Jindřich Waldes

Jindřich Waldes (also Heinrich Waldes or Henry Waldes) 2 July 1876 Nemyšl – 1 July 1941 Havana was a leading industrialist, founder of the Waldes Koh-i-noor Company, Czech patriot of Jewish origin and art collector.

Karel Waldes, father of Jindřich, had an inn and a small haberdashery shop in the village of Nemyšl near the town of Tábor in southern Bohemia. He wanted his son to continue his business but Jindřich found a position of a clerk at the firm of Eduard Lokesch and Son in Prague. This company made buttons and cufflinks. As Waldes had a good knowledge of languages he became Lokesch’s business agent and travelled the world on behalf of the firm. In 1902 together with an engineer Hynek Puc (1856–1938) Waldes left Lokesch and founded his own company Waldes a spol. A year later Puc invented a special machine that inserted a small spring into concealed dress fasteners, the main product of the new firm. The new machine supplemented labour of ten skilled workers. With the increased production Puc kept inventing more machines to support the manufacture of pins, safety pins, needles and buttons. The world-renowned Waldes trademark, Miss KIN, came about in 1912 when Waldes on his ocean trip met Elizabeth Coyne who playfully put one fastener in her eye. František Kupka painted her portrait in oils and Vojtěch Preissig from it designed the firm’s trademark. The other trade names used were Koh-i-noor and Otello.

Waldes Koh-i-noor headquarters were located in Prague suburbs of Vršovice. Soon the company grew to a large concern with branch factories in Warsaw, Dresden, Vienna, Paris, Barcelona and New York City.

On 1 September 1939 Waldes was imprisoned by Gestapo after the Third Reich occupation of Czechoslovakia and kept in concentration camps Dachau and Buchenwald, arriving in Dachau on September 10, 1939 and transferred to Buchenwald on September 26 of the same year. In 1941 his family, who were sent to USA by Waldes before the war (he decided to remain in Prague as a Czech patriot) paid the Nazi authorities 8 million Czech crowns (about 1 Million Reichsmarks or $250,000 US) ransom. In Buchenwald he suffered a diabetic attack, and was in the prison hospital from 11 April 1940 until his release on 2 June 1941. The Gestapo then transported Waldes by plane to Lisbon, Portugal, where he boarded a United States-bound ship. However, Waldes did not survive the journey to the USA and died under suspicious circumstances on the ship which stopped at Havana, Cuba in May 1941.

...
Wikipedia