Weser Hut
The ferrous Weserhütte Otto Wolff GmbH was a German producer of plant and mechanical engineering industries , located in the East Westphalian town of Bad Oeynhausen in the Minden-Lübbecke , North Rhine-Westphalia . The company was founded in 1844 as Eisenwerk Weserhütte, developed and became part of the German armaments industry during World War II. In 1987 the company went bankrupt.
history
The origins of the company lie in the establishment of the Weserhütte ironworks in 1844 by Albrecht Emil Kuntze and Christian Friedrich Pottharst. The relatively small company produced a modest amount of cast goods, mainly pots, stoves and agricultural implements. After the death of the company founder Pottharst, operations on the site on the Werre were expanded. It was produced with a foundry for mechanical engineering and bridge construction. At the beginning of the 20th century, the plant ran into financial difficulties several times, followed by restructuring and new investors.
During the Second World War was the Weserhütte part of the German defense industry and produced guns ( Pak and Flak ), armored cars and armored personnel carriers . Part of the production was relocated to the so-called U-relocation in the nearby Wiehengebirge . The studs Toad took the Weserhütte AG to anti-aircraft guns to manufacture underground. During this time, forced laborers were also used. Shortly before the occupation of the city by the US Army, the factory and with it the city of Bad Oeynhausen were bombed targets by the Allies, in which many employees of the Weserhütte were killed. In the post-war period, the Weserhütte came on the dismantling list of the Americans and British. The approximately 800 workers at the plant feared for their jobs. Parts of the factory premises were used by the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers of the British occupying forces for a repair workshop (4 base workshops REME) until 1958.
After the war, the company was largely ruined, but in the following decades it played a part in the German economic miracle and in the 1950s and 1960s - alongside competitors such as Demag , Menck & Hambrock and Orenstein & Koppel - it was one of the great German companies Establish excavator manufacturers. Above all in the construction of rope excavators, the company took a leading position worldwide. It also produced large transport systems, machines for heavy ceramics and machines for hard crushing. In the 1950s, the company employed well over 2,000 people and thus took a top position in East Westphalia.
bankruptcy
The company's decline began in the early 1970s, so that it increasingly had to concentrate on plant engineering. In 1980 it merged with the machine manufacturer Pohlig- Heckel-Bleichert Vereinigte Maschinenfabriken AG (PHB) to form PHB Weserhütte AG (PWH). In 1987 the company went bankrupt. At that time, the owner was Otto Wolff von Amerongen , and Arend Oetker , Chairman of the Supervisory Board . The insolvency administrator was Klaus Hubert Görg , who sold large parts of the business to Orenstein & Koppel. Wolff tried to turn things around in 1986 when he appointed his then son-in-law Oetker as CEO of Otto Wolff AG. The old orders remaining for the Weserhütte for large systems under construction for continuous conveyors abroad were no longer completed by the Weserhütte, with one exception, the completion of a system in Bangladesh , which was accompanied by Görg's colleague Jauch .
The cause of the bankruptcy was on the one hand foreign business for which the management under the chairman Peter Junge had not taken out any rate hedging . At the beginning of the 1980s, the Weserhütte was able to compensate for weak operating results with the rising exchange rate of the US dollar . However, from 1985 to 1986 it fell (converted to the ratio to the euro ) from 2.94 to 2.17 and in 1987 back to the rate of 1980 at around 1.80, which resulted in dramatic losses for the Weserhütte. In addition, turnkey construction was common in large-scale plant construction . As a general contractor, the Weserhütte increasingly had to be responsible for large-scale systems, technically and economically, for which it only provided relatively small parts of the service with its own products.
Görg was able to persuade Otto Wolff to subsidize the bankruptcy proceedings to avert possible further liability, but with the result that Wolff lost his entire Otto Wolff group by 1990 . The bankruptcy proceedings were concluded with a compulsory settlement under the bankruptcy code. This was made possible at the same time by Wolff's outstanding position as a long-standing representative of the German economy, as many creditors wanted to save Wolff from forced access to his assets. Wolff's celebrities made the procedure one of the most spectacular at the time.
