Brenntag
company
Brenntag SE is the holding company of Brenntag Group. The company was founded in 1874 in Berlin and specializes in the distribution of chemicals and ingredients. The company is headquartered in Essen, Germany and has operations in more than 600 locations in 72 countries.
History
Founding
Brenntag was founded on 9 October 1874, in Berlin by the Jewish merchant Philipp Mühsam (14 November 1848 – 17 May 1914) under his own name. At first, the company Philipp Mühsam was an agricultural wholesale business, whose most successful product was eggs. In 1879, Philipp Mühsam entered the trade of pharmaceutical raw materials, the so-called ‘drugs.’ By 1881, according to the sources, the company was distributing chemicals, dyes, drugs and also agricultural products, though the latter only in small quantities. In November 1923, the founder’s son, Dr. Kurt Mühsam (31 December 1887 – 20 March 1928), together with his business partner Julius Herz, converted the company into a joint stock corporation.
National Socialism and post-war period
Julius Herz, who after Kurt Mühsam’s death owned 91% of the share capital of Philipp Mühsam AG, presented a sales offer for the company to the entrepreneurs Hugo Hermann Stinnes and Otto Stinnes on Christmas Eve 1936. On 20 February 1937, the sale of all shares in Philipp Mühsam AG was contractually finalized.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q828445. VIAF identifies the subject as 147242255. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1874, 1848, 1914 and 1879.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brenntag” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.