listen

This article covers the European automaker; for other meanings see Horch (disambiguation)

Horch trademark from June 1924: The crowned "H" designed by Ernst Böhm

The Horch cars were the best-selling luxury- class cars in the German Empire in the 1930s . The company, which was founded by August Horch in Zwickau in 1904 , only built passenger cars with eight-cylinder engines from 1927 , including over 13,900  Horch 8 and 850 with up to 5- liter in - line engines and from 1933 more than 11,600  Horch 830/930 with the smaller V-engines . Horch cars were market leaders by a long way ahead of the Mercedes or Maybach cars and the Horch 600/670 were the only German cars with a twelve-cylinder engine alongside the Maybach Zeppelin DS 8 .

From June 1932, the plant belonged to Auto Union AG , Chemnitz . This began the following year in Zwickau with the development and production of their Grand Prix cars. The Auto Union racing cars built by Horch achieved numerous victories.

Due to the war , all German vehicle manufacturers had to stop production of civilian cars in the autumn of 1940. Together with the neighboring Audi plant of the Auto Union Group, Horch was busy with armaments production and also used forced labor for this .

After the war ended, Zwickau belonged to the Soviet occupation zone . After the removal of machines as part of reparations payments , the Auto Union plants located there were nationalized due to the referendum in Saxony in 1946 . At the beginning of May 1958, VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau was created from the merger of the state- owned company Sachsenring motor vehicle and engine works Zwickau (until February 1957: VEB Horch motor vehicle and motor works Zwickau ) with the VEB Automobilwerk Zwickau (AWZ, until 1955: VEB motor vehicle factory Audi Zwickau ) , Manufacturer of the Trabant small car built until the end of April 1991 .

On the former Horch site on Crimmitschauer Strasse in Zwickau, there is now a a. the Sachsenring body Module GmbH . No new use has yet been found for the Horch building, which was built in 1914/15 and is a listed building.

Company history

Founding years

August Horch in the 11/22 HP type ( Kathe body , Halle / S.) For the Prinz-Heinrich-Fahrt , 1908

After an apprenticeship as a blacksmith, August Horch worked at Benz & Cie. From 1888 to 1890 . in Mannheim an engineering training at the Technikum Mittweida . On November 14th, 1899 he founded the A. Horch & Cie. Company with the businessman Salli Herz in Cologne-Ehrenfeld . in Venloer Straße No. 295, where he first repaired Benz motor vehicles in a former horse stable. The first car ("Model 1") was built in July 1900 and was presented in Cologne in January 1901 with a spectacular, not entirely breakdown-free maiden voyage. An expansion of his company encountered spatial and financial limits during this time.

With financial support from Moritz Bauer ( Plauen ), his mechanical engineering company Bauer & Lange took a stake in Horch's company, which led to the move to Reichenbach in the Vogtland in March 1901 . It soon turned out that the local entrepreneurs disapproved of an expansion of Horch's company. With new investors, all of them entrepreneurs, who had come together in 1903 in the Saxon-Thuringian Automobile Club of the Zwickau District Headquarters with City Councilor Friedrich Paul Fikentscher at the helm, August Horch moved his company to Zwickau , the then seat of the Southwest Saxon administration. On May 10, 1904, August Horch & Cie. Motorwagenwerke AG entered in the Zwickau commercial register.

In 1906, when a large trade and industrial exhibition was taking place in Zwickau, the local lawyer Rudolf Stöss won the Herkomer competition on a Horch car , which is comparable to today's World Rally Championship. Horch automobiles were characterized by quality, luxury and technical progress.

Foundation of Audi

Horch KL, 25 hp (1916)

August Horch had to leave Horch AG due to disputes with the CFO. On July 16, 1909, he founded August Horch Automobilwerke GmbH in Zwickau with investor friends from the district of Zwickau . There was then a legal dispute with his former company over the “Horch” brand , which August Horch lost in the last instance before the Imperial Court in Leipzig.

