A knee shot ends a life
In August 1914, Fritz Langin – like many of his club mates – went to war. A shot in the knee on the Eastern Front in 1916 ended the 23-year-old lieutenant’s footballing joys. In 1919, Sturm honored the founder at a 10-year anniversary, but the center of his life now became Kos near Leoben. Fritz Langin was the school director there, and in 1933 the citizens elected him mayor of Kos in the last free election.
On February 4, 1934, just days before the tragic outbreak of the Civil War, Fritz Lang married and fathered her only son, Helmut, that same year.
Fritz Longin belonged to a generation tormented by wars. On August 8, 1939, he was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the German Wehrmacht. He also survived World War II. In 1945, he was captured by Yugoslavia in Istria and had to stay in the Vrsic camp near Belgrade until February 1949.
Weighing 42 kg, he returned home to Leoben, where he was a secondary school principal until his retirement in 1959. The charismatic Sturm founder died in December 1965 at the age of 72.
Son of Helmut Lang, “General” of a global corporation
DPL. Helmut Langen was the only son of Sturm founder Fritz Langen. Born in 1934, the businessman can look back on a fascinating career path that was by no means predetermined for him. He was a leader like his father.
He graduated from high school in Leoben and after eight semesters at the University of Montana, Longin was already a qualified engineer in March 1957. From 1957 to 1959 he spent his first years as an engineer at the “Frederikswerk” steelworks in Denmark, where he also met his wife Brigitte, with whom he was married for 65 years. In 1960, Helmut Langin accepted an offer from the Austrian-American Magnesite AG in Radenthein, Carinthia, to be closer to his ailing father. The career move continued in 1973: the men at the American parent company recognized Longine’s abilities and appointed him European head of Magnesite AG.
First management buy-in
On April 24, 1987, the Sturm founder’s son organized the first “management buyout” in Austria. With a loan of 800 million schillings, Helmut Longin and his management bought today’s RHI Group, the then Austrian-American Magnesite AG, from the Americans.
“It was a difficult, risky step – and the Giro Center with Tyrolean Dr. At the time the only big bank that understood this was the above Bale,” describes the incredible success story Helmut Langin.
In the same year, the group went public with full success.
In 1990, the RHI Group under Lang acquired “Veitscher Magnesite” and in 1994 Didier from Wiesbaden, the world’s largest refractory producer. Longin is now the world’s largest non-profit with 12,000 employees and sales of 24 billion shillings. After his retirement, he remained active in industry associations for a long time. The enthusiastic glider pilot later retired to Wolfsberg in Carinthia, where he ended his exciting, fulfilling career.
