One of the pioneers of the German retail landscape, Otto Beisheim, is dead. On Feb. 18, he took his own life at his home at a lake in Bavaria, faced with an incurable disease. He was 89. Beisheim was one of the co-founders of Metro, Europe's leading cash & carry group, which also controls retail operations such as Media Markt and Saturn for consumer electronics, the Real supermarkets, and the Galeria Kaufhof chain of department stores along with its Sportarena specialty sporting goods stores. Metro was founded in 1963 by two entrepreneurs in Essen, Germany. One year later, Beisheim's then-employer, the Schell family, acquired a stake in Metro along with the Franz Haniel retail company. Simultaneously, Beisheim became both Metro's chief executive and a shareholder. In 1964, the Beisheim family held one-third of Metro, as did the Haniels and another family. Beisheim went to the U.S. to learn about and finally copy a wholesale concept that was basically unknown in Europe at that time: the cash & carry way of wholesale trading. In 1996, when Beisheim was no longer at the operating helm of the group, Metro bcame listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange folllowing the merger of Metro, Kaufhof and other companies earlier that year. The late Beisheim, who held some 10 percent of the Metro shares until his death, spent the last years of his life on various charities and other activities, including a €50 million donation to a private business school that bears his name. The dark spot in his biography was his membership in the Waffen-SS during World War II, even though no information became public on his actual activities in that unit. His name stands side-by-side with other entrepreneurs of the post-war generation who are still considered the founding fathers of the German economy and the architects of the miracle that it enjoyed in the 1950s and early 1960s, including the Albrecht brothers (Aldi), Gustav Schickedanz (Quelle), Josef Neckermann, Ferry Porsche, Max Grundig and many more.

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