Maxhütte (Sulzbach-Rosenberg)
The Maxhütte (MH), named after the Bavarian King Maximilian II Joseph , was a traditional steel mill and is now an industrial monument in Sulzbach-Rosenberg . At its heyday, the Maxhütte employed over 9,000 people. The group had branch plants in Haidhof and Unterwellenborn (today Stahlwerk Thüringen GmbH) and its own ore mines in Sulzbach-Rosenberg ( Annaschacht until 1974, Eichelberg mine until 1977) and Auerbach ( Maffei until 1978, Leonie until 1987).
The Maxhütte was the last steelworks in Bavaria with a conventional blast furnace , and at the same time the last Bavarian company subject to mining co-determination . She was known nationwide in the labor movement for the decades-long struggle of the workforce for their jobs. The Maxhütte was also a political issue due to the ownership participation of the Free State of Bavaria . After two bankruptcies , steel production was finally stopped on September 24, 2002. The Rohrwerk Maxhütte with around 400 employees has been producing since it was taken over by the Max Aicher group of companies since 2000. For the rural region in the middle Upper Palatinate , which has been characterized by mining and iron production since the Middle Ages, the two bankruptcies of Maxhütte with the loss of thousands of jobs had a structural and political fatality. After the final closure, the employees were taken up in an employment company until mid-2004.
It is unclear which parts of the Maxhütte will be preserved as an industrial monument , who will bear the expense, and how the sometimes enormous contaminated sites , such as the slag mountain, will be dealt with. The preserved facilities are an important attraction for tourism, especially the Bavarian Iron Road and the North Bavarian Industrial Road. The site is still partially used commercially and rented to various companies. Since April 2012, the site can be rented as a location for film and photo shoots via an external service agency. Regular guided photo tours for hobby photographers were discontinued when extensive dismantling work began in June 2016.
history
The history of the Maxhütte goes back to 1851, see Maxhütte (Maxhütte-Haidhof) .
Ironworks Maximilianshütte (MH)
With the decision of the Belgian company T. Michiels, Goffard & Cie. The prehistory of the Maxhütte began in 1851 to build a rail rolling mill in the Upper Palatinate. A year later, the railway track factory was built and put into operation in the Sauforst von Burglengenfeld , from which a year later the Eisenwerk-Gesellschaft Maximilianshütte emerged with its main factory in Haidhof. It was named after the Bavarian King Maximilian II.
In 1859, the purchase of ore fields near Sulzbach created its own ore base, and four years later the Maximilianshütte was set up in Rosenberg. The first Kokshochhofen in Rosenberg was blown in August 1864, the ore came from regional extraction. In 1872 the iron and steel works to extract raw and cast iron were built in Unterwellenborn (Thuringia) and five years later ore fields in the Auerbach mining district were purchased. Between 1898 and 1930 the Maxhütte (" König-Albert-Werk ") was in operation in Lichtentanne near Zwickau in Saxony . It was supplied with pig iron from Maxhütte Unterwellenborn. Today only the former, listed factory settlement in today's Zwickau district of Maxhütte reminds of this factory.
The Thomas steel works in Rosenberg was put into operation in 1889 and in 1892 the main administration was relocated from Haidhof to Rosenberg.
In 1921 the Röchling family acquired the majority of the shares with just over 50 percent of the shares, which Friedrich Flick acquired in 1929 together with the shares in Belgium (of around 33 percent) .
In the Second World War , from 1939 onwards, Polish prisoners of war performed forced labor in the Maxhütte under inhumane conditions. Group boss Flick was sentenced to seven years imprisonment for this in the Nuremberg trials. With the establishment of the Soviet-occupied zone after the end of the war in 1945, the Thuringian iron ore mines near Schmiedefeld and the Thuringian and Saxon plants (e.g. Unterwellenborn ) in what was then the main sales area were lost.
Maximilian colliery
In order to cover the need for hard coal, the rights to 15 hectares of land near Hamm were acquired around 1900 and the Maximilian colliery was founded there in order to be more independent from the Rhenish-Westphalian coal syndicate . The development of the coal seams took over ten years due to water ingress, so that the systematic coal mining could not begin until 1912. Due to increasing water ingress, however, the mine was closed on August 13, 1914, without any significant amount of coal being extracted. Further attempts at reactivation in 1921 and 1942–1944 were unsuccessful. After 1980, the Maximilianpark was built on the site as part of the 1984 State Garden Show .
post war period
Six years after the end of the war, the Free State of Bavaria took over 26 percent of the MH business shares in the course of the unbundling of the German mining industry. The pipe works in Rosenberg went into operation three years later. From 1955 the Maxhütte belonged again to the Flick Group.
