Knorr-Bremse during the "Third Reich".

Competition between rail and road

In a radio address broadcast two days after he became Chancellor of the German Reich, Hitler promised the electorate to provide “work and bread”. Indeed the surprising success of his state job creation programs accounted in no small measure for the popularity of his regime. Without necessarily lending National Socialism their immediate political support, many entrepreneurs invested a great deal of hope in this reversal of economic fortunes, considered by most to have been scarcely possible. It was a moment the Knorr-Bremse Board of Management dated with great precision in its annual report: “The turning point was January 30, 1933.”

With the number of incoming orders now on the increase – the economic upturn was having a particularly marked impact on the transportation sector – the company could at last start creating new jobs. Construction of a network of freeways – the Reichsautobahnen – was perhaps the most effective of the new regime's job creation programs. It also showed beyond doubt that Hitler saw the motor vehicle as the mode of transportation of the future, according it priority over the railroads in both civilian and military life.

So the tangible economic upturn which accompanied the early days of the Third Reich led also to a marked shift in the focus of sales at Knorr-Bremse. The Reichsbahn, by far Knorr's largest customer, was awarded the commission to build the autobahns. At the same time it took on a development role in automotive design. As well as embarking on a rigorous program of expansion for its road freight delivery service, it expanded into bus transportation and became one of Germany's major commercial vehicle operators, putting into service 1,000 new trucks fitted with Knorr air brakes in 1934 alone. In this way, the Reichsbahn helped air brake technology make the desired breakthrough in road transportation, and through ongoing development work Knorr-Bremse was able to make rapid positional gains in the commercial vehicle brake sector.

The trend toward ever faster and heavier vehicles with payloads of up to 36 metric tons finally established the air brake with other vehicle operators as well. In 1937 Knorr-Bremse supplied approximately 22,000 brake systems for commercial vehicles and 11,000 units for trailers. By this time some 80 percent of new trucks coming onto the German market were equipped with the Knorr air brake.

Now it was time to expand the company's repair operations and the retrofitting of air brake systems. The first Knorr brake service facilities were established in late 1936, and a central parts store was set up at Frankfurt am Main. Just two years later there were 200 authorized workshops in Germany. When the hydraulic brake began to establish itself in the auto industry, however, Knorr-Bremse opted not to “jump on the American bandwagon” – as the company stated in 1936. Instead, it persisted with a hybrid “air-hydraulic” brake, which combined Knorr's own air brake technology with subassemblies from hydraulics specialists Alfred Teves (ATE) and Krupp. Knorr-Bremse's only use of hydraulics was in a hydraulic handbrake for rail vehicles.

Nevertheless, during this period of turbulent expansion in the commercial vehicle sector, sales of motor vehicle brakes (Department III) rose fourteen-fold in just four years from 1933. In 1937, for example, the department's sales totaled 11.9 million RM – more even than Department I (Mainline Rail Vehicles), which, like the rail sector in general, was by this time suffering from the Reichsbahn's ongoing reluctance to order new rolling stock, as the annual report for 1935 put it.

With assets of 23 billion RM and placing annual contracts worth over one billion RM, the Reichsbahn remained the “world's largest commercial enterprise” and a vital source of orders for the rail sector as a whole. Knorr-Bremse had been quick to prepare for the new technical challenges that would come to face rail transportation as a result of growing competition from the automobile and the airplane from the 1920s. The results of these preparations were not just to be found in the development of the Hildebrand-Knorr brake, which had set new standards in the mainline sector only a few years after the deployment of the Kunze-Knorr brake was completed.

The company had also pursued development initiatives in the high-speed sector. The use of brake linings promised improvements in the way braking forces were traditionally transmitted to the wheel rims. And faced with the choice between disk and drum brakes, Knorr-Bremse opted for the latter, a system it had already successfully deployed as a streetcar brake. In addition, in the high-speed sector the company began to exploit the potential of a braking system whose effectiveness was no longer dependent on the minimal grip that existed between wheel and rail:

In the early 1930s Knorr-Bremse acquired the Jores & Müller company and allocated it to Department II, which was now equipping multiple units in addition to streetcars and light rail vehicles. This small firm specialized in electromagnetic track brakes, which work by lowering magnetic shoes over the rail head which then “grip” the rail. Like the air brake, the electromagnetic track brake had already proved itself in the streetcar sector. Jores & Müller, which was to retain its own name as a part of the Knorr-Bremse Group until 1944, could also claim to have equipped the legendary “Rail Zeppelin” which on June 21, 1931 reached 230 km/h on a propeller-driven test run between Berlin and Hamburg. Although various teething troubles prevented it getting beyond the prototype stage, the Rail Zeppelin demonstrated the Reichsbahn's conviction of the need to find ways of increasing the speed of transportation.

In the ever fiercer competition between rail and road, the Reichsbahn promoted itself as the faster, more advanced mode of transportation. The speed of freight trains had risen dramatically and by the early 1930s the maximum permitted speed for express passenger trains had also been raised on a number of lines.

