Hans-Jürgen Wischhof was passionately committed to the versatility of the Unimog implement carrier.

From the very beginning.

We sit down and Hans-Jürgen Wischhof begins his account. To begin at the beginning: he was born in 1939 and grew up on a farm near Uelzen in the Lüneburger Heide region of Germany. That was where he first encountered the Unimog. A neighbour was using a Unimog U 25 on his farm. And another one was in operation in a neighbouring village at a saw mill – but not limited to that; it was also fitted with a Holder sprayer body for crop protection. After finishing school, an apprenticeship, military service with the air force and an agricultural internship, he did a mechanical engineering degree at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne.

From 1965 Hans-Jürgen Wischhof was a consultant in the technical division of the Trade Association for Agricultural Machinery on behalf of the Mechanical and Plant Engineering Association (VDMA). The Association represented the interests of the agricultural machinery industry on a national, European and international level. And as a result he was also responsible for the Unimog. "From the moment it was launched, the Unimog was a very special kind of vehicle that just didn’t fit any of the official boxes with regard to registration regulations," the experienced consultant remembers. "The fight to have the Unimog classified as an agricultural or forestry tractor took ten years in West Germany and an incredible 47 years in the European Union."

A bond based on shared enthusiasm.

At the start of his career at the VDMA Hans-Jürgen Wischhof met one of the founding fathers of the Unimog personally: engineer Heinrich Rößler, who had developed the all-rounder together with Albert Friedrich and Hans Zabel. The two remained in close contact until the 1980s. Their main focus was to position the Unimog as a multi-functional motor vehicle with special rights.

"In April 1980 my career path took me straight to the heart of the Unimog world," Hans-Jürgen Wischhof remembers. At Daimler-Benz AG, as it was known at the time, he was first employed in the development of the Unimog and MB-trac. "Then the first intensive discussions about the further development of the future light-duty and medium-duty model series of Unimog as well as an expansion of the MB-trac range were already underway. The Unimog in particular was confronted with new legal requirements which were the result of international specifications for trucks."

In 1989, at the suggestion of the Board of Management, Hans-Jürgen Wischhof established a representative office for the corporation in Brussels and then took on the set-up and management of the Mercedes-Benz AG press office where he was responsible for press and public relations as well as traffic policies. "A year later, the job was done," he recaps. " I was 50 years old and looking for a new challenge."

So on 08 March 1990, Hans-Jürgen Wischhof became Head of the newly created Unimog business unit in Gaggenau. "By the mid-1990s we had achieved a fundamental change there. Based on the development philosophy of the UX 100 and a market survey completed across Europe, we decided in future to classify the Unimog in two fundamentally different model series: the professional implement carrier and the classic, highly mobile Unimog – of course with as many common parts in terms of value as possible," he explains.