him and spent most of the war in a Nazi internment camp; he died in 1951. Fritz Thyssen's widow, Amelie, now 85, proved resourceful: she found loopholes in the Allied decartelization decrees and gradually welded together much of the old steel dynasty. From her Bavarian castle, Frau Thyssen today controls 52% of Phoenix stock and 12% of August Thyssen stock; her daughter, Countess Anita de Zichy-Thyssen of Buenos Aires, holds another 39% of Thyssen stock. The countess thus would presumably inherit a majority share of both.

Increasing Support. Only two years ago, the Common Market High Authority balked at a petition to unite these Thyssen family assets. For this, the High Authority was rebuked by the harder-headed Common Market parliament, which argued that the Thyssen-Phoenix combine would produce scarcely one-third as much as U.S. Steel Corp. With world competition sharpening and the Common Market steadily building into one big economy, cartel-inclined Europeans are finding increasing support for their ambitions for bigness. Even in France, which helped break up the German cartels, the business paper Les Echos wrote: "For German heavy industry, cartelization and reconcentration are a condition of survival."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.