Robert Bosch, His Life and Achievements: His Life and Achievements 1861-1942

Son of a wealthy Swabian farmer, tenacious, brusque Robert Bosch (1861-1942) transformed a small craft workshop into a huge manufacturing firm which developed the spark plug and assisted the birth of Germany's auto industry. Bosch, who worked in Thomas Edison's factory in New York in 1884, pioneered Germany's eight-hour workday and a wage policy stressing high pay and old-age security for all. In this comprehensive workmanlike biography, published in Germany in 1946, Heuss, who was president of West Germany from 1949 to 1959, portrays Bosch as profoundly alienated from Hitler but reduced to silence. After the industrialist unsuccessfully urged Hitler to seek a rapprochement with France, Bosch's factory reached an accommodation with the Nazis and helped build the German air force. Nevertheless, his firm was viewed with suspicion by the Gestapo, and some of its employees and principals went to prisons or concentration camps. Photos. (May)