Thereupon a Zwickau high school student from the befriended Fikentscher family invented the brand name Audi  - the translation of the imperative “listen!” Or “hear!” Into Latin . On April 25, 1910, August Horch's new company was renamed Audi Automobilwerke GmbH Zwickau and converted into Audiwerke AG Zwickau in 1915 .

Merger to form Auto Union

OHW Hadanks winged arrow (here the second version with a curved support) was only about two years Horch hood ornament

The globe designed by Ernst Böhm replaced the arrow as the Horch hood ornament in 1929

The motor car works, August Horch first company firmierten in 1918 with a registered capital of three million Mark for Horch Werke AG Zwickau order . In the 1920s, Moritz Straus , owner of the Argus Motoren Gesellschaft in Berlin, took over the majority of the shares in Horchwerke. Argus chief designer Paul Daimler was responsible for the facelift of the Horch cars from 1923 and presented the Horch 12/60 hp ( type 303 ) in 1926 - the first German series vehicle with an eight-cylinder engine . From 1925, the Horchwerke delivered an average of 1,300 vehicles per year. In April 1929, the Horchwerke announced that they were giving up their previous Berlin branch on Unter den Linden and  moving to Lennéstraße 2, in premises that had been furnished according to a design by the architect Bruno Paul .

After Paul Daimler left Argus Motoren Gesellschaft, Fritz Fiedler became chief designer in Zwickau in autumn 1929 . He developed the twelve-cylinder engine of the Horch 670 presented in Paris in autumn 1931 .

At the initiative of the Sächsische Staatsbank , Horch, Audi, DKW and the Wanderer car division merged to form Auto Union AG with its headquarters in Zschopau , which was relocated to Chemnitz in 1936 . In 1932, Horch had a registration share of around 44 percent in the class over 4.2 liters.

Horch Pullman (1934)

Auto-Union Type C (1936)

All four brands were continued under the Auto Union umbrella, which was reflected in the logo of the four intertwined rings. The luxury-class automobiles manufactured by Horch enjoyed high social prestige and in the 1930s had a market share of over 50 percent, making them the top position among competitors in Germany. The Auto Union type A to D racing cars, developed and manufactured in the Horch racing department between 1934 and 1939, are world-famous top products in automotive racing history to this day.

"It was the high standard in the series production of automobile production that allowed the successful construction and use of an absolute top product in automotive technology, which the Auto Union racing car undoubtedly was."

- Peter Kirchberg : The Silver Arrows from Zwickau , Audi video (1992)

Shortly after the start of the war, the Auto Union group was almost exclusively busy producing armaments for the Wehrmacht . The Horch, Audi, DKW and Siegmar (Wanderer) plants only built a few civil vehicles. Horch was a supplier for the aircraft engine construction of the Auto Union subsidiary Mitteldeutsche Motorenwerke in Taucha near Leipzig and mainly produced medium and heavy standard cars for the Wehrmacht . After the end of production of these all-wheel-drive cars in 1943, chassis for the medium-sized armored personnel carrier Sd.Kfz, developed by Hanomag, were manufactured in the Horch factory until 1945 . 251 type Hkl6p built. The 3-ton half- track Sd.Kfz tractors were built on the same basis . 11 . After one year of preparations, the Horch branch in Dorotheenstrasse began assembling electrically powered torpedoes of the type G7e ( code name : “Device 20”) in the autumn of 1940, together with Borgward in Bremen . Until the occupation of Zwickau by the 3rd US Army in mid-April 1945, Horch had built 16,198 torpedoes. The neighboring Auto Union factory Audi presented as a license- to-wheel truck Steyr 1500A ago. A satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp was set up in Zwickau in the summer of 1944 to accommodate the forced laborers employed at Horch and Audi .

