Manfréd Weiss von Csepel (1857–1922)

Manfréd Weiss, later Baron von Csepel, was an Austro-Hungarian industrialist in several sectors during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the time of the First World War he employed some 30,000 people, principally in manufacturing armaments.

Weiss came from a family of merchants in Budapest, where he studied at the commercial academy. As a teenager he worked at Hamburg in Germany in the colonial goods trade but at the age of 19 he came back to Budapest to take over his father’s grain-trading company. In 1883, he and his brother Berthold established the first canning factory in Hungary with large buildings on Lövölde Square. It produced canned meat under the brand name Globus but soon also began making gun cartridges. Two years later he opened a textile factory at Ružomberok (now in Slovakia).

By 1890, the arms industry was the most important branch of Weiss’s activities. He opened a subsidiary in Berlin to produce gun magazines. The canning factory moved from the city centre to the island of Csepel in the Danube after an explosion in the cartridge workshops. It began making rifles and other armaments; a mobile army kitchen that Weiss designed was manufactured for many decades. By around 1898 the factorry employed 1,600 people. In 1911, he founded a steel works at Csepel with the name Manfred Weiss, Munitions-, Stahl- und Metallwerke, which not only supplied armaments to Austria-Hungary but exported them to Britain, Russia, Spain and Italy. During the First World War, his factories supplied cartridges, shells and canned meat and coffee.

With the end of the war, the factory contracted from 30,000 to only 400 workers. It was confiscated by the new Soviet Republic and Weiss attempted suicide. However, he returned to the factory and focused on civilian production of steel parts and goods such as agricultural machinery, stoves, bicycles and sewing machines. Before his death in 1922 he began producing aircraft and was again employing 10,000. As a philanthropist in Budapest he ran a soup kitchen and built a hospital, maternity home, sanatorium for tuberculosis patients and nursery for his workers’ children.