Helmut Claas was a significant European agri machinery business personality.
Helmut Claas, long-time Managing Director, Chairman of the Supervisory Board and Chairman of the Shareholders’ Committee of the CLAAS group, has died on January 5, 2021 at the age of 94.
His death has come as a great shock. Along with the family and all of the relatives, not only are well over 11,000 employees around the world mourning, but so too is an entire industry which, in Helmut Claas, has lost a significant European business personality.
Helmut Claas was born in 1926 in Harsewinkel. His parents, August and Paula Claas, managed a small agricultural machinery firm with a workforce of around 100. He completed an apprenticeship as a machine fitter after graduating from school. Practical experience followed in metalworking firms, and further practical training in casting. After a complementary study of agriculture in Paris, he took over the planning and establishment of a CLAAS distributor in France, which now operates as CLAAS France SAS. He joined his parents’ family firm in Harsewinkel in 1958. Here he applied himself initially to his particular area of expertise, which was engineering.
In 1962 he was made Managing Director. Helmut Claas accepted the position of Personally Liable Partner when the company was reconstituted as a general partnership in 1978. In 1996, as part of the restructuring of the firm into a joint-stock company, he changed from the role of Managing Director to the position of Chairman of both the Supervisory Board and the Shareholders’ Committee.
His special focus was always on developing pioneering products and mass-producing them economically. During his era, following the success of the combine harvester model DOMINATOR, came the completely new combine harvester construction the LEXION, which is today the most efficient combine harvester in the world. Also, the JAGUAR forage harvester and the large tractor XERION were developed under Helmut Claas, author of the success story.