New registrations of Horch cars in the German Reich from 1933 to 1938

year	Registration numbers
1933	1268
1934	1534
1935	2029
1936	2014
1937	2024
1938	2223

Source:

post war period

Horch H3A, 3.5 tons (1954)

Horch P 240 Cabriolet (1956)

Towards the end of the Second World War , bombs damaged the Horch factory in Zwickau badly. Nevertheless, vehicle production was resumed as early as 1945 with the manufacture of the 1/2 ton SAW Horch trailer . For the production of this vehicle, mostly designed as a trailer or handcart, mainly remnants from the production of the H kl 6p chassis were used. These first Horch vehicles of the post-war period were presented to a wider public on May 1, 1946. As VEB HORCH motor vehicle and engine works Zwickau , the production of tractors of the type RS01 and trucks of the type H3 was resumed in 1948 after the company had been expropriated by a referendum. In 1954, production of the successor IFA H3A began . Ten years after the Second World War, the Sachsenring P 240 car, developed by Horch in 1954 and then mass-produced, was again a luxury class car of the highest technical and design level. In February 1957 there was another change in the company to VEB Sachsenring motor vehicle and engine works Zwickau , since Auto Union, newly founded in West Germany at the end of 1949, had successfully sued against the continued use of the name “Horch” in Zwickau.

A SED party resolution on May 1, 1958 led to the merger with VEB Automobilwerk Zwickau (AWZ) (formerly Audi) to form VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau . From then on, Horch's last in-house development, the Sachsenring P 240 , featured a curved S (S as a trademark for Sachsenring ) instead of the crowned H. At least the former institutions of the two companies once founded by August Horch were united and, as a producer of the Trabant, became the most important automobile manufacturer in the GDR, while the newly founded Auto Union claimed legal succession in the Federal Republic.

Today the August Horch Museum , an anchor point on the European Route of Industrial Culture, is located on part of the former Audi factory in Zwickau . The crowned H , trademark of Horch , is a trademark registered with the German Patent and Trademark Office in Munich , the rights of which are owned by Volkswagen AG . However, Daimler-Benz AG , which was the owner of Auto Union from 1958 to 1966, prohibited the use of the Horch trademark when it was sold to VW.

"The last listen"

In 1953, employees at the Auto Union plant in Ingolstadt built a body for a one-off piece by hand on the chassis of a pre-war Pullman limousine of the Horch 830 BL type , which was then handed over to the then managing director Richard Bruhn for representation purposes. This only so-called Bruhn-Horch ever built in Ingolstadt is now in the Audi museum mobile in Ingolstadt after its rediscovery in the USA . The Horch work in Zwickau brought under whose 1955 under the model designation Horch P 240 Sachsenring one last production model out that after trademark dispute in 1957 with the newly established in Ingolstadt Auto Union GmbH in early 1958 only under the model designation Sachsenring P240 could be produced .

Timeline

In the timeline you can see how Horch AG quickly developed into a luxury-class car provider, how August Horch established competing products with his Audi and how the Horch brand found its place in Auto Union.

Timeline of the Horch , Audi , Wanderer , Slaby-Beringer and DKW models from 1900 to 1942
class																																	Nov. 1931: Auto Union is founded
		1900s										10s										20s										30s										40s
		0	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th	8th	9	0	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th	8th	9	0	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th	8th	9	0	1	2	3	4th	5	6th	7th	8th	9	0	1	2
Microcar																					Slaby ringers
Small car																						Slaby ringers											F1	F2 / F4			F5		F7		F8
														W 1, W 2, W 3, W 4, W 8 dolls																P 15 hp		PS 600 Sport
		4-15 hp														Pony (5/14 hp)																	Type p
Lower middle class												Type A (10/22 HP)				Type G (8/22 hp)															P 25 PS (4 = 8), V 800 4 = 8, V 1000 4 = 8, Type 432, 1001 special class					Floating class, special class
																							W 6, W 9
Middle class				10-12 hp			14-20 hp					10/30 hp		6/18 hp
												K (12/30 hp)		8/24 hp
													Type B (10/28 hp)
												15/30 hp																W 10						W 15, W 17, W 20	W 21, W 235 / W 35				W 24
														Type C (14/35 hp)									Type K (14/50 hp)												W 22, W 240 / W 40
upper middle class														O (14/40 hp)										10 M 20/10 M 25						W 11
					22-30 hp	18/25 hp						H (17/45 hp)																									W 245 / W 45, W 250 / W 50, W 51			W 23, W 26, W 52
														Type D (18/45 hp)																			Type T (15/75 HP) Dresden		Type UW front		225				920
Upper class																18/50 hp
							23/50 hp																	8 (type 303–405)									8 (3 & 4 liters)			830
															Type E (22/55 HP)												Type M (18/70 hp)			Type R (19/100 hp) Imperator		Type SS (20/100 HP) Zwickau
											25/60 hp																						8 (4.5 & 5 liters)					850
									26/65 hp							S (33/80 hp)																	12
Sports car																																	W 14					W 25 K, W 25
Kübelwagen																																			W 11
listen Audi walker Slaby ringers DKW Developed by DKW and marketed under the brand name Audi .