When the Reichsbahn turned to operating high-speed multiple units, Jores & Müller developed an electromagnetic track brake for the new car sets. It was introduced as an auxiliary brake and first entered service on the legendary Fliegender Hamburger – the diesel-electric high-speed multiple unit that attracted worldwide attention when it came into operation on the Berlin to Hamburg route on May 15, 1933 with a scheduled top speed of 160 km/h. The Reichsbahn had invested a great deal of time and effort in equipping this train with the appropriate braking system – and seats were booked up weeks in advance. The Hildebrand-Knorr brake developed in 1931 was also used on the Fliegender Hamburger.

These brakes for high-speed trains, developed at Knorr-Bremse in an astonishingly short time-frame, may not have returned high sales figures, but they nevertheless helped the Reichsbahn to achieve high-profile international successes and thereby underlined the role of Knorr-Bremse as an important development partner to what was still Europe's largest and most technologically advanced railway operator.

Knorr-Bremse also worked with the Reichsbahn to find new solutions to the German capital's steadily growing mass transit requirements. The Berlin S-Bahn, widely considered the most advanced light railway system of its kind in the world, was equipped with electrically controlled air brakes, motorized compressors and pneumatically operated doors – all supplied by Knorr-Bremse. Thanks to the foresight with which the company increased its technical staff, Knorr-Bremse was able to introduce a whole series of other innovations in the railway sector during the years that followed.

Throughout the 1930s, in addition to manufacturing the air brake Knorr-Bremse developed its activities in other product segments. In 1935, for example, the company joined with interested French and British parties to establish a syndicate with the aim of marketing the Isothermos axle bearing worldwide. In conjunction with the Walter Peyinghaus Iron and Steelworks in which Knorr-Bremse held a dormant equity holding, the company had been striving to ensure the widespread acceptance of the Isothermos bearing since 1925. With effect from January 1, 1938, the Peyinghaus steelworks based at Volmarstein in the Ruhr was taken over and became Knorr-Bremse AG, Stahlwerk Volmarstein. This left Knorr-Bremse with its own efficient foundry facility with around 1,000 employees.

Knorr-Bremse's attempts to expand into new markets centered mainly on the manufacture of pumps and compressors, which it had long designed as components of the air brake system. The company set up a new business unit – Department IV – to produce industrial compressors for applications in over 100 different fields.

A key figure in all of this was the engineer Hans Peters, whom Vielmetter had appointed in 1926 to head up the testing department. Knorr-Bremse became Germany's number one manufacturer of steam compressors. Since the mid-1930s it had also manufactured high pressure compressors such as those fitted to the whale catcher, the Walter Rau.

As a manufacturer of compressors the company also systematically developed its position. To boost sales, paint spray guns and pneumatic drills were added to the product range. For the latter, the company attempted to find a British licensee. Knorr-Bremse also supplied pneumatic tipping systems for the coal trucks used in the opencast brown coal mines. Department IV also manufactured starter clutches and transmission units under license, and with its signaling systems Knorr-Bremse also gained access to the market for automatic train control. Although these new products fell well behind brake manufacture in terms of sales, they often raised hopes of substantial new sales markets.

Then there was another production unit that initially generated little in the way of sales: Created in May 1934 as department “RB” this unit was kept strictly separate from the rest of the plant. Later also known as Department V, it was dedicated to armaments. However, trials with a patented compressed-air machine gun initially brought the company more losses than anything else.

Between global market and European “New Order”

By now Knorr-Bremse was represented in many different countries around the world. In addition to Germany these included Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Iran, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Outside Germany, the Kunze-Knorr freight train brake had already been introduced in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Turkey and to some extent in Hungary.

The newly developed systems for express rail transportation also soon met with interest abroad. Starting in 1936, the “lightning trains” of the Danish State Railway were fitted with both the electromagnetic track brake and the external-pad drum brake from Knorr-Bremse. Department II (Light Rail Vehicles and Multiple Units) supplied its systems to railway operators in Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, as well as Spain, Turkey and South America. From 1937 onwards a total of 140 multiple units with Knorr brakes were exported from Hungary to Argentina. But above all it was the Hildebrand-Knorr (Hik) brake which promised a sizeable increase in foreign sales – the brake the Reichsbahn would soon be fitting to all new passenger and freight cars.

The Hik brake had already received authorization for cross-border rail traffic from the UIC in 1931. The “Hiks” rapid-action version was awarded a Grand Prix in the “safety” category at the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris. At this time, Knorr-Bremse was involved in promising negotiations with many foreign railway authorities, and now the company also attempted to gain a commercial foothold in South America – in direct competition with Westinghouse. In Brazil in the spring of 1938, Companhia Paulista began trials with the Hildebrand-Knorr brake on the track between Tapuya and San Carlos where the system proved particularly effective on long and heavy trains.

Like its predecessor, the Hik brake found its first foreign market in Sweden. By 1939 it had also been decided to introduce it in Norway, Austria, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria and Iran. In Iran it was fitted to English rolling stock and went into service between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf on the Trans-Iranian Railway opened in 1938. Denmark and Hungary also decided in principle to adopt the Hik. Authorities in countries with an indigenous railway industry insisted on domestic production. But with a shortage of funds as a result of inflation, the Great Depression, and above all the strict foreign exchange controls introduced after the banking crisis of 1931, German companies found it difficult to set up their own production facilities abroad.

