Wily Willy

Jutting out of the clutter of Hamburg's docks is a giant rooftop sign that pinpoints the location of the big, busy Schliekerwerft. The yard is named after its owner, tough Willy Schlieker, who operates a worldwide complex of 15 shipyards, steel mills and trading companies with a yearly gross of $150 million. At 45, Moneymaker Schlieker is the youngest of postwar Germany's Wirtschaftswunder-knaben (economic wonderboys).

Last week he was busy filling orders for 15 ore carriers, bulk carriers, tankers and escort vessels for U.S. companies and the German navy. His ultramodern yard sends ships down the ways so fast that Schlieker does not even bother to take down tents and grandstands used for launching ceremonies. The 300,000-sq.-ft. yard has the biggest (capacity: 100,000 tons) drydock in Europe, an optical tracing device that projects cutting patterns on steel plates. Overseeing all is an electronic brain named "Big Brother" that tells Schlieker which machines have not worked at full capacity and why. From keel to launching, Willy can build a 20,000-ton vessel in three months. This year 170,000 tons will slide down his ways.

On the Tight Rope. Born in the Hamburg slums shortly before the start of World War I. Schlieker started kicking his way ahead during the Depression, became in rapid succession a farmhand, a clerk in a Nazi law court, a chamberpot salesman in Haiti. Back in Germany in ,1938, Willy caught the attention of the Ruhr's huge Vereinigte Stahlwerke, which made him their lobbyist to the Nazi government. So well did Party Member Schlieker lobby that he was eventually taken into the government as chief of the entire steel industry. His age: 28.

After the war, Schlieker was bounced between the Russians, French and Americans, eventually got the British to give him practically the same job he had under the Nazis: allocating the crumbled remains of German steel for peaceful uses. Eventually, Ruhr steelmen who had many a wartime grudge to settle initiated denazification proceedings against Schlieker, forced the British to fire him.

"Instinct." That did not stop Willy. After the Berlin blockade, he bought the old Silesian trading firm, Otto R. Krause, then proceeded (with Allied permission) to ship $16 million worth of steel to Grermany's Communist zone. His profit: $1,000,000. With the money he bought a steel mill, a rolling mill, a machine shop. During the Korean war, Schlieker shipped millions of tons of U.S. coal to Germany, hundreds of thousands of tons of German steel back to the States at handsome profits. When the war was over, he unloaded 50,000 tons of top-priced steel to desperate Ruhr traders just as the price broke. Said Willy: "You cannot learn hat; you must know it by instinct."

Schlieker is often accused of shady dealing, but no one has ever made a charge stick. Though the shipyard gets much of his time, more than half of schlieker's profits still come from trading, specially in steel. When questioned about he future, he says only: "I have no imperialistic ambitions." But as a British intelligence report once noted: "He is a ruthless opportunist, vain, ambitious, and egotistical . . . who seems destined for leading role in Ruhr industry, whatever orm of organization it adopts in the future."

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