The Heir Behind The Zeppelin Fortune Is Really Mad And Trying To Get His Family’s Massive Auto Parts Business Back From A Tiny German City

If you’ve ever read anything about blimps before, you’ve almost certainly heard the name Zeppelin. These days, people use the term to identify rigid airships—that is, blimps with inner skeletons to maintain their shapes—but really, it comes from a German company of the same name, founded in the late 1800s by one Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

From 1900 until the 1930s, rigid airships built by Zeppelin would be used in Germany for transportation and, through World War I, for wartime purposes such as bombing campaigns. During that time, Zeppelin also founded another company: ZF Friedrichshafen. At first, ZF was used to supply parts for the parent company’s airships, but over the years, it’s evolved into one of the world’s biggest automotive suppliers. It’s best known today for building transmissions like the eight-speed automatic you see in virtually every BMW, Dodge, Audi, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Alfa Romeo.

Zeppelin built a business empire, but ZF is no longer controlled by the Zeppelin family. Instead, its majority ownership is held by Friedrichshafen, a city in southern Germany that sits on the coast of Lake Constance. How did this happen? Well, by the end of World War II, during the reconstruction of Germany, the family had its control relinquished at the behest of the government. Here’s how German publication Manager Magazin describes it:

At that time, the provisional Württemberg state government, together with representatives of the French occupation authorities, dissolved the foundation into which the airship pioneer had contributed his company shares before the outbreak of the First World War. The assets at that time, primarily the majority stake in the automotive supplier ZF, were transferred to the city of Friedrichshafen. Since then, the city’s mayors, not representatives of the family, have overseen the entrepreneurial legacy of Count Zeppelin.

This all happened in 1947, but the Zeppelin family hasn’t forgotten. In fact, Zeppelin’s great-grandson, Albrecht von Brandenstein-Zeppelin, has apparently made it his life’s mission to reacquire his family’s control of companies like ZF and MTU Friedrichshafen, known today as Rolls-Royce Power Systems (the arm of Rolls-Royce that builds industrial-sized engines, not the luxury carmaker). 

Since he acquired his law degree, Brandenstein-Zeppelin has been filing lawsuits against the government in a bid to regain control of his family’s legacy. Though he’s amassed a fortune of his own—estimated at around 250 million euros—through his time as a large-scale farmer and wind farm operator, he considers those endeavors side hustles that come second to his main goal. From Manager Magazin:

In the early 1980s, Brandenstein-Zeppelin first rebelled against what he perceived as a profound injustice by the post-war bureaucracy – having just passed his state law exams. For the next four decades, he kept generations of mayors, state premiers, and ministers busy with petitions, expert opinions, and legal briefs. Since 2015, he has taken his case to court ten times. He is estimated to have spent between 5 and 6 million euros on legal advisors and lawyers during this period. The fact that he has consistently lost these courtrooms hasn’t led him to consider giving up. “I have staying power and can easily continue for another ten years,” he threatens – even beyond his own death, if necessary: ​​”Should I no longer be among the living, then my sons will simply finish the job.”

Brandenstein-Zeppelin’s efforts have not been entirely fruitless. He scored a seat on the board of MTU Friedrichshafen in the mid-1980s, where he managed to finesse a good chunk of change back into Zeppelin family hands, seemingly by being a general pain to everyone else involved as MM points out:

[I]n the case of MTU Friedrichshafen, where he had served on the supervisory board for more than two decades, he secured around 70 million euros for himself and his family. In doing so, he pushed the negotiators of the then major shareholder Daimler to the brink, played several private equity firms against each other, and, as one participant in the sales negotiations reported, “really stepped on everyone’s toes.”

That payout amounted to a roughly 5% stake in the company, according to Automotive News, which reported back in 2005 that Daimler also had to buy out the founding Maybach family from its 7.2% share (MTU Friedrichshafen was originally founded by Wilhelm Maybach and his son, Karl, who started out supplying engines for Zeppelins). Even though Daimler owned a majority of the company, the families still had the power to strike down a sale, which they used to stop a sale to a U.S. private equity firm. From that ’05 article:

DaimlerChrysler intends to sell the unit which it values at over 1 billion euros ($1.23 billion), but wide-ranging veto rights from the two founding families had complicated the disposal and led to a public clash.

Buying out the families heads off a legal battle that was brewing after the carmaker used its majority stake at an extraordinary shareholders meeting to approve liquidation of MTU and a shift of its operating assets into another firm to be sold at auction.

“Thanks to the constructive stance of all family shareholders, the liquidation of the company can now be avoided,” it said.

Daimler did, in fact, end up selling the brand not to American private equity, but Swedish investment firm EQT. The next year, it would be spun off into a new holding company called Tognum, which, in 2011, was ironically purchased by Rolls-Royce Holdings and Daimler AG.

Now 75 years old, Brandenstein-Zeppelin shows no signs of slowing down. His latest efforts, according to Manager Magazin, involve a submission to the state authorities last month claiming that the original foundation owned by Count Zeppelin was never officially dissolved, and exists to this day as an incapacitated legal shell of a company. He’s even gone as far as to appoint a supervisory board for the foundation, placing himself as the future head. 

Right now, all of the profits from ZF and the other former Zeppelin companies owned by Friedrichshafen go to improving the city with stuff like new pools, kindergartens, and hospitals. Should Brandenstein-Zeppelin succeed, he wants to redirect those funds to turning the town into the Silicon Valley of aerospace.

How does he plan to do it? With the help of Wolfgang Schuster, a former mayor of Stuttgart. Schuster has been helping to run Brandenstein-Zeppelin’s Center for Aviation Research, a scientific initiative that will, should the funding permit, “coordinate the development activities of companies in the region, attract new firms to an aerospace cluster, and, last but not least, support and attract startups.” These operations would perform their testing and operations out of a bankrupt regional airport in the area.

On the Center for Aviation Research website, Schuster and Brandenstein-Zeppelin argue that the holdings being transferred away from the city would be a good thing for the area:

The city of Friedrichshafen is currently facing a difficult economic situation.
With the restitution of the Zeppelin Foundation as the initiator of the European Cooperation Centre for Aeronautics Research (EKL), new future prospects are opening up for the city.

Those “prospects” predict that global air traffic will double in the next two decades, requiring the need for accelerated development. The site also mentions the need for more efforts to meet climate goals with regard to reducing ecological footprints, and referencing the nearby Lake Constance as a place with a “strong industrial structure” ideal for expanding the sciences and research.

Whether any of this actually happens will depend on how government authorities interpret Brandenstein-Zeppelin’s argument that his great-grandfather’s company was never truly dissolved, and that the rights to its companies should be transferred back to him. Seeing as how his past four decades of arguments haven’t worked, I’m not exactly confident in his success. Either way, it’s a weird piece of drama that dates back over a century, which, should Brandenstein-Zeppelin’s declarations about his sons be correct, could last for decades to come.

Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com