In Hungary Knorr-Bremse made efforts to purchase a majority shareholding in the Budapest-based Telefonfabrik AG, with whom a license agreement had been in place since 1926. But the problem of currency transfer caused the attempt to fail in 1933. In Romania, where a company called “Frana Knorr” was initially established, Knorr-Bremse ultimately concluded a license agreement with Fabrika de Lokomotiva N. Malaxa S.A.R. of Bucharest in 1936. In that same year, a license agreement was signed with Gebr. Hardy Maschinenfabrik und Giesserei AG in Vienna governing the manufacture of the Hik brake and other Knorr products for the Austrian market. Still in 1936, in Norway Knorr-Bremse assigned manufacturing rights to the Kongsberg Vaabenfabrik in Kongsberg, with Berlin to supply high-quality components such as control valves and brake cylinders at least for an initial period. And finally in Sweden Knorr-Bremse concluded an agreement in 1937 with Nordiska Armatur Aktiebolaget, its license partner since 1919. With plants in Stockholm and Lund, the company would manufacture the Hik brake for Sweden.

Not long after this, however, the politics of conquest and exploitation of the Third Reich dragged expansion of the Hik brake further and further into the troubled waters of the European “New Order” under German rule. The war meant that, on the one hand, major orders for Turkey and Iran, as well as for Estonia and Latvia were lost – countries that fell either into the sphere of influence of the western Allies or the Soviet Union. And the outbreak of war meant that all attempts to gain a foothold in South America had to be abandoned. Contacts were now necessarily focused on those railway authorities and licensees of Knorr-Bremse in the occupied states of Europe, or in neutral countries with German troops on their borders.

The ongoing joint venture with Nordiska Armatur Aktiebolaget (NAF) in Sweden remained relatively uncomplicated, however. A close working relationship had existed since 1919, and the company's Lund plant, which employed a workforce of several hundred, manufactured brake sets for the Swedish State Railway under a licencse agreement with Knorr-Bremse. That said, the company in which Johannes P. Vielmetter held a personal stake of 8 percent was certainly no easy partner. Lengthy disputes over sales rights bound up with the license agreements were not finally settled until 1936. And the new licensing agreement concluded with Knorr-Bremse in 1937 was not actually ratified by NAF until 1940. Throughout the entire duration of the war the Berlin company enjoyed a good reputation in neutral Sweden, and this made it possible for cooperation with its licensee to continue. In 1941 the first foreign company to be assigned the rights to produce and sell Knorr-Bremse brake equipment for road vehicles was also from Sweden – Thulin of Landskrona.

The annexation of regions by the Third Reich and ultimately its military conquest of large areas of Europe smoothed a path for German companies and their products into those occupied or annexed territories. In Austria, for example, following the Anschluss to the German Reich in March 1938, the decision was taken after “consultation” with the German authorities to bring the country's rail vehicles into line with German technology as quickly as possible. In spite of their license agreement with Knorr-Bremse, Gebrüder Hardy AG of Vienna had been working on the development of a new control valve, which unlike the Hik valve employed innovative rubber seals rather than metal ones. With the events of 1938 the company was forced to abandon this development and its director, the British citizen William Francis Hardy, left Austria to serve in the navy of the allied forces. The new regime put the company under the control of a commissioner, and on the basis of the license assigned two years earlier, Gebrüder Hardy finally started production of the Hik brake for the state railway, now part of the Reichsbahn. In the Netherlands and Denmark, too, it was only under German occupation that the state railways began systematic introduction of the new brake.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the view eastwards also became distorted in the whirlpool of military force. In August 1941 the Board of Management at Knorr-Bremse AG was mistakenly convinced that an entirely new set of challenges lay ahead. “The reorganization of Europe will in all probability mean new challenges in the freight train brake sector. Longer, continuous routes will lead to greatly increased train lengths and loads, particularly if Russia were ever to be incorporated into the European transportation network.”

Part of the German regime's strategy was to exert pressure on the business sector in occupied countries, while at the same time leaving a free rein to private competition.

In the eyes of the Board of Management at Knorr-Bremse, therefore, the license agreement concluded in October 1942 with Skoda in Prague for its Adamsthal plant was considered a notable success, since until then the Prague company had been striving to distribute a competitor product, the Bozic brake. “We regard this agreement as a further major step towards the exclusive use of the Hildebrand-Knorr brake throughout Europe,” reported the Board. Not long before this, the Reichsbahn's Central Office had given its consent for Skoda to manufacture at its Adamsthal plant “all brake parts for locomotives ordered by the Reichsbahn, for which Knorr-Bremse holds no industrial property rights.” As with Gebrüder Hardy in the Ostmark region, Skoda was a key target in the Third Reich's attempt to bring commerce in the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia under German control by pseudo-legal means.

