Helmut Horten was one of the exceptional entrepreneurs that brought economic prosperity to the Federal Republic of Germany after WWII. Helmut Horten created the first German supermarket based on American consumption habits at the end of the 1950s.

He listed the firm on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 1968, with 25,000 employees and a turnover of € 1 billion in West German marks.

Helmut Horten was born in Bonn, Kingdom of Prussia, on January 8, 1909. His father worked as a judge.

Horten worked as an apprentice in a Leonhard Tietz department store in Düsseldorf before joining the Gebrüder Alsberg (Alsberg brothers) company in Duisburg.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, Horten was able to buy the company from its Jewish proprietors, Strauß and Lauter, who had fled to the United States.

From 1966 until he died in 1987, Horten was married to Heidi Jelinek. Horten lived the life of a wealthy man, with a BAC 1-11 private plane, a fleet of private yachts named Carinthia, and a home in Mülheim a der Ruhr.  His $1 billion wealth was left to his widow.