The company's photo archive was taken over in 2001 by the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv Foundation.
Product range
- from 1844: stove parts, pots, kettles, window frames and accessories for agricultural equipment
- from 1869: Deep drilling rigs, saline grids, brick making machines, steel construction (lattice masts, bridges), crushers and brick making machines
- from 1904: backhoe excavators (cable excavators), bucket chain excavators, floating excavators, rope and chain conveyor systems
- from 1908: machines for bulk material extraction, storage and transport for opencast mines and power plants; Crushers, conveyor belts, trench excavators
- from 1919: presses and light railways
- from 1924: First excavators with crawler tracks, mobile belt conveyors, smaller ship unloading devices, cable laying devices
- from 1929: loading bridges and special peat excavators
- During the Second World War: armored vehicles, guns and other military technology
- from 1948: In the following years a wide range of excavators and opencast mining was offered
- from 1949: Sampling systems and transport systems for steel works
- from 1958: Bucket wheel excavator
- from 1959: mobile rope excavator named "Weserwolff"
- from 1962: hydraulic excavator
- from 1965: port handling equipment
- from 1964: First rope excavator with hydraulic control
- 1968: The Weserhütte builds the hydraulic excavators for the Elbe tunnel in Hamburg
- from 1966: facilities for nuclear power plants and nuclear research facilities
- from 1973: Cable excavators were only built with fully hydraulic drives
(The list is not complete.)
Todays use
The previous halls and other buildings were demolished. The large Werre-Park shopping center with a total area of approx. 52,000 m², a cinema center and the Bad Oeynhausen casino are located on the site of the Weserhütte . A large part of the site is used as a parking lot with almost 2,300 spaces. In April 2012, a memorial plaque for the former Weser hut was erected on the grounds of the Werre Park .
Web links
literature
- 125 years of the Weserhütte. Portrait in words and pictures , o. O., o. J. (Festschrift for the 125th anniversary in 1969).
- Gerd Rohlfing (Ed.): The Weserhütte. The rise and fall of a company. Mindener Geschichtsverein, Bad Oeynhausen 1999. ISBN 3-929894-26-2 .
- Ulf Böge, Rainer Volkwein: Weserhütte excavator. Podszun, 2004. ISBN 3-86133-350-3 .
- Bad Oeynhausen between war and peace: end of war and occupation in contemporary testimonies and memories , published on behalf of the working group for homeland maintenance of the city of Bad Oeynhausen e. V. in collaboration with the Bad Oeynhausen City Archives by Rico Quaschny; Bielefeld 2006, ISBN 3-89534-631-4 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ archive.nrw.de
- ↑ In memoriam: Weserhütte ( Memento of April 8, 2020 in the Internet Archive ) GEOCACHING.COM
- ↑ Dirk Windmöller: Brutal murderers and good friends Löhner Nachrichten / Neue Westfälische from March 10, 2005 on www.hiergeblieben.de
- ↑ Neue Westfälische: "" Furniture cemetery "in the Siel causes trouble. Bad Oeynhausen 70 years ago" , accessed on July 31, 2018.
- ↑ Dr. D. Wilms: Ostwestfalen Lippe, the administrative district of Detmold . Oldenburg, 1957
- ↑ a b From private assets . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1987 ( online ).
- ↑ Very busy . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1986 ( online ).
- ↑ Unknown: Development of the dollar rate from 1971 to 2010. Accessed on January 26, 2011 .
- ↑ fotoerbe.de
- ↑ The information was taken from the books Weserhütte-Bagger and 125 Jahre Weserhütte .
Coordinates: 52 ° 12 ′ 52 ″ N , 8 ° 48 ′ 51 ″ E