By this time the Reichsbahn covered large parts of Europe and Knorr-Bremse was receiving a growing number of orders from the Ostbahn (Eastern Railway) operated by the “General-Governorship.” At the same time, the company's Berlin plant was directly supplying the railway industries in occupied Belgium and France, which were obliged to manufacture exclusively for the Reichsbahn. Even the Westinghouse plant in Paris was now supplying equipment for the Reichsbahn made to Knorr-Bremse designs, a turnaround from the situation a decade earlier when Knorr-Bremse had equipped French State Railways with Westinghouse brakes.

There is no documentary evidence which suggests that Knorr-Bremse at any stage attempted or even had the opportunity to apply political force to obtain orders or conclude license agreements. The Board of Management actually reacted to the rapidly increasing orders from abroad with growing restraint and attempted at least to draw out their acceptance so as not to incur excessive order backlogs. Unlike many other German companies and investors, Knorr-Bremse evidently made no attempt to acquire potential suppliers in the occupied countries, even though with the growing number of orders on the books the company was obliged to subcontract to foreign operators and thus run what it perceived as a risk of future competition. Orders were subcontracted to at least 57 companies in occupied territories during the war, including 21 in France, 27 in Belgium, three in both Italy and Denmark, one in Norway and two in the General-Governorship set up in Poland.

When, however, in the summer of 1943 increased allied bombing caused the Reich's Minister for Arms and Munitions to instruct Knorr-Bremse to relocate parts of its plants to sites further east, the company did take over production facilities in Myszkow and Sosnowice in that part of Upper Silesia ceded to Poland in 1920, but which since German occupation had been reincorporated into the Reich. These were a former metal- and enamelware factory and a large textiles plant, which following German occupation had been placed in the hands of the “Haupttreuhandstelle Ost” (HTO), the Central Trust Agency, Eastern Division. But here, too, Knorr-Bremse refused to purchase the real estate and instead signed a lease agreement with the HTO. These “relocation plants” employed between 1,000 and 1,200 mainly Polish workers, but in addition part of the regular Berlin workforce was moved there in order to produce materials vital for the war effort, for customers such as the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe.

The Supervisory Board was by now receiving reports from management that spoke of “very serious pressure” being applied by the relevant committees at the Ministry of Defense whenever the supply programs they had set up were not smoothly executed. The Board of Management found itself increasingly restricted in its freedom of decision and, under mounting difficulties, forced to supply the requisite equipment to various German railway authorities, whose influence by this time extended far beyond the borders of the Reich. Orders from the Eastern Railway rose to 800,000 RM in 1942. These not only facilitated the directly war-related services provided by “the railways required for the transportation of troops and supplies,” as the annual report from the Knorr-Bremse Board of Management put it. The development of efficient railway operations in occupied Poland was also vital for the trouble-free “evacuation” of half of Europe's Jewish population to the mass death camps of the Third Reich.

One can only speculate about what Berlin company directors knew, did not know or did not want to know of such matters. But Knorr-Bremse's relocation plant at Sosnowice near Katowice, which started production in February 1944 and where some 300 workers from Berlin were also employed until just before the end of the war, was no more than 20 kilometers from the Auschwitz extermination camp. The Nazi regime hermetically sealed off its mass-murder machinery from the outside world. Anything that did reach the ears of people outside the camps was so incredible that few in Germany or abroad were able to believe what they heard until allied troops were able to reach the camps and free the few remaining survivors. Whether or not the truth was known, no trace of it found its way into the surviving records.

Knorr-Bremse in the wartime economy of the “Third Reich”

Legislation passed on February 10, 1937 placed the Reichsbahn under the direct sovereignty of the Reich and thus under the control of the regime. From that point on it became known officially as “Deutsche Reichsbahn.” The new Reichsbahn Law introduced on July 4, 1939 expressly placed the transportation company at the service of “national defense requirements.” The expansion of its rolling stock however trailed far behind the growth of the Reich's production of actual armaments. At the outset of the war, Johannes P. Vielmetter had expressed the conviction “that construction of rolling stock is as vital to the war effort as the manufacture of any kind of weapon.” Not only was he soon proved correct, but his opinion also was shared by the military administration charged with fixing production quotas and the allocation of raw materials to industry.

In 1940 the Berlin production facility turned out a monthly average of 4,000 Hik freight and passenger car brakes for the Reichsbahn and for export. And in early 1941 its Munich subsidiary Süddeutsche Bremsen began supplying 1,500 Hik control valves to the Reichsbahn per month, with production rising to over 2,000 valves per month by the end of the war.

In 1942, control of production was placed directly in the hands of the new Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Albert Speer, who set up a Central Committee for Rail Vehicles. As a direct consequence of this, Knorr-Bremse was required to boost production by roughly 80 percent, primarily in the locomotive equipment sector. Taking into account the relocation plants at Myszkow and Sosnowice and the Munich subsidiary, during the latter years of the war Knorr-Bremse produced 500 complete brake sets for locomotives every month, in addition to a daily output of 250 Hik brakes mainly destined for freight cars. All in all, sales for Department I (Mainline Rail Vehicles) rose by a factor of six between 1937 and 1943, from 11.8 million RM to 72.6 million RM. In Department III (Motor Vehicle Brakes) the decline in civilian orders at the outset of war was offset by increased incoming orders for expanding military fleets. Sales of commercial vehicle brakes, however, which had been growing exponentially in the run-up to the war, became increasingly affected by restrictions on raw materials for the automotive industry and went into decline having reached a high point of 18.7 million RM in 1941.

