Schalke club

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The Schalke Club was a steel works in Gelsenkirchen .

history

The company was founded by Friedrich Grillo and Fritz Funke as the Schalker Mine and Huts Association in 1872 in the Bulmke district , but had its administrative headquarters in the Schalke district , which in turn explains its name. The first blast furnace was built in 1874 and put into operation on March 2, 1875 (first blast furnace tapping). On the factory premises in Gelsenkirchen, there were later six blast furnaces in which pig iron was produced. The Schalke Club was supplied with iron ore via the Bochum ore railway .

In 1897 Schalke merged with AG Vulkan in Duisburg-Hochfeld, and in 1899 the company expanded further with the takeover of Pluto colliery . In 1907, the Schalke Verein merged with Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks AG , after two years earlier it had established an interest group with the Aachener Hütten-Aktien-Verein Rothe Erde of the mining industrialist Adolph Kirdorf and with which it became part of the United Steelworks in 1926 . In 1924 a cement works was put into operation, which used the slag obtained from the blast furnace slag . Since the beginning of the 1920s, the Schalke Verein developed a centrifugal casting process for iron pipes, which was later further developed by the Bochumer Verein for use with steel (for gun barrels).

Together with the Friedrich Wilhelms-Hütte , the Meiderich Foundry and the Hilden Foundry, the Schalker Verein was spun off in 1933 as part of the reorganization of the United Steelworks into the Deutsche Eisenwerke AG as the Schalker Verein plant .

At the heyday of the ironworks, 6,000 people worked for the Schalke Club.

During the Second World War , the Schalke Club was an important target for the Allies. The factory was severely damaged in several bomb attacks. During the war, there was a warehouse on Wattenscheider Strasse for the mainly Russian slave laborers employed in the plant .

Company logo of Eisenwerke Gelsenkirchen 1948–1963

After the Second World War, the Schalker Verein was spun off as the United Steelworks AG was broken up into the Eisenwerke Gelsenkirchen AG with 3272 (in 1947) and 5608 (in 1951) workers. Together with other iron and cast steelworks, they founded Rheinisch-Westfälische Eisen- und Stahlwerke AG, Mülheim (Ruhr) (Rheinwesteisen for short) in 1952, which merged with Rheinische Stahlwerke AG in Essen as early as 1957 .

In 1956, the Schalke Association introduced ductile iron water pipes and thus became the market leader for cast iron pipes for drinking water and wastewater disposal, which were exported to over 30 countries.

A road gully - product of the Rheinstahl Eisenwerk Gelsenkirchen

When Rheinstahl Hüttenwerke AG was established in 1963 , the plant was renamed "Rheinstahl-Hüttenwerke AG, Schalker Verein Gelsenkirchen". In 1974, Rheinstahl and with it the Gelsenkirchen plant were acquired by the Thyssen group.

After the takeover of Rheinstahl by Thyssen and the concentration of the Group's iron production on the Rheinschiene, the loss of the last active blast furnace due to an explosion on March 5, 1982 was the starting point for a reduction in the workforce to just 1200 workers. In addition to the blast furnace operation, the cement works, which was dependent on the blast furnace slag, were shut down, but the production of cast iron pipes was maintained for the time being. The required pig iron was delivered in torpedo ladle cars from the Thyssen blast furnaces in Duisburg .

In 1997 the Schalke plant was offered for sale by Thyssen because iron pipe production was classified as unstrategic. The now only 950 workers were reduced to 790 before the Saint Gobain Group took over the plant in 1999 and reduced the workforce to 235 by 2004.

closure

Gatehouse of the Schalke Club, today Saint-Gobain regional warehouse

In March 2004, the plant finally learned from a press release that the casting process in Gelsenkirchen was to be completely discontinued - which happened the next day regardless of any consequences under labor law (e.g. continued payment of wages). In the following time, attempts were made to develop a connection concept, which, however, lost the basis because the production equipment had already been sold to the Czech Republic. The offer of continued employment in the Saarbrücken parent plant Halbergerhütte of the Saint-Gobain Group was not accepted by any of the production workers.

today

Solar bunker and ...
... energy center April 2010

The gate house 1, the switching house, the bunker, parts of an underground footpath system and the ore loading are preserved to this day.

In 1996, the state development company of North Rhine-Westphalia took over the approximately 35 hectare industrial wasteland. The site, which is about three kilometers from Gelsenkirchen main train station, is to be revitalized with small craft businesses, retail and housing.

As part of the Ruhr 2010 Capital of Culture , the solar bunker was used as a venue, for example for Strong Places . This is the remaining high ore bunker, on the roof of which a large-scale photovoltaic system is installed.

literature

  • The Schalke Club. Work and life in Bulmke cases. ÖAG, Work and Life (DGB-VHS), Gelsenkirchen 2008, ISBN 978-3-9812298-1-3 .

Web links

proof

  1. ↑ See patent application DE000000378557A from December 1922 and following
  2. ↑ Manfred Rasch, Vera Schmidt, Gerald D. Feldman (eds.): August Thyssen and Hugo Stinnes. An exchange of letters from 1898–1922. Verlag CH Beck, Munich, 2003, ISBN 3-406-49637-7 , p. 591, GoogleBooks
  3. ↑ top v .: "Unbundling of the steel industry" in: "Hüttenzeitung" of the Bochumer Verein, JG 22/23, 1951
  4. ^ Title page of the annual report for the first business year 1952 and the second business year 1952/52 of the Rheinisch-Westfälische Eisen- und Stahlwerke AG, Mülheim (Ruhr)
  5. ^ Rheinstahl brochure "100 Years of Schalke Club", 1972
  6. ↑ Case study Schalker Verein / St Gobain , in: Bernard Gazier (Ed.), Frederic Bruggeman (Ed.), Sian Moore (Ed.) Restructuring Work and Employment in Europe: Managing Change in an Era of Globalization , Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd ( November 30, 2008), ISBN 978-1847205698 , pp. 132ff.

Coordinates: 51 ° 30 ′ 39.9 ″  N , 7 ° 7 ′ 24.5 ″  E