VÖEST

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Systems of the former VÖEST in Linz, seen from the Danube (2007)

The VÖEST (long: United Austrian Iron and Steel Works ) were a nationalized Austrian steel company based in Linz , Upper Austria . The company existed from its foundation in 1938 until it was broken up and privatized in the 1990s. Successor companies that emerged from the group are in particular Voestalpine and Siemens VAI .

history

founding

Hermann Göring enters an excavator on the occasion of the groundbreaking ceremony for the works.
Former Headquarters in Muldenstrasse

Choice of location

There were several reasons for founding a steelworks in Linz. On the one hand, the necessary raw materials were available nearby: iron ore on the Styrian Erzberg , coal in the coal mines in Silesia and Bohemia and lime in the Upper Austrian Limestone Alps . The area around Linz also offered itself due to its convenient location on the Danube and the Western Railway .

The area around Pichling and Asten was originally considered as a location . However, it was decided that too much agricultural land was being lost there.

The village settlement of St. Peter / Zizlau near the Danube , which had been a district of Linz since 1915 , was ultimately chosen as the location . The wide strip in the east of Linz was almost undeveloped due to the risk of flooding. It was therefore decided to demolish the settlement and relocate the residents to other parts of the city.

The area had a size of 4 × 1.5 km, today around 5 km² belong to the industrial area. The area was largely filled with gravel to prevent future floods. The Weikerlsee and parts of the Pichlinger See were created when gravel was extracted in the vicinity of Linz . Adjacent to the north on the same area, the Nazi rule also founded the nitrogen works Ostmark AG - the later Chemie Linz (today Agrolinz Melamine International , Borealis and others).

Groundbreaking

On May 13, 1938 - two months after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich - the groundbreaking took place for the establishment of the Reichswerke Aktiengesellschaft for ore mining and ironworks 'Hermann Göring' Linz as a subsidiary of the Hermann-Göring-Werke .

Start of production in 1941

The first blast furnace could be blown on October 15, 1941. Then the Eisenwerke Oberdonau , the division for pig iron production, began with the production of armored parts. These were assembled in the nearby Nibelungen factory in St. Valentin .

Three more blast furnaces could be completed by 1944. Before the factory buildings were destroyed by US bombing in July 1944, around 1.5 million tons of pig iron had been produced for the production of armor plates. Until recently, around 20,000 people worked in the plant, which, along with the other new industrial companies, had become the city's economic engine. Among the workers, however, there were also 8,500 forced laborers and 6,390 prisoners from the Mauthausen concentration camp , who were housed in two camps on the company premises and mainly worked in the Hochofenschlacke Linz Ges.mbH division. The city's population increased from 112,000 in 1938 to 194,000 in 1945. However, there were also around 40,000 prisoners of war, forced laborers, resettlers, refugees (some from settlements north of the Danube, as they feared the approaching occupation by the Russians) and bomb victims in the city.

At the end of the 1990s, voestalpine AG commissioned a commission of historians to deal with the history of forced labor at the Linz location. Their two-year research culminated in 2001 on the one hand in the two-volume work Nazi Forced Labor published by Oliver Rathkolb : The Linz site of Hermann Göring AG Berlin, 1938–1945 and on the other hand in the scientific conference Industry and Forced Labor under National Socialism in cooperation with the JKU and the Linz State Theater , in which Gerd Wysocki also took part. This researched the history of the site in Salzgitter as early as 1982 .

On October 31, 2014, the contemporary history exhibition 1938–1945 was opened at the corporate headquarters . It is dedicated to the Nazi forced laborers at the Linz site of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring and has been called the Contemporary History Museum since 2016 .

End of the war and reconstruction

After the end of the war, the former Hermann Göring works were confiscated as German property by the Allies (USA). The company traded for the first time as Vereinigte Österreichische Eisen- und Stahlwerke Aktiengesellschaft ( VÖEST for short ). On July 16, 1946, VÖEST was finally transferred to the property of the Austrian state due to the Nationalization Act of 1946.