The armaments department at Knorr-Bremse also acquired a new significance during the war, as the company turned out large numbers of compressors for airplanes and for the navy. In addition, Knorr-Bremse supplied substantial numbers of barrels for anti-tank artillery and shells to the army. During the war years, Department RB employed a workforce of about 400. Knorr-Bremse was also involved in a whole range of military development projects. Towards the end of the war, for example, two employees were working at the Peenemünde rocket center designing air-sprung brake sleds for launching the V1 rocket, the so-called “vengeance weapon” – although these were never brought into use. But even during the war, revenues from the armaments department represented a relatively small proportion of total company sales, hovering on average around the 6 percent mark and reaching a record high of 13.3 percent in 1942. For the entire duration of the war Knorr-Bremse remained at virtually full capacity with the production of air brakes for motor vehicles and for rail vehicles in particular, very much in line with the portrait of the company that had appeared in Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung on June 27, 1935: “Knorr-Bremse A.G. became established as a brake manufacturer, and this branch of operations will always remain the backbone of its industrial activities.”

At the company's subsidiaries that was not the case. Süddeutsche Bremsen in Munich took a long time to recover once the production program for railway brakes – reintroduced for a short period in 1934 to handle reparations supplies to Belgium – was brought to an end. No longer compatible with market requirements, its engine range attracted few orders. The turning point only came at the beginning of 1937 when, with assistance from Johannes P. Vielmetter, the company tendered for orders from the Army Weapons Office (HwaA) and began supplying detonators and shells. In 1938 Südbremse also began manufacturing aircraft engine parts for the Reich Air Ministry. When war broke out, the company's engine building department, which had been laboriously expanded, was also geared to supplying the army.

In Munich, actual production of armaments was seen from the outset as a stopgap measure which should be accorded no more space than was absolutely necessary. When Südbremse also took up production of Hik control valves in order to relieve the pressure on its parent company in 1941, and the Board of Management at Knorr-Bremse showed a renewed and lively interest in the production situation at its Munich subsidiary, the company even found it necessary to apologize for its ongoing production of armaments. The justification offered by the Board of Management at Südbremse was that without prewar armament production they would never have got the plant back up to capacity. The Munich company was of course aware of the drawbacks of having many and diverse products aimed at industry and agriculture, at the army, the navy, the air force and the railways. “But perhaps nowadays,” management argued in July 1941, “and in the near future it could prove advantageous not being tied to any one product.”

At Südbremse's sister company, MWM in Mannheim, too, army demand drove sales to record levels while the onset of war led to civilian orders being cancelled. Extensions to the plant were begun in 1938 and their scope increased several times, so that soon after the outbreak of war the number of employees had passed the 2,000 mark. Yet in spite of all this expansion, engine production at the Mannheim plant was constantly at full capacity.

The defense boom also had a significant impact on Carl Hasse & Wrede GmbH, in which Knorr-Bremse now held a 75 percent stake. In the early 1930s, company management was quick to recognize the onset of a worldwide buildup of arms and saw an opportunity to recommence supplies of complete special-purpose machines. As early as 1930 the Reich Army Weapons Office (HwaA) had commissioned Hasse & Wrede in strictest confidence to develop a shell lathe with tools for cutting hard metal. From the mid-1930s onwards large-scale orders were obtained from mainly state-run companies throughout Europe and South America. In 1935 the company opened its own representative offices in Shanghai and Tokyo.

Since export deals meant receipts of foreign currency, which were in short supply, the Reich authorities were favorably disposed toward the company's efforts. In 1937, Hasse & Wrede were authorized to set up a pilot production facility with machinery for manufacturing shells and detonators which they were also permitted to demonstrate to potential customers outside Germany. To this end, the company acquired the site of a former iron foundry in Berlin-Britz from Knorr-Bremse, and after extensive conversion work the pilot plant, known as Plant IV, went into operation in 1938. By this stage the company's workforce had increased tenfold since 1933 and numbered over 4,000 employees. As in the past, a large part of the machines were exported, mainly to the Soviet Union. Annual sales rose from a low point of 1.3 million RM in 1932 to a high of 23.6 million RM in 1938.

It was then decided to relocate the company's entire production operations to spacious new premises. On November 25, 1938, the Board of Management of Hasse & Wrede were invited to the offices of Albert Speer, the General Buildings Inspector of the Capital of the Reich, later to be Minister for Armaments. He allocated them a construction site in what was listed as Industrial Area 15 of the General Buildings Inspectorate near Marzahn, to the north-east of Berlin city center. The new plant, which incorporated an existing skeleton structure put up for the Reichsbahn, was built at impressive speed and under the direct supervision of the General Buildings Inspectorate.

