Kreitz, Hubertus

Clock manufacturer

born: 26.03.1811 in Monschau

died: 02.04.1896 in Biebrich

The son of a merchant, he learned the watchmaker's trade in London and Paris. In 1837, he settled in St. Petersburg and found a job in a watch store on Nevsky Prospekt, the city's boulevard, which he later took over.

Kreitz achieved astonishing skill in the manufacture of clocks. He bought the movements in Switzerland and France and then "refined" them into precious works of art in order to sell them to a wealthy clientele. His clocks with day and month indications as well as the phases of the moon - the so-called calendar clocks - and his unusually small clocks were world-famous. According to tradition, the three smallest pocket watches in the world, each the size of a small American gold dollar, were owned by Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna (1798-1860), the wife of Tsar Nicholas I, Queen Victoria of England and Kreitz's daughter Eugenia Kreitz.

Kreitz acquired such a fortune with his watches in a short space of time that he was able to retire as a millionaire several times over as early as 1855. After living in Hamburg and Wiesbaden, he settled in Biebrich in 1870. Here the family moved into their first villa in Rheingaustraße (in the immediate vicinity of Biebrich Palace), which Kreitz had built according to his own designs by Wiesbaden architect Ludwig Euler.

Kreitz can be regarded as the greatest benefactor of the small Catholic community in Biebrich. In 1890, he had the spire of St. Mary's Church, which was consecrated in 1876, extended, donated the high Gothic altar with the statues of saints (which are now in the choir), the pulpit, the communion bench, three stained glass windows and arranged for the neo-Gothic painting of the choir.

Kreitz found his final resting place next to his wife, who died in 1885, in the Briebrich cemetery in a prestigious crypt. Hubertusstraße commemorates him.