Older residents of Lippstadt still know the company Hella under the abbreviation WMI (Westphalian Metal Industry),
which was registered as a company in Lippstadt in 1899. But let's look back another 50 years ...
In 1852, a young couple named Windmüller ran a livestock feed business on Blumenstraße. Mr Windmüller came from Beckum, his wife from Werther near Gütersloh.
Historically, the Jewish Windmüllers are among the oldest bourgeois families in Westphalia, whose name has been passed down since the 13th century.
The newly married couple built a joint existence here with the feed trade.
They are the parents of their son Sally, about whom this text tells.
A livestock feed trade was probably nothing special at that time.
Statistics for the Lippstadt district from 1835 show that there were twice as many livestock as residents in the district, especially sheep, pigs, and cows.
There were also about 4,000 horses in the district, i.e., on average one horse for every 7 residents.
Hay was mainly meant by feed.
And although the Windmüllers also sold coal, their income was below the average of merchants.
The Windmüllers had 8 children, all born in Lippstadt, including the first-born daughter Tina (*1853) and Sally as the eldest son (*1858).
Sally does not appear in the pupil list of the Ostendorf secondary school - perhaps the family could not afford the school fees.
But there was still an elementary school in the synagogue.
When Father Windmüller died in Lippstadt in 1877, he left his wife with 7 still underage children.
Sally was then 18 years old and had to continue the feed trade as the eldest son.
But since he was not yet of age (formerly at 21), the business ran under the name of the mother "Hanna Windmüller, widow".
11 years after the father's death, four employees are listed in the feed business.
At that time, 6 siblings of Sally gradually got married, to whom he had to pay dowries and compensations.
Therefore, he had to mortgage three properties, including on Hospitalstraße.
It is unclear whether his father may have also operated the feed business on Hospitalstraße.
In 1891, Sally Windmüller married Helene Sternberg from a good family in Lippstadt. Helene was pretty and well-mannered.
Helene's parents had worked their way up from poor conditions and had enabled their two daughters to attend the higher girls' school and a distinguished boarding school.
Helene had three daughters with her husband Sally, but one daughter died in the first year.
A special feature in Windmüller's business led to an unexpectedly positive development:
The feed trade owned several horse-drawn carriages to transport the hay from the farmers and also to deliver it.
Sally employed blacksmiths and locksmiths, actually to repair his own carriages and horse harnesses.
But by selling fittings and carriage accessories from their own production, the Windmüllers soon earned better money than with the hay.
In 1895, an additional opportunity arose: In Neheim, where there were several lantern manufacturers, a factory went bankrupt
and their production machines were for sale. Sally seized the opportunity.
He had a factory hall built here on Hospitalstraße on the site of his previous hay barn,
took over the machines from Neheim, and also brought 30 trained specialists from Neheim to Lippstadt.
The establishment of the new lamp factory was published in the Lippstädter Zeitung in September 1895.
Sally's company continued to operate under his mother's name, but all documents bore Sally's signature.
Candle and oil lanterns for carriages and bicycles are manufactured.
Although the car had been invented nine years earlier, cars were initially prohibitively expensive, so there were no cars in Lippstadt until 1900.
So the production of lanterns for carriages remained here for the time being.
Every year the number of employees in Windmüller's lamp shop grew by an average of 20 workers. In 1899, the factory already employed 122 workers.
To finance further growth, Windmüller brought investors into his company and converted the company into a joint-stock company - a then still quite new corporate form.
Thus, in 1899, the Westphalian Metal Industry Joint-Stock Company (WMI AG) was established, based on Hospitalstraße.
In addition to foreign investors, residents of Lippstadt were also among the investors: distillery owner Kisker, wool manufacturer Abel, and private bank owner Rosenbaum.
Sally and Helene Windmüller now had a distinguished house built next to Sally's parental home on the corner of Blumenstraße and Cappelstraße.
And around 1900, Windmüller became Lippstadt's first car owner. He used the car as a demonstration vehicle for his lamps.
Windmüller even drove it to Paris, to the World Exhibition, for which the Eiffel Tower was built in 1889.
For example, in 1900, Rudolf Diesel was awarded for his (stationary) diesel engine,
and the Lohner-Porsche - the first electric car with front-wheel drive (later the first all-wheel-drive vehicle) - was also awarded.
Around 1900, Windmüller recruited 40 musical instrument makers from a vocational school in Thuringia to design bulb horns with different sounds.
They were initially accommodated in the Hesse inn in Lippstadt.
One of them was named Hans Zuber. His grandson will have a business for musical instruments on Brüderstraße.
In 1904, Renault introduced hydraulic shock absorbers and OSRAM developed a tungsten filament in 1905 that could withstand the vibrations of the car.