On the day before the topping-out ceremony on August 31, 1940, acting on behalf of Hasse & Wrede, the company's directors, Paul Peter and Wolfgang Anger, signed a confidential agreement with the German Reich, represented in this instance by the German Army's Supreme Command (OKH). According to the terms of the agreement the company was obliged to make the new production facilities available when necessary for purchase orders received either directly or indirectly from the OKH. In return, the Reich would contribute 4.9 million RM to the construction costs. At the same time, the share capital of Carl Hasse & Wrede GmbH was increased from 4 million to 5 million RM, and Knorr-Bremse's stake rose to 90 percent. By March 1942 the move was complete, but in addition to operations at the giant new plant, production also continued at the Britz facility.

The Board of Management of Hasse & Wrede had asked the General Buildings Inspectorate to nominate a suitable architect specifically for this large-scale industrial construction project. The external appearance of the red brick and concrete structure picked up on the distinctive Modernist styles of the 1920s and 30s. Behind the brick-clad façade was a production hall measuring 200 meters by 200 meters. An uninterrupted 40,000 square meters of floor space accommodated 1,400 state-of-the-art machines and the 4,000 employees who operated them.

Such massive expansion in the interests of the defense sector called for considerable investment. A total of 24.5 million RM was poured into the new Hasse & Wrede plant at Marzahn, most of which was financed through credit agreements. In a development described internally as “not wholly without risks,” the company, whose senior director Julius Wrede died on February 23, 1939, had surrendered its independence. “Developments to the plant have made Hasse & Wrede the largest machine tool factory in Europe, perhaps even in the world. Following this expansion, carried out at the orders of the Supreme Command, Hasse & Wrede's capacity now exceeds that of normal machine tool factories. Once the war is over, utilizing this capacity to the full will be an enormous challenge.” The plant was therefore fittingly described a “shadow facility of the defense industry.”

By the end of 1939, Knorr-Bremse and its subsidiaries employed a workforce of over 20,000. The armaments boom had led to extraordinary expansion at the subsidiaries. But the dangers of this growth, occasioned to a large extent by the political framework conditions, were clearly recognized. For this reason the management of Knorr-Bremse was at pains to avoid any excessive expansion of capacity at the parent company. In summer 1938, Johannes P. Vielmetter made the following statement to the Supervisory Board: “We are not keen to undertake any expansion of our existing facilities; instead we are intending to engage the cooperation of plants with which we have friendly relations.” This was to remain the company's strategy throughout the war years. Once production capacities at Südbremse were fully stretched, the demands imposed by the war economy were seen increasingly as a burden. A large delivery backlog meant the risk of orders going to competitors, and in such cases this also meant handing over technical drawings and vital technical know-how.

The company's relationship with its number one customer was also encumbered by pressures of a rather different kind. Supplies to the Reichsbahn had traditionally been calculated on a “cost-plus” basis. The company submitted its audited cost accounting to which it was then permitted to add a limited profit margin. At times, prices were appreciably higher than production costs, so that the considerable costs of development could also be covered. But during the war this costing basis was abandoned in favor of a rigid fixed price system. From 1940 the Reichsbahn cut prices considerably on numerous occasions. Johannes P. Vielmetter saw his company reduced, as he complained in a letter dated June 22, 1940 to the Berlin Central Office of the Reichsbahn, “to the level of a screw factory.”

Knorr-Bremse nevertheless sought to honor delivery promises, come what may, right up to the end of the war, in spite of falling or even non-existent earnings. But this should not be ascribed to the considerable pressure exerted by the armaments committees alone. The company also kept a clear eye on the post-war situation. “It is vital,” explained the Board of Management in March 1943, “that our company should not lose these orders, as we shall otherwise see the development of competition that would not only help to meet the extraordinary growth in demand occasioned by the war, but would also pose a competitive threat to us in later years in both domestic and foreign markets.” Consequently no distinction was made between the demands of war and the interests of the company.

Responding to the substantial problems encountered not least in the field of human resources, the Board squared up to the need to restructure production operations and remained determined to meet its supply obligations. In its report of early 1943, management stated:

“Failure [to meet our obligations] would bring untold consequences both for the conduct of the war and for our company. The required increase in productivity has repercussions upon internal company structures in particular, since there are no more skilled workers to be had and the gaps that arise as a result of conscription cannot be adequately filled.”

From full employment to forced labor

For the Knorr-Bremse workforce, the economic upswing since 1933 had translated into a noticeable improvement in wages and additional benefits. Even before the war began, with nearly 5,000 employees, staff shortages occurred. Now there was full employment, and the lack of workers, particularly skilled labor, was acutely felt. The management sought to address this through retraining programs, mechanization, and streamlining of administrative tasks. For some time, Knorr-Bremse had also been stepping up recruitment of female employees. The number of female workers quadrupled between 1933 and 1938, rising from 149 to 621, while the total workforce more than doubled from 2,152 to 4,925 in the same period.

