Fewer than 12,000 people live in the southwestern German village of Blaubeuren, but only one ever made it on to the Forbes list of the internationally wealthy: Adolf Merckle, the entrepreneur who threw himself in front of a train behind his local pub on Monday night.

The Goods Station serves lentils with noodles, and the patrons while away their evenings playing cards. Merckle was their hero. “You have no idea what he created here in the past 40 years,” a wizened drinker said yesterday. “Thousands of jobs.”

Until now, the global credit crisis had barely touched Blaubeuren. True, Merckle had lived like a man trying to save his pennies. When it was fair weather he rode to his office on an ancient bike; when it rained he drove his four-year-old VW Golf. He was a woolly cardigan man, an off-the-peg-suit kind of billionaire.

But his lifestyle was not conditioned by the recession. It was the Swabian way. The Swabians of Baden-Württemberg are known to be tight-fisted. The region is full of small companies that have edged their way to the top of world export leagues in niche markets by deploying some canniness and keeping a close eye on costs. Although Merckle was born in Dresden and grew up in the Sudetenland, he was of Swabian ilk: a penny-pincher who collected supermarket stamps and returned empty bottles for the deposit.

He did have a generous side. His wife Ruth persuaded him to support a leukaemia charity, and he personally footed the bill for office parties. Yet there was a hidden side to Merckle: the risk-taker. He dropped more than €200 million on short-selling VW shares last year and there was a running battle with the tax authorities, with Merckle trying to unearth ever more imaginative loopholes, including an attempt to have a small fishing town – where he had a house – declared a tax-free zone. For the most part, however, Merckle brushed off the problems and stayed true to his image as the local patriarch.

The breaking point came when Merckle realised that to save the remnants of his fortune, he would have to sell Ratiopharm, the pharmaceuticals division. His grandfather had started the company in 1915. It had passed to Merckle’s father, Ludwig, and had weathered the storms of the 20th century, above all its requisitioning under Hitler to make field medical kits for the Wehrmacht. Adolf Merckle was 74, with three sons and a daughter. It was his sacred duty – that is how he saw it – to pass on the pharmaceuticals unit to his children.

Crumpling under debt, written-down assets, the impatience of the banks and Merckle’s stock exchange gambling, Ratiopharm was going to be the price of survival. His suicide note read simply: “I am sorry.”

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