Felix Wankel

Felix Heinrich Wankel (13 August 1902 – 9 October 1988) was a German mechanical engineer and inventor after whom the Wankel engine was named.

Wankel was born in 1902 in Lahr in what was then the Grand Duchy of Baden in the Upper Rhine Plain of present-day southwestern Germany.

He was the only son of Gerty Wankel (née Heidlauff) and Rudolf Wankel, a forest assessor.

His father died in World War I.

Thereafter, the family moved to Heidelberg.

During the early 1920s Wankel was a member of various radical anti-Semitic organizations.

He went to high schools in Donaueschingen, Heidelberg, and Weinheim, and left school without Abitur in 1921.

In 1921 he joined the Heidelberg branch of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund and in 1922 he became a member of the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers Party (or "Nazi Party"), which was banned soon afterwards.

Wankel founded and led youth groups associated with a cover-up organization of the NSDAP.

With them he conducted paramilitary training, scouting games and night walks.

He and some friends had already run an unofficial afterwork machine shop in a backyard shed in Heidelberg since 1924.

Wankel was now determined to receive unemployment benefits and to focus on the machine shop.

True to this prediction, he conceived the Wankel engine in 1924 and won his first patent in 1929.

He learned the trade of purchaser at the Carl Winter Press in Heidelberg and worked for the publishing house until June 1926.

Here Wankel not only rejoined the party in 1926, but also met the local Gauleiter, i.e. regional head of the NSDAP party, Robert Heinrich Wagner.

One of his friends, who had graduated from university, gave his name and transformed the shop into an official garage for DKW and Cleveland motor bikes in 1927, where Wankel worked from time to time until his arrest in 1933.

Wankel was gifted since childhood with an ingenious spatial imagination and became interested in the world of machines, especially combustion engines.

After his mother was widowed, Wankel could not afford university education or even an apprenticeship.

He was, however, able to teach himself technical subjects.

At age 17 he told friends that he had dreamt of constructing a car with "a new type of engine, half turbine, half reciprocating. It is my invention!".

When his high esteem for technical innovations was not widely shared among the German Youth Movement, he was offered instead the opportunity to talk about the issue of technology and education to Adolf Hitler and other leading National Socialists in 1928.

In the meantime Wankel's mother, Gerty had helped founding the local chapter of the NSDAP in his hometown of Lahr.

In 1931 Wagner entrusted Wankel with the leadership of the Hitler Youth in Baden.

But they soon fell out with each other, because Wankel tried to put a stronger emphasis on military training, whereas Wagner wished for the Hitler Youth to be a primarily political organization.

In a particularly bitter and ugly controversy Wankel publicly accused Wagner of corruption.

Wagner retaliated by stripping Wankel of his office by early 1932 and managed to have him expelled from the party in October 1932.

Wankel, who sympathized with the social-revolutionary wing of the NSDAP with Gregor Strasser, then founded his own National Socialist splinter group in Lahr and continued his attacks on Wagner.

Since the Nazis' seizure of power on 30 January 1933 had strengthened his position, Wagner had Wankel arrested and imprisoned in the Lahr jail in March 1933.

Only by intervention of Hitler's economic adviser Wilhelm Keppler and Hitler himself, was Wankel set free in September 1933.

A fellow native of Baden and member of Reichstag from 1933 to 1945, Keppler had been a friend of Wankel and an ardent supporter of his technological endeavors since 1927.

He now helped Wankel to get state contracts and his own Wankels Versuchs Werkstätten experimental workshop in Lindau.

Wankel tried to rejoin the NSDAP in 1937, but was turned down.

With the help of Keppler, however, he was admitted to the SS in 1940 in the rank of Obersturmbannführer.

Two years later his membership was revoked for unknown reasons.

During World War II, Wankel developed seals and rotary valves for German air force aircraft and navy torpedoes, as well as for companies such as BMW and Daimler-Benz.

After the war, the region was occupied by France.

Wankel was imprisoned by French authorities for several months in 1945 and his laboratory was closed by French occupation troops.

Wankel's work was confiscated and he was prohibited from doing any more work.

However, by 1951, he got funding from the Goetze AG company to furnish the new Technical Development Center in his privately owned house in Lindau on Lake Constance.

He began development of the engine at NSU Motorenwerke AG, leading to the first running prototype on 1 February 1957.