During the war, as military conscriptions increased and industrial demands grew, the need for additional labor escalated. By the war’s end, more than two-thirds of the male German workforce at Knorr-Bremse’s main Berlin plant had been conscripted or killed. The ability to fill these positions with female workers or untrained personnel quickly reached its limits. Workers faced increasing restrictions: from the summer of 1941, repeated unexcused absences no longer resulted in dismissal but instead carried the threat of imprisonment for up to three months. Nevertheless, the outflow of personnel threatened to interrupt production.

To sustain manufacturing output during the war, the Nazi regime ruthlessly exploited the labor force of occupied territories. Many people volunteered for work out of sheer necessity. However, their numbers were far from sufficient, and increasingly people were brutally deported from their homeland to perform forced labor in German factories. Prisoners of war were also compelled to work, a practice that, while technically allowed under international law, often took place under appalling conditions. By August 1944, a total of 7,615,970 foreign laborers were registered within the territory of the Greater German Reich.

For businesses, employing foreign laborers often entailed additional costs. Companies were required to provide food and accommodation. Knorr-Bremse AG and its subsidiaries also employed large numbers of foreign workers. In a supervisory board meeting on March 4, 1943, the management reported:

“The increased use of foreign workers, primarily Eastern European and French nationals, meant that we had to set up barrack camps, and their construction was subject to certain regulations. We built some of these camps ourselves, while others were constructed by the Reich and leased to us for use. [...] Approximately 2,700 foreign workers have been housed in these barrack camps.”

That same month, the number of foreign workers at Knorr-Bremse’s main Berlin plant reached its wartime peak at 3,101, representing 42.3% of the total workforce of 7,334. Among the industrial occupations, the ratio of foreign workers was even higher, at 48.7%. In the branch plants located in the General Government territory, the workforce was predominantly Polish. Including these workers, the number of non-German employees reached a peak of 4,090 in July 1944, when Knorr-Bremse employed a total of 8,269 people across Berlin, Myszków, and Sosnowiec. At Südbremse, foreign workers made up as much as 50% of the over 2,000 employees, including French and Soviet prisoners of war. In some manufacturing departments, foreign workers accounted for up to 75% of the workforce. As early as 1940, 100 prisoners of war were working at the Volmarstein steelworks. By September 1944, the number of foreign workers there rose to 344, plus an additional 273 prisoners of war, out of a total workforce of 1,285.

These numbers reveal little about the working and living conditions of foreign workers, which varied greatly depending on their origin. A report from July 11, 1942, listed foreign workers from 19 different countries at Knorr-Bremse’s main plant in Berlin. They included so-called Eastern workers (Ostarbeiter) from the Soviet Union, as well as Belgians, Czechs, Italians, French, Yugoslavs, Croatians, Dutch and Poles. There were significant numbers of women, especially among the Eastern workers. Prisoners of war were also employed. Western Europeans often had relatively more freedom and were treated better than Eastern workers, who faced particularly harsh restrictions.

In a circular from June 1942, the Knorr-Bremse management claimed that Eastern workers “voluntarily offered their labor.” However, the statement was accompanied by a warning to German employees: “As nationals of an enemy power, they are granted no freedom of movement. Keep them under strict control to prevent escapes.”

All company employees were required to wear color-coded badges on their clothing for identification: supervisors wore white badges, German employees blue, foreigners red, and Eastern workers green. Foreign workers were also housed in separate barrack camps according to their nationality. The female Eastern workers were escorted daily under guard from their camp to the factory. Similarly, Knorr-Bremse subsidiaries maintained their own camps on company premises. Foreign workers were most likely to work in closed groups. Their interaction with the German workforce was limited and typically mediated by designated supervisors tasked with training and overseeing them. The female Eastern workers were trained to operate lathes. Conduct towards foreign workers ranged from the sometimes extremely rude behavior of supervisors to cases of German employees offering individual assistance.

Initially, the company’s subsidiaries sought to draw upon all available reserves from the increasingly regulated labor market. For example, the management of Südbremse requested more female German workers, but municipal labor offices were unable to meet the demand. In May 1943, the management reported to the supervisory board: “The labor shortage was more or less remedied by recruiting foreigners of all nationalities and additional prisoners, but skilled workers remained unavailable.”

From 1943, Knorr-Bremse’s accounting calculated a decline in sales not only per worker but also per wage unit, which it attributed to the employment of foreigners, despite their wages being lower than German workers, as stipulated precisely in the regulations. Carl Hasse & Wrede reported a decline in total sales in 1942 due to the major outflow of skilled workers and the resulting shift to foreign labor.

The companies did not insist on recruiting foreign workers but they did view it as necessary, thereby participating in a system built on the ruthless exploitation of these individuals. The extent to which the inhumane tyranny of the Third Reich had permeated the apparent normality of everyday working life is starkly illustrated in a report from the Knorr-Bremse management to the supervisory board regarding employment at the Volmarstein steelworks:

“On average in 1942, 30 industrial apprentices were employed, compared to 32 in the previous year. At the end of March of the business year, 120 Soviet prisoners of war arrived, of whom only 75 were still working by the end of the business year. The Soviet prisoners of war were in very poor health: many had to stop working after a matter of weeks or months due to death or illness.”

