The press tycoon whose grandson was kidnapped

Night of January 20-21, 1985. Location of Zuoz, in the Swiss canton of Grisons. Two shadows move silently through one of the rooms of the Lyceum Alpinum boarding school, where the children of Central Europe's great fortunes study. The two masked men wake a nineteen-year-old young man who was sleeping peacefully and convince him to accompany them when they show him a pistol. After hours of travel in a car confined to the trunk, they lock him in a room and force him to record a message intended for his family in which he asks for a ransom of 15 million German marks, a fortune in itself (about 825 million pesetas at that time, or almost 5 million euros).

Who was this young man for whom the kidnappers expected to get so much money? His name was Axel Sven Springer and he was the favorite grandson of the great German press magnate, Axel Springer, a rich and powerful man.

Your grandfather's business history began when, after gaining experience working in his father's publishing business and at a news agency, he decided to take the leap and set up his own company. This happened in 1946, just after the Second World War when the country was devastated and under the control of the Allied forces. Under these conditions, and after two years of advertising work, he managed to bring out his first newspaper, the "Hamburger Abendblatt.

In 1952 he would create his second masthead, the Bild-Zeitung, aimed at a low-profile audience and managing to become the best-selling newspaper in Europe, exceeding five million copies. It was what the British call a tabloid. Many years later, Springer even said that he found it very distressing to read this newspaper, a product made with laundry, sex, crime, and sports in equal measure.

Beyond the popular press, even in his early years as a publisher, the ideological pillars that would define him began to emerge: anti-communism, defense of Israel and the United States, economic liberalism, and the will to reunify Germany. To highlight this last point, in 1959 he moved the company's headquarters to Berlin, right next to the wall that split the city in two. The other major newspaper he acquired in the early fifties was "The world, which aimed to be a quality read.

Since then, the Springer empire continued to grow and became the most influential media group on the continent. Its right-wing view of current affairs put it in the crosshairs of the German left at the time, which organized protests against the publications it controlled. The peak of the conflict came on May 19, 1972, when the terrorist group Red Army Faction —also known as Baader Meinhof by the surnames of its ideologues— attacked the printing press of the Image, with the result of 17 injured.

In the fifties, he also acquired the prestigious Ullstein Verlag publishing house and the newspaper Berliner Morgenpost, both of Jewish origin. Such rapid growth in the immediate post-war period aroused certain suspicions that behind Springer was the financing of a United States eager to shape German public opinion. Suspicions that seemed to have some plausibility.

A complicated life

His personal life was also turbulent, with five marriages —the last one, to his children's caregiver, thirty years his junior— and, above all, the suicide of his heir, Axel, who shot himself in the head in the midst of a severe depression when he was thirty-eight years old. To top it off, someone set fire to two of the German magnate's properties.

By the way, how did the kidnapping of his grandson end? The impossibility of collecting the ransom led to the kidnappers releasing him a few days after holding him captive.

Initially, the German police suspected that the whole affair was a simulation perpetrated by Axel Sven himself, but in the end, it turned out that the kidnappers were two young former students from the same school where he studied and that they had planned it during a few days they spent at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

A few months after all this affair, in September 1985, the German magnate died from long-standing respiratory problems. At the time of his death, one out of every three newspapers sold in Germany came from his factory. Today, the Axel Springer SE conglomerate has annual revenues exceeding two billion euros and owns titles such as the aforementioned Bild and Die Welt, as well as Business Insider, Politico, and Fakt.