Biography|Werner Baumann — Born in Krefeld Beside This Civic Palace

People treat Bayer chiefs as products of the Leverkusen works.

Werner Baumann was born on 6 October 1962 in Krefeld, a textile city on the Lower Rhine about sixty kilometres from the plant he would later run.

Munzinger records that he was the son of a baker's family.

Manager Magazin later described the bakery as just large enough to feed them if everyone worked, and too small to survive the chain shops spreading through the city.

The exact house is still a private address, so this pin sits on the civic palace that stands for the city that raised him.

Krefeld's Rathaus at Von-der-Leyen-Platz 1 began as the late-eighteenth-century town palace of the silk family von der Leyen.

The city converted it into a town hall in 1859 and 1860.

Company and press profiles agree he was the first in his family to attend university.

That is the origin that matters here: a baker's son from this city who would spend thirty-five years inside one firm.

Bayer's own history page and the German and English Wikipedia biographies all give the same birth date and city.

Nothing in the public record names a hospital wing or a street number that a visitor should look for.

Stand on Von-der-Leyen-Platz instead.

The six-column facade is the public face of the town that produced him.

Photo: Philipp Beckers, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo: World Economic Forum, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (portrait, Davos 2022)