The remaining 4,400 VÖEST workers have now started the reconstruction. The first thing to do was to rebuild the gas-fired power plant, which still provides the majority of the energy supply today. It is operated with coke oven and furnace gas, and today also with natural gas . Then the coking plant, the blast furnace and the steel mill were put back into operation. In the beginning there was also a lack of resources for production, not least financial ones. It was only through the sale of a blast furnace to a Swedish company in 1947 that the necessary resources could be acquired and the blast furnace started up again in productive operation. From 1947 onwards, steel could also be produced again, and in the same year another Siemens-Martin furnace supplemented the steel production capacity. In 1951 three, from 1956 four blast furnaces were in operation.

In later decades up to 5 of the same-sized blast furnaces standing in a row were operated, but several of them were shut down when a significantly larger, higher one went into operation. In the 1980s Voestalpine also built iron and steel works in various countries, including Poland, the Soviet Union and the USA.

Boom

VÖEST formed the foundation of the nationalized industry , which later became Österreichische Industrieholding AG (ÖIAG). From 1947 onwards, VÖEST experienced a steady upswing and with the development of the LD process for steel production in 1952 at the latest , it became the flagship company of nationalized industry. In the same year the GIWOG - Gemeinnützige Industrie-Wohnungsges. mbH Linz - founded. This provided VÖEST employees with living space. This company built housing estates such as the Muldenstrasse settlement with 178 residential units as early as 1952.

shipbuilding

After LD steel was also approved for shipbuilding , VÖEST considered setting up its own shipping company. The reason for this was that the freight costs for coal and ore transports were subject to massive price fluctuations between 1950 and 1970. The company had to pay between 22 and 120 British shillings per ton . The Ister shipping company was founded and in December 1958 the first ship was launched at the Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft , the "Linzertor", which is made 100% of LD steel. In March 1959, the ship reached New York City as its first destination. After unloading the cargo, the ship continued its journey towards Hampton Roads in southeastern Virginia to pick up coal cargo for the return trip. More ships were commissioned. In November 1960 the second cargo ship, the “Wienertor”, was launched at AG Weser in Bremen . It had a length of 159.44 m, a maximum width of 20.20 m and a freeboard draft of about 9.89 m. It could reach a speed of about 15.5 knots and load a maximum of 16,250 tons . The third ship of the VÖEST shipping company was the "Kremsertor", which sank on January 20, 1966 in a storm off the coast of Great Britain near Plymouth . As a replacement, the "Buntentor" was completed in the Flensburg shipyard at the end of October 1967. With a deadweight of 38,000 t it was the largest VÖEST ship.

But VÖEST itself also built ships. In the Korneuburg shipyard , which belonged to the group from 1974 to 1991 and which was incorporated into the Hermann Göring works and expanded under the Nazi occupation, over 100 passenger ships were built for the Soviet Union .

Takeover of the Austrian steel works

In 1973 the Styrian Alpine Montan AG (full name Oesterreichisch-Alpine Montangesellschaft , main production site in Leoben-Donawitz) , which was then in economic distress, was reintegrated into VÖEST, to which it had already belonged before 1946. The other Austrian steel producers at the time, Böhler and Schoeller-Bleckmann , were also brought into the new group at the political request. The newly created company was named VÖEST-Alpine AG .

In 1976 the largest blast furnace to date was put into operation with a capacity of 3.3 million tons per year.

crisis

In the years that followed, the strong political influence on the nationalized company was increasingly used to secure jobs. This practice came to an end in 1985 when the company, which had grown into a conglomerate, incurred a record loss of 25 billion schillings , which was compounded by oil derivative transactions (see intertrading scandal ). As a result, the company was massively reorganized and restructured and the workforce was greatly reduced. The then finance minister Ferdinand Lacina dismissed the entire VÖEST board and put an end to the previous party proporz system, which had made the appointment of the company management dependent on political affiliation instead of economic qualifications.

The Steel Foundation was established in 1987 to support the laid-off staff in their reintegration into working life .

division

In 1988 and 1989 VÖEST-Alpine AG was divided into six branch holdings ( VÖEST Alpine Stahl AG , Stahl Linz Ges. Mb H. , Maschinen- und Anlagenbauholding AG , Industrieanlagenbau Ges. Mb H. , Bergbau Holding AG , Machinery, Construction & Engineering Ges . mb H. ). With the privatization law of 1993, the company conglomerate was essentially divided into three groups, which were partially privatized by 1995:

CEO

Successor company

Voestalpine AG

With the IPO in 1995, the privatization of VÖEST-Alpine , which until then was 100 percent state-owned ( ÖIAG ), was initiated. The company was divided into four divisions:

  • steel
  • Railway systems
  • Automotive
  • Profile shape.

