BEHALA

BEHALA - Berliner Hafen- und Lagerhausgesellschaft mbH
legal form	GmbH
founding	February 26, 1923
Seat	Berlin
management	Petra Cardinal
Number of employees	112
sales	21.7 million euros
Branch	logistics
Website	http://www.behala.de/
	As of December 31, 2018

View of the Berlin Westhafen site, the headquarters of BEHALA

The Berliner Hafen- und Lagerhausgesellschaft mbH , BEHALA for short , operates several inland ports in Berlin with the associated warehouses, cargo handling, port railways and the rental of real estate on the port premises. It is a GmbH with 100 percent participation by the State of Berlin.

The company, which was founded on February 26, 1923, has its current headquarters at Berlin's Westhafen in Berlin-Moabit . It also operates the southern port in Spandau (Tiefwerder) and the port of Neukölln .

history

Viktoriaspeicher I on the BEHALA site on Köpenicker Strasse

BEHALA cranes in the East Harbor

Several ports were built in or around Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century. The Spandauer Südhafen was built from 1906 to 1911, the Osthafen from 1907 to 1913, the Neukölln harbor from 1912 to 1922, and then the Westhafen from 1914 to 1923.

Due to the difficult financial situation, the city was unable to operate the ports itself and had to transfer them to a stock corporation, namely Berliner Hafen- und Lagerhaus A.-G. , which was specially founded on February 26, 1923. , the General Directorate of the Berlin Ports (BEHALA), in which it only held a 25% stake. The other shares were held by the shipping companies Schenker and Carl J. Busch. On March 1st, BEHALA took over port operations.

In July 1929, BEHALA took over the property at Köpenicker Straße 20–26a in Kreuzberg with the Viktoriaspeicher I built in 1910–1911 based on a design by the architect Franz Ahrens . In 1937, the site at Köpenicker Strasse 16-17 was acquired, on which the 19th century Provision Office of the Garde du Corps with bakery and warehouses was located. The Viktoriaspeicher II was built on this site in 1938–1939 . Both storage buildings are now a listed building.

During the Nazi era, BEHALA ran a camp for forced laborers at Köpenicker Strasse 24a .

On January 1, 1937, BEHALA became a municipal company. From 1939 to 1943 a grain silo was built in the Westhafen. During the Second World War, 60 percent of the facilities in the West Harbor and 80 percent in the East Harbor were destroyed.

In 1958, BEHALA acquired the properties adjacent to Viktoriaspeicher I at Köpenicker Strasse 27, 27a, 28 and 29 as storage space. In 1960 the coal trade was relocated from the Urbanhafen to this site, and in 1980 a turnover of 250,000 t was achieved.

After the city was divided, the (West) Berlin magistrate began stocking up in May 1949 , and in 1961 the Senate reserve in the port warehouses was increased with the construction of the wall .

In 1994 BEHALA became an institution under public law .

In 2000, BEHALA and other public companies in Berlin participated in the “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” foundation to compensate former Nazi forced laborers.

In 2003, BEHALA was converted into a GmbH .

The Osthafen in Friedrichshain has been developed as a media location since 2000 and has no longer had a handling function since 2006. The two crane systems and the port railway with the connection to the inner ring were dismantled.

Today the company is a member of the Mediaspree investor project , which supports the economic use of the banks of the Spree in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district .

Port railway

BEHALA is also a railway infrastructure and rail transport company that looks after a total of twelve kilometers of track systems in the west and south ports. The wagons are brought in with their own locomotives from the freight stations in Ruhleben and Moabit . The new trimodal container terminal in the Westhafen has led to an increase in freight traffic. There is a weekday container train connection from Hamburg and a weekday KLV connection from Bönen for a large department store group. From the end of May 2009, the Rhein-Spree-Express will supplement this offer with a weekday container connection to the Gerolstein, Hürth and Krefeld terminals (with possible barge connections to Antwerp and Rotterdam).

For the increasing rail freight traffic to the Westhafen, the infrastructural disadvantages are proving to be an operational obstacle: lack of electrification on the section between the Moabit freight yard and Hamburger and Lehrter freight yard (HuL) , track lengths that are too short for trains up to 700 m long and the change of direction from HuL to the Westhafen to get. At the end of 2014, the first step was to initiate the planning approval procedure for the extension of the two shunting tracks in the HuL freight yard.

In addition, BEHALA has been a minority partner of Captrain Deutschland (formerly Veolia Cargo) since 1988 with 49.8% of the Industriebahn-Gesellschaft Berlin GmbH (IGB) , a non-public railway transport and infrastructure company in Berlin, which in turn holds 66.6% The majority shareholder in Niederbarnimer Eisenbahn -AG, which operates local public transport in the Berlin area.

BEHALA station in Berlin's Westhafen: the two container trains are provided in the evening
Locomotive 1 (Krauss-Maffei M 700 C) in Berlin's Osthafen, 2003
Locomotive of the type Vossloh G 1700-2 BB in the Westhafen
Locomotive L2 ( LEW EL 4 ) on an exhibition track in front of the BEHALA administration in the Westhafen

Business figures

Cargo handling

The incoming and outgoing goods at BEHALA decreased between 1999 and 2009 from 5.5 to 3.1 million tons. Since then, it has increased again, with a cargo turnover of 4.9 million tons in 2018. The following table shows the development of cargo handling between 1999 and 2011 at the individual locations in thousands of tons. Except for the Westhafen , the incoming and outgoing goods have decreased at all other locations, with the Osthafen being completely abandoned:

Location	1999	2005	2011
Loading street	1250	909	910
Neukölln harbor	396	114	72
East port	707	352	-
Spandau south harbor	1702	685	522
West harbor	1453	1867	2316
Total throughput (million t)	5508	3927	3820

In 2018, trucks accounted for 54 percent of the means of transport involved in goods handling, the railways with 27 percent and inland waterways with 19 percent.

Holdings

BEHALA is involved in the following three companies:

B-Plus Planungs-Aktiengesellschaft, Berlin (100%)
BPS BEHALA Port Services GmbH, Berlin (100%)
Industriebahn-Gesellschaft Berlin mbH , Berlin (49.8%)

literature

BEHALA - Berliner Hafen- und Lagerhausgesellschaft mbH (publisher): 50 years BEHALA / 50 years Westhafen . Berlin 1973, ISBN 3-87455-023-0 .
BEHALA - Berliner Hafen- und Lagerhausgesellschaft mbH (ed.), Jörg Raach (author): 80 years of BEHALA - between then and now (1923–2003). Berlin 2003