From 1956 onwards, Swedish ore was also purchased, and from 1969 Brazilian ore. In 1962 the cold rolling mill in Haidhof was put into operation and in the 1970s the first OBM converter in the Rosenberg steelworks and the strip galvanizing line in Salzgitter went into operation. The Thomas steel plant was converted to the self-developed OBM steel production process, while the Haidhof plant was restructured to continuous bar and reinforcing steel lines. This was accompanied by a concentration of steel production on Rosenberg.
The 1970s and 1980s were marked by restructuring and industrial action. On October 1, 1976, Fronberg was sold to the Luitpold-Hütte. On August 17, 1976, Klöckner-Werke Duisburg acquired almost all of the Maxhütte shares for DM 270 million. During this time, mining was concentrated on the Leonie shaft near Auerbach. A significant development was the KMS process (Klöckner-Maxhütte steel production process ) from 1980. On January 1, 1984, the Eschweiler Mining Association took a 15 percent stake in Maxhütte's share capital by bringing in the Eschweiler ironworks; On July 1 of that year, Maxhütte acquired a 49 percent stake in Salmax / Salzgitter-Drütte by bringing in the Eschweiler ironworks. On the night of September 30 to October 1, 1985, the Maxhütten board sold the cold rolling mill in Haidhof to the owner Klöckner-Werke. The last shift in the cold rolling mill there was on March 31, 1987.
bankruptcy
On April 16, 1987, the Maxhütte went bankrupt with 4,500 employees. The company was run by Maxhütte i. K maintained. Less than a month later, the last German iron ore mine "Leonie" in Auerbach was closed and on June 30, 1990 the Maxhütte-Haidhof plant was shut down. On July 1, 1990, NMH Stahlwerke GmbH and Rohrwerk Neue Maxhütte GmbH were founded in Rosenberg.
The successor companies NMH Stahlwerke GmbH ("new Maxhütte") and Rohrwerk Neue Maxhütte GmbH were supposed to secure the operation of the Maxhütte. The shareholders were Thyssen , Krupp , Klöckner, Mannesmann and the Free State of Bavaria. In 1993 Max Aicher , a building contractor from Freilassing , took over the shares in Thyssen, Klöckner and Krupp as well as the industrial management and in the following year also bought the 45 percent stake of the Free State of Bavaria for 3 DM.
On November 6, 1998, Maxhütte's second bankruptcy filing followed by Labor Director Peter Moschinski. The other two managing directors subsequently submitted settlement requests. The second bankruptcy proceeding opened on December 31, 1998. The operation was carried out by NMH i. K. continued. On July 22nd, 2002 NMH Stahlwerke GmbH was shut down and production began (workforce still 850 people). The last blast furnace tapping was on September 23, 2002. The next day, the last batch left the steelworks and the last works meeting took place.
In 2000, the pipe works was transferred to today's Max Aicher group of companies and continues to produce - with a collective agreement on restructuring.
The Maxhütte as a technical monument
The Maxhütte has a high monument value due to its age and its sometimes unique technical equipment.
It is the only integrated steel and smelting works in all of Europe, which includes all phases of production from the ore to the finished product in a very small space.
Even certificates of ore mining have been preserved in the immediate vicinity of the plant, such as the headframe of the Annaschacht, which is only 1.7 km from the Maxhütte in the city area.
The converters in the steelworks are the last remaining evidence of the OBM process developed at the Maxhütte .
The two compactors still in existence are examples of technically outstanding and highly developed systems and are among the world's most powerful piston steam engines .
There are a total of three steam engines in the Maxhütte:
- a four-cylinder twin standem compound machine as a single drum drum steam engine with max. 15,000 hp output
- a four-cylinder twin standem compound machine as a single drum drum steam engine with max. 10,000 hp power
- a single cylinder machine in the central condensation with max. 500 hp power
This third machine was responsible for generating the vacuum for the single drum steam engines; The full machine output was only available when these were running on condensation.
