The kidnapping of Theo Albrecht in 1971 sounds like the kind of headline people repeat at parties and then half dismiss. But it happened. One evening in Essen, West Germany, Albrecht was grabbed outside his office, shoved into a car at gunpoint, and driven away. For seventeen days, the man who built his fortune on staying anonymous could not disappear. He became news.
By then, Theo and his brother Karl had already turned their parents’ small Essen shop into something enormous by staying stubborn about the basics. The stores were plain. The selection was tight. Anything that raised the price without helping the customer was cut, and goods moved fast. It was not glamorous, but shoppers felt the difference in their wallets, and Aldi grew into a quiet machine.
That kind of success paints a target, even if the owner tries to live like he is not there. The scheme came from Heinz Joachim Ollenburg, a lawyer buried in debt, and Paul Kron, a convicted safecracker known as “Diamond Paul.” Their plan had nerve, but it also had moments so sloppy they read as almost farcical on paper. At one point they tried to hide Theo in a rolled up carpet, then discovered the carpet was too small. In the end they kept him in a cramped alcove inside Ollenburg’s own law office in Düsseldorf, which was both bold and oddly domestic, as if they had run out of better ideas.
The kidnappers demanded 7 million Deutsche Marks, the largest ransom in Europe at the time. Theo, famous for counting every penny, reportedly tried early on to bargain it down to 100,000. Police pressure did not make things simpler, and an undercover attempt to pose as the Albrecht family nearly blew up the exchange. What finally got the handoff done was an unexpected negotiator: Bishop Franz Hengsbach of Essen. He offered the kidnappers reassurance through the seal of confession, then delivered the cash himself, wrapped like Christmas presents, to a lonely dirt road.
Theo was released unharmed on December 16, 1971, and the men who took him did not stay free for long. Kron’s voice was recorded during a phone call and aired on national television, and his own sister recognized it while they sat together over coffee and cake. Ollenburg unraveled in a different way, more jitter than swagger. His “dirty pants,” tied to burying money in the woods, were enough to spook his girlfriend into bringing evidence to police. Both men were caught and sentenced, and Theo retreated further afterward, moving around in armored cars and keeping himself out of sight. He later tried, without success, to claim the ransom as a tax-deductible business expense.
Aldi, and later Trader Joe’s, kept expanding, and the business story has plenty of chapters. Still, it is the kidnapping that sticks in people’s minds, because it shows what extreme wealth can draw in from the shadows. It also captures the strange mix this case ran on: a discount empire, a criminal shakedown, and a bishop carrying gift-wrapped bundles of cash. That combination is hard to forget.