The Divided Town
Adolf and Rudolf Dassler and the Thirty-Year Cold War of Herzogenaurach
Sirens wailed across the small Franconian town of Herzogenaurach on an autumn night in 1943 as Allied bombers droned toward nearby Nuremberg. Inside the subterranean air-raid shelter of the family villa, cobbler Adolf (Adi) Dassler and his wife Käthe were already huddled in the dark when Adi's older brother and business partner, Rudolf Dassler, hurried down the cellar steps with his wife Friedl. Looking up as a fresh wave of aircraft vibrated the ceiling beams, Adi muttered in German (Da sind die Miststücke wieder) that the dirty bastards were back again. Adi insisted for the rest of his life that he was referring to the Royal Air Force bombers overhead; Rudolf was convinced with equal certainty that Adi was talking about him and his family.
For the previous nineteen years, their partnership inside the Gebrüder Dassler Schuhfabrik (Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory) had been a textbook study in complementary specialization. Working at his cobbler's bench in their mother Pauline's former laundry room, the quiet, obsessive Adi engineered lightweight leather track spikes—including the canvas-and-leather shoes worn by American sprinter Jesse Owens to win four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics—while the extroverted Rudolf ran the sales force and commercial ledger. Yet the wartime pressure cooker of conscription, factory requisitioning, and the post-1945 American denazification hearings poisoned that symmetry. When US military investigators arrested Rudolf on suspicion of Gestapo collaboration, Rudolf saw transcripts indicating that someone inside his immediate circle had denounced him; he blamed Adi and Käthe.
In the spring of 1948, the brothers liquidated their joint partnership and split the company's sewing machines, leather bales, and sixty employees down the middle. Adi remained at the original factory north of the Aurach River, combining his nickname and surname into Adidas; Rudolf marched his faction across the stone bridge to a facility on the south bank of the river, registering his company first as Ruda and then as Puma.
Because both men knew every supplier, last design, and trade secret of the other, their fraternal rupture transformed a sleepy Bavarian town of fewer than ten thousand inhabitants into a hermetically partitioned Cold War enclave:
- * The Geographic and Commercial Split: The Aurach River became a hard ideological border. North-bank residents worked for Adidas, bought bread from Adidas-aligned bakers, drank at Adidas taverns, and had their hair cut by Adidas barbers; south-bank residents patronized exclusively Puma-aligned butchers, pubs, and garages.
- The City of Bent Necks (Stadt der gebeugten Hälse)*: Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Herzogenaurach earned a famous nickname across West Germany because no resident ever initiated a conversation with a stranger without first tilting their chin down to inspect the markings on the person's shoes—three parallel stripes for Adidas, a curved formstrip for Puma.
- * Bifurcated Football and Marriage Taboos: Adi funded and equipped the town's ASV Herzogenaurach football club, while Rudolf sponsored rival 1. FC Herzogenaurach; when a plumber or carpenter from the south bank was called to repair a pipe inside Adi's villa, he was expected to wear battered civilian boots or flip-flops rather than step onto Adidas property in Pumas, and intermarriage between families of the two factories was treated as a clan betrayal.
- * The Global Innovation Ratchet: What made the Herzogenaurach feud an industrial engine rather than a mere village quarrel was that bilateral hatred forced both firms into hyper-vigilant technological competition. After Rudolf refused to supply West Germany's national football coach Sepp Herberger in 1954, Adi equipped the German squad with revolutionary screw-in nylon cleats that could be lengthened at halftime during the torrential rain of the Bern World Cup final, allowing West Germany to upset heavily favored Hungary 3–2. Puma retaliated at the 1960 Rome Olympics by secretly paying German sprinter Armin Hary to win the 100-meter dash in Pumas, only for Hary to lace up Adidas shoes for the medal ceremony in hopes of collecting cash envelopes from both brothers.
By the 1970 World Cup in Mexico City, the rivalry had passed to their sons, Horst Dassler of Adidas and Armin Dassler of Puma, who concluded a secret truce dubbed the Pelé Pact agreeing that neither firm would trigger a ruinous bidding war for the Brazilian superstar. Days before the opening match, Puma representative Hans Henningsen broke the pact by paying Pelé $120,000 to walk to the center circle at kickoff, signal the referee for a delay, and bend down on live global television satellites to tie his Puma King boots for forty seconds. Adi and Rudolf never spoke another word to each other in public. Even in death inside the Herzogenaurach municipal cemetery in 1974 and 1978, the two brothers maintained their geometry, buried at the farthest opposite corners of the graveyard with the entire length of the grounds between them.