All three are historic steam engines that were built and installed in the early 1900s. These three historic steam engines were constantly maintained and did their work until the end of the Maxhütte in 2002.
With the blast furnace 3, a one-off example of a blast furnace with a set bucket coating via a vertical elevator and an electric Möller car has been preserved. In addition to the furnace of the Henrichshütte, it is one of the oldest preserved blast furnaces in Germany and is also an outstanding monument due to its open water cooling .
No other iron and steel works in Europe has such a sophisticated and flexible cowper system as the Maxhütte. The numerous gate valves and shut-off systems were all operated manually by a few, very experienced employees. There was no automation .
In the area of the hut there are still rare chimney coolers .
With the construction of the S32 continuous casting plant , Maxhütte was a technological leader in the 80s and therefore represents a milestone in the history of the steel industry.
The roots of the facility go back to the middle of the 19th century and have been preserved, for example, in the form of one of the oldest steel half-timbered halls in Germany. In addition, it becomes clear that the hut has evolved over time and has been adapted to the respective requirements over time.
The Maxhütte is one of the most important material witnesses of the iron and steel industry in Germany.
Partial demolition and conversion
The Maxhütte is being demolished in steps. After the auction on February 11, 2003, the majority of the roller bearings went to Max Aicher's pipe mill (in the industrial area of Rosenberg) for 4.2 million euros . The massive roller benches were also removed, the crane runways and cranes dismantled, and the finishing line, which was not part of the heritage, was removed. The expansion of the vacuum system, which was used to upgrade the Lech steel works in Meitingen (by Max Aicher), was also approved .
Architect Peter Brückner from Tirschenreuth also said that a huge chance would be wasted with the demolition. The Brückner und Brückner office, which most recently won prizes for the Kunstspeicher in Würzburg, was commissioned by the city of Sulzbach-Rosenberg in 2002 to develop thought models for the future. Also were included Karl Ganser and the State Development Corporation of North Rhine-Westphalia. The result: clear-cutting restoration would be 50 million euros more expensive than a “careful renewal in a close interplay of leaving and removing, restoring and developing”. An expert opinion by the water management office in Amberg confirmed that the costs for an environmentally friendly treatment of the soil in the event of a demolition would be around 27 million euros. However, if the listed halls were to remain standing, only individual parts would have to be decontaminated for around 3.7 million euros.
In December 2015, the Sulzbach-Rosenberger Zeitung reported that Harald Schwartz (CSU) , member of the state parliament, believes that “the large-scale dismantling of the Maxhütte facilities” is “indispensable for progress.” For financial reasons, only the so-called blast furnace plaza should remain, and several renovations Millions of euros are needed in investments and should be converted into a "monument and event location".
On September 7, 2016, the online portal Onetz reported that the dismantling of the steelworks had started. The dismantling work began in the western part next to the converter hall. Metal parts, cables and pipelines were recycled, then the lime silos next to the old converter hall will be demolished, which was described as a decisive step for a conversion of the area in the western part, even if the specific planning was not yet fully completed. A few days later, the chairman of the Maxhütte Hüttenverein appealed to the owner of the blast furnace, Max Aicher, to invest in the blast furnace plaza together with the Free State of Bavaria in order to make the “unique industrial monument” accessible to the public.
From June 2019, the large-scale dismantling of the last existing OBM steelworks in Europe began. First the small continuous casting plant was destroyed, then the secondary metallurgy . The last part was the steelworks itself. First the pig iron mixers and the water-cooled converter chimneys and their chimney access equipment were demolished, then the converter platform. Then the three clean gas flares - through which the cleaned converter gas was burned - were torn down. The next step was the dismantling of the three OBM converters using cutting torches and the demolition of the gas cleaning systems and the coal dust silos. After that, the oxygen tanks were knocked down, removing the tall parts of the steel mill. Finally, the control rooms and the media stage were removed, with the result that the OBM steelworks, apart from its foundations, had completely disappeared from the scene at the end of 2019.
In 2020, the demolition of the power plant began, which had generated steam for the rolling mills by burning furnace gas and electricity using turbines. The 75 m high chimney was also blown up, which was done in camera. The demolition of the foundations and the renovation of the floors began at the former steelworks.
