Adidas and Puma Exist Because One Brother Betrayed the Other

In the 1920s, two brothers were making shoes in their mother's laundry room in a small Bavarian town. Within a decade they were putting them on Olympic athletes. By the end of the war they weren't speaking. Nobody knows exactly what happened between Adolf and Rudolf Dassler. The popular version involves an air raid shelter and a misheard remark, but it has never been verified, and the brothers took the real answer with them. What is documented is everything that followed. The company split in two. One brother built Adidas on one side of the river. The other built Puma on the other. The town of Herzogenaurach divided along with them — two football clubs, two sets of suppliers, families who worked for one side and married into the other. They were buried at opposite ends of the same cemetery. This is the story of how a private falling-out between two brothers created two of the biggest sportswear companies on earth — and what it cost the town that had to live between them. 00:00 The laundry room 02:00 Olympic gold, 1936 04:00 The war 06:00 The split 08:00 Two companies, one river 10:00 The town in the middle 12:00 What was never explained Sources include company histories from Adidas and Puma, contemporary reporting on Herzogenaurach, and published accounts of the Dassler family. The specific cause of the brothers' falling-out is not documented and this video does not claim to resolve it.