This Allgäu native from Weiler in the Lindau district was a wanderer between worlds, as he was a racing driver on two and four wheels. He was a celebrity in his time – especially in motorbike racing, which he started in 1923 and from which he retired at the end of 1937 with a world speed record of 279.5 km/h, which he set on a 500cc supercharged BMW.
From 1934 onwards, he also competed in car races, initially with Mercedes-Benz, then for BMW, with whose model 328 he won the Eifel Race on the Nürburgring in 1936. His involvement as a test and reserve driver at Mercedes-Benz began with an accident in a W 25 Grand Prix racing car during test drives at the Nürburgring. His first outing was in August 1934 at the Coppa Acerbo in Pescara, Italy, where he finished in a respectable sixth place. The second time Henne was on the grid was at the Italian Grand Prix in Monza in September, but he dropped out during the race. The third and last time, he sat behind the wheel of a W 25 at the Czechoslovakia Grand Prix on the Masaryk Ring near Brno and crossed the finish line in sixth position, supported by Hanns Geier.
After the end of the Second World War, Henne began to set up a Daimler-Benz agency in Munich, which became one of the largest in Germany and was taken over by the Munich plant branch in 1997. He transferred a large part of his fortune to the Ernst Jakob Henne Foundation, which he founded in 1991 to support people in need through no fault of their own. His life ended in Gran Canaria at the biblical age of 101.