The slag mountain as a biotope
The slag pile located at the plant can be viewed after its renovation, which was completed in 2014. There is an information pavilion on top of it. Since May 2017, visits have been possible on the "Schlackenberg Landfill Educational Trail", a marked 4 km long circular route on the landfill site. The blue-winged wasteland insect and the blue-winged sand insect are native there.
literature
- Oskar Duschinger, Dietmar Zierer: The splendor and misery of the Maxhütte. Lokal-Verlag, Burglengenfeld 1990, ISBN 3-925603-09-3 .
- 150 years of Maxhütte: "... a true forge of the volcano". City of Sulzbach-Rosenberg, 2003, ISBN 3-9807612-1-5 .
- Udo Acht: hut fire . Düsseldorf 1991, OCLC 245676436 .
- Preservation of monuments in structurally weak regions. Problems and opportunities. Workbooks of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation. Lipp, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-87490-730-9 . (With an assessment of the monument value of the MH)
- Detlef Knipping, Rolf Höhmann: The Maxhütte in Sulzbach-Rosenberg - a monument to the Bavarian iron and steel industry in a European context. In: Preservation of monuments in structurally weak regions - problems and opportunities. (= Workbooks of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation . Volume 115). lipp, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-87490-730-9 , pp. 33-54.
- Hans Seeling: Télémaque Fortuné Michiels, the Phoenix and Charles Detilleux. Belgium's influences on the economic development of Germany in the 19th century (= writings on Rhenish-Westphalian economic history. Volume 38). Cologne 1996, DNB 949675849 , p. 127 f. Excursus 3: "Belgian entrepreneurs in Bavaria"
Web links
- Rohrwerk Maxhütte
- Photo documentation of the Maxhütte in operation
- Pictures from the Maxhütte in Sulzbach-Rosenberg - 9/2003
- Pictures from the Maxhütte in Sulzbach-Rosenberg - 4/2003
- Pictures from the Rohrwerk Maxhütte in Sulzbach-Rosenberg - 7/2005
- End of shift - the Maxhütte is in decline. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . July 21, 2012
- Official website of the photo and film location Maxhütte with extensive image material and 360 ° panoramas
- Bachelor thesis project with a 360 ° tour through the Maxhütte
- Article Oberpfalznetz on the background and motivation of the owner company on the subject of the demolition and scrapping of the Maxhütte
- Budget of the Bavarian Administration of State Palaces, Gardens and Lakes PDF file accessed on January 21, 2016
- Early documents and newspaper articles on the Maxhütte in the 20th Century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ^ Jens Riesner: Glowing irons & rattling mills. Out and about on the North Bavarian Industriestrasse. Ars Vivendi, Cadolzburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-86913-640-0 , chapter 17.
- ↑ rohrwerk-maxhuette.de
- ↑ The König-Albert-Werk on www.albert-gieseler.de
- ↑ Tug-of-war over an industrial monument: the Maxhütte is threatened with demolition - prospects ready for scrap accessed on 14 September 2016.
- ↑ Historical Railway - Waggonkipper Maxhütte accessed on September 14, 2016.
- ^ Sack & Kiesselbach Maschinenfabrik GmbH: Single drum drum steam engine accessed on September 14, 2016.
- ↑ Lokomotiv- und Maschinenfabrik JA Maffei: Single drum drum steam engine accessed on September 14, 2016.
- ^ Sack & Kiesselbach Maschinenfabrik GmbH: Steam engine accessed on September 14, 2016.
- ↑ Andreas Royer: The future of the Maxhütten area in view - the round table should bring a solution. In: Onetz.de , December 11, 2015.
- ↑ Joachim Gebhardt: Something is stirring on the ex-Maxhütten site - dismantling of the steelworks started. In: Onetz.de , September 7, 2016.
- ↑ Joachim Gebhardt: Preservation of the blast furnace: appeal to Aicher. In: Onetz.de , September 12, 2016.
- ↑ Rehabilitation and recultivation of the slag mountain in Sulzbach-Rosenberg as well as a visit to the Schlackenberg landfill - contact person for making appointments with the regional government of Upper Palatinate; see also pictures of the cinder block from 2008 ( Memento from October 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Opening times of the Schlackenberg are well received Onetz from April 10, 2017.
- ^ Sulzbach-Rosenberg - recovery on contaminated sites. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . June 15, 2008.
Coordinates: 49 ° 29 ′ 16.9 ″ N , 11 ° 46 ′ 4.9 ″ E