In 2003, the decision was made to privatize it completely - the last state shares were offered for sale. Since the same year the company has been trading under the traditional name Voestalpine AG , but with a new spelling in the logo.

On March 29, 2007, the company announced that it wanted to take over the steel manufacturer Böhler-Uddeholm after its core shareholder offered its shares for sale. After the end of the offer period at the beginning of June 2007, the group now held a majority with over 50% of the shares, albeit with fewer shares than originally expected. In the meantime, as of September 6, 2007, the stake in the share capital has been increased to 79.2%. The integration as the fifth stainless steel division takes place.

Siemens VAI

The former VÖEST-Alpine Industrieanlagenbau (VAI) first became part of the newly established VA Technologie AG. From 2005 the company was the metallurgy branch of Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services and traded as Siemens VAI. In 2015, a joint venture turned this into Primetals Technologies .

Important technical developments from the group

VÖEST LD crucible from 1952, today in the Vienna Technical Museum

LD process

The Linz-Donawitz process (LD process) developed by VÖEST is one of the most important inventions in steel production, in which technically pure oxygen is blown onto pig iron. In 1952 the world's first LD steelworks went into operation at the Linz location. Today's steelworks LD-3 , which opened in 1973, is still considered to be one of the most modern in the world. The know-how of the engineers of the then new building department was later outsourced to the newly founded VOEST-Alpine Industrieanlagenbau (VAI).

Corex process

The Corex process was developed by VOEST-Alpine Industrieanlagenbau (VAI). The first large-scale Corex plant was built at the end of 1989 at ISCOR , now part of the Arcelor Mittal group, in South Africa (capacity around 300,000 tons per year). A second Corex system was successfully put into operation at POSCO in South Korea with a capacity of 600,000 tons per year. Further systems are planned and under construction.

literature

  • Oliver Rathkolb (ed.): Nazi Forced Labor: The Linz Location of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring AG Berlin, 1938–1945 , Böhlau Vienna 2001. 2 volumes. ISBN 978-3-205-99417-6 .
  • Karl Fallend: Forced Labor - Slave Labor in the Reichswerke Hermann Göring at the Linz location: (Auto) biographical insights , Böhlau Vienna 2001 (Volume 2).
  • Wilfried Leisch: You VOEST me. Texts / pictures / facts. The book against forgetting about Voest privatization. Ed. V. Group works council at ÖGB-Verlag Vienna 2004. ISBN 978-3-7035-1025-0 .
  • Christian Hager, Markus Rieger: The works railway of Voest-Alpine Stahl Linz GmbH . ISBN 978-3-927587-39-7
  • Franz Summer: The VOEST debacle Vienna, 1987. ISBN 978-3-7015-0101-4
  • Günter Kaar, Manfred Carrington , Andreas Reiter: LiNZ contemporary history - from provincial to steel city, the beginning of VÖEST. Lentia-Verlag, Linz 2012, ISBN 978-3-9503469-0-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c http://www.expeditionvoestalpine.com/begreifen/19
  2. ^ Conference report, PDF ( memento of February 21, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) of the AHF , accessed on March 18, 2010.
  3. ↑ voestalpine: Contemporary History MUSEUM (accessed on February 27, 2017).
  4. ^ Helmut Lackner: The "Contemporary History Museum" of voestalpine AG in Linz . In: steel and iron . tape 137 , no. 2 , 2017, p. 78-80 .
  5. ↑ Federal Act of July 26, 1946 on the Nationalization of Enterprises (Nationalization Act), StF: Federal Law Gazette No. 168/1946
  6. ↑ Ex-state company on merger course , Der Standard , March 30, 2007, p. 18
  7. ^ History of the Steel Foundation ( Memento from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ A child of the steel city as head of voestalpine. Retrieved June 29, 2019 .
  9. ^ DiePresse.com: Voestalpine: Böhler takeover with flaws