Car models

Type	Construction period	cylinder	Cubic capacity in cm³	Power in PS or kWh	V max in km / h	image
04-15 hp	1900-1903	2 row		02.9-3.7 PS	060
10-16 hp	1902-1904	2 row		07.4-8.8 hp	062
22-30 hp	1903	4 row	2,725	16.2-18.4 kW
14-20 hp	1905-1910	4 row	2,270	10.3-12.5 kW
18/25 hp	1904-1909	4 row	2,725	16.2 kW
23/50 hp	1905-1910	4 row	5,800	29 kW	100
26/65 hp	1907-1910	6 row	7,800	44 kW	120
25/60 hp	1909-1914	4 row	6,395	40 kW	110
10/30 hp	1910-1911	4 row	2,660	18.4 kW
K (12/30 hp)	1910-1911	4 row	3,177	20.6 kW	075
15/30 hp	1910-1914	4 row	2,608	22 kW	080
H (17/45 hp)	1910-1919	4 row	4,240	33 kW
06/18 hp	1911-1920	4 row	1,588	13.2 kW
08/24 hp	1911-1922	4 row	2,080	17.6 kW	070
O (14/40 hp)	1912-1922	4 row	3,560	29 kW	090
Pony (5/14 hp)	1914	4 row	1,300	11 kW
25/60 hp	1914-1920	4 row	6,395	44 kW	110
18/50 hp	1914-1922	4 row	4,710	40 kW (55 PS)	100
S (33/80 hp)	1914-1922	4 row	8,494	59 kW
10 M 20 (10/35 HP)	1922-1924	4 row	2,612	25.7 kW	080
10 M 25 (10/50 HP)	1924-1926	4 row	2,612	37 kW	095
8 Type 303/304 (12/60 HP)	1926-1927	8 row	3.132	44 kW	100
8 Type 305/306 (13/65 HP)	1927-1928	8 row	3,378	48 kW	100
8 Type 350/375/400/405 (16/80 HP)	1928-1931	8 row	3,950	59 kW	100
8 3 liter type 430	1931-1932	8 row	3,009-3,137	48 kW (65 hp)	100
8 4 liter type 410/440/710	1931-1933	8 row	4.014	59 kW (80 PS)	100-110
8 4.5 liters type 420/450/470/720/750 / 750B	1931-1935	8 row	4,517	66 kW (90 PS)	115
8 5 liter type 480/500 / 500A / 500B / 780 / 780B	1931-1935	8 row	4,944	74 kW (100 PS)	120-125
12 6 liters type 600/670	1931-1934	12 V	6,021	88 kW (120 PS)	130-140
830	1933-1934	8 V	3,004	51 kW (70 hp)	110-115
830B	1935	8 V	3,250	51 kW (70 hp)	115
830Bk / 830BL	1935-1936	8 V	3,517	55 kW (75 PS)	115-120
850/850 sport	1935-1937	8 row	4,944	74 kW (100 PS)	125-130
830BL / 930V	1937-1938	8 V	3,517	60 kW (82 PS)	120-125
830BL / 930V	1938-1940	8 V	3.823	67.6 kW (92 PS)	125-130
851/853 / 853A / 855/951 / 951A	1937-1940	8 row	4,944	74 kW (100 PS)	125-140

See also

• List of automobile brands
• August Horch Museum
• Audi museum mobile

literature

(in chronological order)

