Shortly before 5pm on Monday night, Adolf Merckle quietly put on his coat, told his wife "I have to go to the office for a while", and drove to a railway embankment near his home, where he lay on the frozen tracks and waited patiently for death.

Merckle was once ranked as one of the 100 richest men in the world, with an £8.5 billion personal fortune, but he had seen his wealth ebbing away as the global recession took hold, leaving him a "broken" man, according to his family.

To casual observers, it appeared that the 74-year-old businessman had committed suicide because he was unable to cope with losing the sort of riches the rest of us can only dream of.

Yet the trappings of wealth meant nothing to Merckle; to him money was simply an inevitable by-product of his success, never a goal in itself.

He lived so modestly that he cycled to work on a 15-year-old bike for most of the year, and in bad weather he drove a four-year-old VW Golf. He had no bodyguards or servants, lived in an unimposing chalet-style house in the small town of Blaubeuren, his home for the past 60 years, without so much as a CCTV camera for protection, and stopped off at his local pub on his way home each night to share a drink with the regulars.

The suicide note which Merckle left for his wife, Ruth, and four grown-up children provided no clues to the motive for his suicide. It simply said: "I'm sorry."

The industrialist's friends and family blame his demise on a complex combination of pride, guilt over what he saw as failing his family, and, perhaps most importantly, loss of control. "His companies were his life and when he was going to lose control of them he obviously felt he would lose control of his life, that is the only way I can see it," said Ernst Junger, a friend in Blaubeuren.

A short statement released by Merckle's family said the "powerlessness of not being able to do anything" had been the key to his suicide. But Merckle, who spent the last day of his life negotiating a rescue package for his business empire, still had plenty of options and was in a strong position to ride out the recession. Was there something else which he simply couldn't face?

Merckle had devoted his life to building up the family business originally founded by his grandfather in 1881 as a drugs company. When he inherited it from his father in 1967, having worked as a lawyer for several years, the company had just 80 employees and sales of £1.6 million.

Over the following decades, he built up the pharmaceuticals business and diversified into cement manufacturing and recycling until he had 100,000 employees worldwide and sales of about £31 billion from 120 different companies.

In Britain, his Phoenix Group, based in Runcorn, Cheshire, employs 6,500 people through its drugs wholesale business (the third largest in the country) and the 500-strong Rowlands pharmacy chain.

Merckle's other business interests here included the building supplies business Hanson, Castle Cement, the recycling company SRM and Minerals Resource Management, which recycles materials used in the cement industry.

What baffles Merckle's friends most of all about his death is that he was by no means ruined. True, his holding company had lost £400 million by betting on the falling price of VW shares in October, just before Porsche announced that it had secretly built up a controlling stake in the company and sent share prices rocketing.

Yet Merckle's personal fortune still stood at around £6 billion and, on the day he killed himself, he had successfully negotiated a £360 million bridging loan to keep his holding company, VEM Vermogensverwaltung, afloat.

Although the share values of some of his companies had fallen dramatically, his giant pharmaceuticals businesses were still in decent shape and he could easily have weathered the financial storm. There was, however, a price to pay. Under the terms of the £360 million loan agreement made on the day of his death, Merckle had agreed to sell the drugs manufacturing company Ratiopharm, which employs 5,400 people, to pay back the debt.

There had also been speculation that the British arm of Phoenix Group would be sold (the company insists no decision had yet been taken). But industry analysts have suggested it would have been snapped up by a rival firm for a healthy price.

Even if Merckle had sold off several companies, the bulk of his empire would have remained intact – but his creditors had also made it clear that the bridging loan was conditional on his son Ludwig, named after Merckle's father, stepping down as director of VEM.

Was this the final indignity which tipped Merckle over the edge?

Commentators in Germany have suggested that Merckle, steeped in the family business from the day he was born, regarded the duty to pass the torch on to his children as his most important role in life. For his son to be given his marching orders by the banks was surely, to him, the ultimate failure.

He may also have felt he had failed his ancestors, who managed to keep the family firm going through two world wars and the Great Depression.

Merckle, raised as a strict Lutheran, spent his childhood in the Sudetenland, the contested strip of territory in the former Czechoslovakia, where the family business was based.

The company was seized by the Nazis to make medicines for the armed forces during the Second World War, but the Merckles risked everything by refusing to join the Nazi party or allow young Adolf to join the Hitler Youth. Their principled stand paid off when the Allies handed the company back to them at the end of the war, though the Merckles still had to flee the newly Communist Czechoslovakia in 1945. They re-established the family firm in Blaubeuren, the south German hometown of Adolf's mother, where he remained to his last day.

As he built up his companies, becoming the world's 94th richest man, according to Forbes magazine, he created thousands of jobs and enriched the local community by paying for a sports hall, kindergarten and other facilities.

Unlike George Bailey, the character played by Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, Merckle had no guardian angel to bring him back from the brink of suicide by showing him how much he was valued by his family and friends, and how little they cared about the profit margins of his companies.

As flowers, cards and candles continued to be laid by well-wishers outside the Merckle family home, Sabine Wildermut, who works for the local council, said: "You'll find this town in mourning because no one can comprehend what has taken place."

Elisabet Schmidt, a neighbour, said: "No one begrudged him his success. He was just one of us, one of the community. If you met him you would never have guessed he was a billionaire."

Ernst Junger said: "He was always generous to the local community, but he never lived the high life. He always flew economy class on planes, he cut coupons out of the newspapers if there were special offers, and his wife shopped at Aldi, the same as everyone else."

Mr Merckle is not the first high-profile figure to commit suicide during the financial crisis. Just before Christmas, fund manager Thierry de la Villehuchet, who had invested with the alleged fraudster Bernard Madoff, was found dead in his New York office after taking sleeping pills and slashing his wrists. Barry Fox, a Bear Stearns analyst, jumped from his 29th-floor office last year after losing his job.

The sad truth is that there will almost certainly be others as the recession bites deeper. But, like Merckle's family, those who are left behind will never fully comprehend how pride and prestige can ever be more valuable than life itself.

by:telegraph