Peter Zinkann

Peter Christian Zinkann was born in Bremen on 17 September 1928. His mother was Edith Zinkann, née Birkholz, and his father was Kurt-Christian Zinkann (1904 to 1985), a manufacturer and violinist who took over the management of Miele with Carl Miele junior in 1939. His grandfather Reinhard Zinkann (1869 to 1939) had founded the company with Carl Miele in 1899 near Gütersloh, at first making cream separators before moving into washing machines.

Zinkann later said that as a boy he had a Märklin metal construction set and an electric train, and that this was where his love of engineering began; he was convinced early on that his future lay with Miele. At Easter 1944, aged 15, he was called up as an anti-aircraft auxiliary (Flakhelfer) and served at Gütersloh airfield. He later reflected that being born in 1928 rather than a year earlier had spared him from being sent to the front.

He passed his Abitur in 1949 at the Evangelisch Stiftisches Gymnasium in Gütersloh, then studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt and at the Handelshochschule St. Gallen. He qualified as a Diplom-Ingenieur and in 1956 was awarded a doctorate in economics (Dr. rer. pol.) at Darmstadt for a dissertation on quantifying the IFO business cycle survey.

Zinkann joined Miele on 1 January 1957, representing the third generation of his family in the business, which has always been wholly owned by the Miele and Zinkann families. In 1958 he developed the company's first fully automatic front-loading washing machine, which became a central pillar of Miele's later growth. Many further technical innovations followed that he initiated or brought to patent. German Wikipedia records 80 patent applications filed by him at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office, and the newspaper Die Glocke reported in 2018 that he had acquired more than 150 patent rights.

On 20 December 1972 he became a managing partner with sole signing authority. For more than four decades he and his partner Rudolf Miele led the group together: Miele was responsible for commercial affairs, while Zinkann was regarded as the technical innovator. After Rudolf Miele died in August 2004, Zinkann gave up his post as managing director at the end of that year for reasons of age, though he remained a partner and stayed closely involved. Well into his nineties he still drove to his office for two to three hours a day to work on improvements to Miele appliances with the company's specialists.

Outside Miele he sat on the supervisory boards of Friedr. Krupp Stahl AG, Flender GmbH in Bocholt and Kienzle Apparate GmbH in Villingen-Schwenningen, served on the board of the Technischer Überwachungsverein in Cologne, and chaired the Westphalian regional advisory board of Dresdner Bank. He was a Rotarian.

Zinkann was a Protestant. In 1958 he married Karin Rohe, who held a doctorate in philosophy and became a prominent patron in Gütersloh. They were married for 67 years, until her death in Gütersloh on 23 July 2025 at the age of 92. Their son, Reinhard Zinkann, born in 1959, has been a managing partner of Miele since 1999. The family's death notice for Karin Zinkann recorded that two other children, Stephanie Elisabeth and Philipp Georg, had died before her.

He chaired the Kurt Zinkann foundation for music, which supported gifted young musicians, and the Erich and Katharina Zinkann foundation, which supported science and research in health care, and he was closely associated with the Miele Foundation, set up in 1974 to support youth work. Asked about his long life on his 90th birthday, he said that he had simply had a great deal of luck.

Peter Zinkann died in Gütersloh on 19 October 2026, at the age of 98. The cause of death has not been made public.

Miele marked his death with an In Memoriam website, run on the company's behalf, which took leave of him as a holder of the Federal Cross of Merit, longtime managing partner of the Miele Group and honorary citizen of Gütersloh. It said that over four decades he had shaped the company's development with entrepreneurial foresight, responsibility and a spirit of innovation, and that his technical expertise and inventiveness were as striking as his social, cultural and economic commitment. The site invited the public to leave messages of condolence. Funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of writing.

Zinkann is remembered as the engineer behind much of Miele's reputation for durable, technically advanced household appliances, beginning with the fully automatic front loader of 1958. With Rudolf Miele he steered the family firm from a regional manufacturer into an international group, financed without bank loans and still wholly owned by the two founding families.

When he received the Federal Cross of Merit in 2006, North Rhine-Westphalia's economics minister Christa Thoben said that his effort to bring what was economically right into line with what was humanly right had earned him an unusual degree of trust and affection. His honours included induction into the Manager Magazin Hall of Fame (1999), honorary citizenship of Gütersloh (2003), an honorary senatorship of Paderborn University and the Carl Heinrich Dencker pin of the University of Bonn for services to household technology.