These developments made it possible to replace wax and oil lanterns with electric battery lamps.
In 1908, WMI also introduced electric lamps, but instead, a proven acetylene gas lamp with a novelty became a bestseller...
The special feature was the double range. This was necessary due to the increasing vehicle speed.
Previous lanterns already contained a reflector, but new was the combination with an optical glass lens that additionally bundled and focused the light.
Thus, the car headlight was invented in Lippstadt in 1906/1908.
The product name for the improved gas lantern of WMI was "System Hella".
The most likely explanation for the name is the first name of Sally's wife Helene, short form Hella, with the simultaneous association with the word "brighter".
Due to the sales success of the "Hella" headlight, larger production was soon necessary. On Hospitalstraße, extensions had already been made several times, but the space there was no longer sufficient.
Therefore, in 1911, WMI built a new factory on the outskirts of the city, on Lüningstraße, between Rixbecker and Esbecker Straße.
In the same year, the Windmüllers had a new villa built on Esbecker Straße,
again with a view of their own factory. Sally was already 53 years old at the time.
From 1914, WMI could offer a completely electric car lighting system: with a dynamo, a battery, and a control panel
to switch on the headlights, taillights, side lamps, number plate lighting, and a ceiling lamp.
Even turning lights were already offered.
But due to the high price of the electric system, mainly gas headlights were still sold until after the First World War.
In the First World War, WMI's production was surprisingly quickly converted to handguns and ammunition.
As a result, the company's turnover even quadrupled and profits doubled.
In 1916, Windmüller received the Lippe Cross of Merit for the local economy and war-important armament.
And the supervisory board of WMI even transferred sole representation to Windmüller.
This was the business peak of Sally Windmüller - and now follows his fall...
In 1920, rumours arose that something was not right.
After the war, there was a shortage of materials and WMI wanted to buy the stock of the artillery workshop (now the Rothe Erde location) from the state.
The selling price was to be determined by the Reichsverwertungsamt, Hagen branch.
Windmüller had managed to infiltrate his people into a consortium there that set the prices.
As a result, prices were depressed, goods were declared inferior, and false quantities were stated.
In the 1921 trial in Paderborn, 9 people were charged with Windmüller.
All of Lippstadt was shocked, and the newspapers reported extensively on every day of the trial.
Sally Windmüller was sentenced to one year and 8 months in prison, as well as a fine of 111,000 marks and the confiscation of profits amounting to 699,000 marks.
This destroyed Windmüller's existence, he had to sell his houses and his WMI shares. The supervisory board relieved him of all positions.
After his imprisonment, Windmüller moved with his wife and daughter Louise to the anonymity of the big city of Berlin. He was already 64 years old.
WMI still offered him a position as a representative for East Germany, but he soon gave up the position due to age and resentment.
Sally Windmüller died in 1930 at the age of 72. His last address was a rented apartment in Berlin-Schöneberg.
Wife Helene ("Hella") returned to Lippstadt to her siblings and had Sally's coffin transferred to the Lippstadt cemetery.
Her daughter took her to Portugal before the start of the Second World War, where Helene died in 1954.
Her siblings Oskar and Paula Sternberg were deported and killed from Lippstadt to Auschwitz in 1942. The same fate befell Paula's children Gertrud and Erich.
This ↗article states that 120 members of the extensive Windmüller family were victims of the Holocaust.
And the 1921 trial is said to have been accompanied by "the most violent anti-Semitic undertones".
After Sally Windmüller's departure from WMI (1921), the company lacked entrepreneurial leadership in an economically difficult time.
The shares were widely scattered. In this situation, the Hueck family from Lüdenscheid comes into play,
who had been operating a brass rolling mill there for generations, Lüdenscheid's largest employer, and were already suppliers for WMI at the time.
In 1923, the Hueck family bought the majority of WMI shares.
At this point, it would be too extensive to describe the further decades of technical, personnel, and business development of WMI.
It was not until 1986 that the product name Hella was adopted as the company name.
As of 2010: The company Hella enjoys a good reputation as a supplier and was awarded by Porsche in 2011 as the best supplier.
It is one of the 100 largest German industrial companies and one of the 40 largest automotive suppliers worldwide,
with over 30,000 employees in 35 countries.
Hella was still referred to as a family business even after its IPO in 2014,
because the shareholder family Hueck still held around 72% of Hella shares (as of 2015).
The shareholders had committed to hold at least 60% of the shares until 2024.
The fortune of the 59-member shareholder family, including the theoretical value of Hella and the Lüdenscheid company, was estimated at 1.7 billion euros in 2014.
The estimated theoretical wealth had steadily increased from 1 billion to 1.7 billion euros between 2010 and 2014.
It is interesting what can develop from a small feed trade in 150 years.