• August Horch : I built cars. From apprentice locksmith to auto industrialist. Schützen-Verlag, Berlin 1937, DNB 573839638 .
• Werner Oswald : All Horch automobiles 1900–1945. History and typology of a German luxury brand from decades past. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-87943-622-3 .
• Wolf-Dieter Grün: The development of the Horch and Audi trademarks. In: Ulrich Löber (Ed.): August Horch. An automobile designer from Winningen. Landesmuseum Koblenz, Koblenz 1986, ISBN 3-925915-17-6 , p. 117 ff.
• Peter Kirchberg (Ed.): Auto-Union picture atlas. A technical historical photo documentation. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-613-01187-5 , pp. 140-185.
• Jürgen Pönisch: 100 years of Horch automobiles 1899–1999. The rise and fall of a German luxury brand. August Horch Museum, Zwickau 2000, ISBN 3-933282-07-1 .
• Werner Oswald: German cars. Volume 2: 1920-1945. New edition. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-613-02170-6 , pp. 156-183.
• Peter Kirchberg: Listen. Prestige and Perfection. Schrader, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 978-3-613-87230-1 .
• Peter Kirchberg, Jürgen Pönisch: Horch. Types - technology - models. Delius Klasing, Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 978-3-7688-1775-2 .
• Christian Suhr: Power of the four rings. Commercial vehicles of the Auto-Union and their brands Audi, DKW, Horch, Wanderer, NSU. Kraftakt Verlag, Halle (Saale) et al. 2007, DNB 988893061 , pp. 8–83, 169–199.
• Werner Lang : "We Horch workers are building vehicles again". History of the Horch factory in Zwickau 1945 to 1958. Bergstraße Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Aue 2007, ISBN 978-3-9811372-1-7 .
• Matthias Braun, Alexander Franc Storz: Audi. Auto-Union and its brands Audi, DKW, Horch and Wanderer. Motorbuch Verlag, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-613-02914-9 , pp. 82-118.

Web links

Commons : Listening vehicles  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• History of Horch and Auto Union . In: Audi.com
• Horch . In: Audi-MediaCenter.com
• Website of the August Horch Museum
• Karsten Rehmann: Horch & Audi - The history of the car brand . In: AutoZeitung.de , February 1, 2014
• Literature by and about Horch in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Factory expansion Horch AG on industriekultur-in-sachsen.de
2. ↑ Horch 11/22 PS “Prinz-Heinrich-Fahrt”, 1908 In: www.audi.com/unternehmen/historie/modelle - Horch 1909–1918. Retrieved January 14, 2018
3. ^ Christian Löer: Horch, Bugatti & Co: Cologne as the cradle of automobile construction . In: Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger . ( ksta.de [accessed on July 31, 2018]).
4. ↑ Horchwerke AG, Zwickau and predecessors , inventory 31073 in the Chemnitz State Archives.
5. ↑ Audi-Automobilwerke AG, Zwickau and predecessor inventory 31072 in the Chemnitz State Archives
6. ↑ The HORCH WORKS ... Vossische newspaper , April 2, 1929, p. 3
7. ^ Peter Kirchberg: Cars from Zwickau. Transpress-Verlag, Berlin 1985, p. 37.
8. ^ Peter Kirchberg: The silver arrows from Zwickau. Video Audi AG, 1992.
9. ↑ Jürgen Pönisch: 100 Years of Horch-Automobile 1899-1999 , City of Zwickau 2000, p. 187
10. ^ Hans Christoph von Seherr-Thoss : The German automobile industry. Documentation from 1886 until today . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 3-421-02284-4 , p. 328 .
11. ↑ Lang, Werner: "We Horch workers are building vehicles again". History of the Horch factory in Zwickau 1945 to 1958. Bergstraße Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Aue 2007, ISBN 978-3-9811372-1-7 , page 101.
12. ↑ Olaf Schiller: The history of the Audi trademarks. Delius Klasing, Bielefeld 2002, ISBN 3-7688-1415-7 .
13. ↑ The last listen