Dangers and failures

The vague anti-capitalist sentiment within the National Socialist ideology and movement quickly gave way to pragmatic action focused on economic stability after Hitler’s “seizure of power”. However, the racist ideology of the new regime, which aimed to oust Jews from German economic and social life, had an immediate impact. One of Berlin’s most respected Jewish entrepreneurs, Isidor Loewe, had been involved in the founding of Knorr-Bremse, and until 1932, a member of his family had served on the supervisory board. By the time Hitler came to power, however, there were only a few Jewish employees in prominent positions within the Knorr-Bremse organization.

On October 21, 1935, Käthe Jacobi, a long-time employee of Carl Hasse & Wrede who had most recently been responsible for the company’s entire cash management, was informed that, as a Jew, she could no longer remain employed by the company. In February 1937, Wilhelm Strauß, a Jewish board member of Südbremse in Munich, also left his position. It is no longer possible to determine the extent to which political pressure played a role in his decision. According to a later account, Vielmetter’s separation from Strauß was a reaction to a demand from the headquarters of the Nazi-controlled German Labor Front. However, there is no evidence of antisemitic attitudes on the part of the company management.

Both Käthe Jacobi, who personally appealed to Johannes P. Vielmetter after her dismissal, and Wilhelm Strauß subsequently received financial support from their former employer. Herbert Waldschmidt, who joined the Südbremse board alongside Strauß in 1934, continued to employ a “non-Aryan” secretary and was thus able to protect her from persecution until shortly before the end of the war. Like Strauß, who had emigrated to safety, she returned to work for the company after the war. Julius Wrede’s son-in-law and former managing director Günther Beling, who was classified as a “half-Jew” under the Nazi regime, was even elected to the supervisory board of Carl Hasse & Wrede on May 2, 1933, replacing the deceased Walter Waldschmidt. He remained on the board for the remainder of the Third Reich.

However, political pressure was not only exerted on the companies externally. Knorr-Bremse was one of the first large companies where, as early as 1927/28, Nazi “factory cells” emerged among the workforce. After Hitler’s regime took power, the company’s organizational structure was also aligned with Nazi policies. The German Labor Front replaced the previous trade unions, the elected works council was supplanted by a “council of trust”, and the appointment of state “trustees of labor” ended collective bargaining autonomy.

The Law for the Regulation of National Labor of January 20, 1934, also required a new corporate code for Knorr-Bremse AG, under which Johannes P. Vielmetter assumed the function of “works leader” (Betriebsführer) over the workforce of “followers” (Gefolgschaft). However, the German Labor Front’s attempt to embed the National Socialist Führer principle in the company’s operations only had a superficial effect. Nevertheless, the new organization opened avenues for political attack by a horde of informants and careerists.

On September 10, 1937, Johannes P. Vielmetter applied for membership in the Nazi Party (NSDAP). Yet his decision can hardly be interpreted as a political alignment with Hitler’s party, which was well aware of individuals who did not fully conform to its expectations of a “model attitude”. The membership application of technical director Wilhelm Hildebrand on December 8, 1939, was rejected. So was the application of Reinhard Burkhardt, procurator and head of the foreign department, on June 3, 1941, as the party tribunal held his previously expressed distance from the NSDAP against him. In Munich, Herbert Waldschmidt joined the party in 1937. Similarly, Wilhelm Holzhäuser, who succeeded Wilhelm Strauß on the board of Südbremse, applied for membership. However, his earlier affiliation with a Freemason lodge meant his application was only approved five years later through a “pardon decree.”

Finally, the issue of generational succession in the leadership of Knorr-Bremse also entered political waters. Since its foundation, the company had always retained the traits of a family business. It was converted into a public limited company in 1911, and the binding of the shares in a syndicate was intended to facilitate an IPO, an option intended to accompany planned expansions. Yet this plan never came to fruition. The turbulent developments of the 1920s turned Knorr-Bremse into a privately-owned company. By 1941, when Wilhelm Hildebrand terminated the syndicate agreement, Vielmetter was the free majority shareholder of Knorr-Bremse with 87.3% of the share capital.

The company was now facing a different kind of crisis compared to the economic crisis it had weathered a decade earlier. The increased demands on production were difficult to meet and required significant funding. Borrowing from Deutsche Bank had reached nearly RM 11 million by the start of the war, a matter of concern for its board. In this situation, some companies sought alliances with strong or seemingly strong partners. Gesfürel, for instance, having already joined forces with Ludw. Loewe & Co. AG, finalized its merger with the larger entity AEG on February 19, 1942. As part of the transaction, Vielmetter joined AEG’s supervisory board. However, he did not consider such a step for Knorr-Bremse and showed no intention of placing company leadership, which he had exerted almost exclusively since 1907, into new hands. The supervisory board had been discussing the issue of management succession for some time. At the start of the war, Johannes P. Vielmetter was 79 years old, and Wilhelm Hildebrand was 70. The technical director looked back on 40 years of work in the development of the railroad air brake. He had even played a key role in the development of the Kunze-Knorr brake.

In 1937, under clear political pressure, Vielmetter expanded the board for the first time with the appointment of Oskar Maretzky. He had already been associated with Knorr-Bremse as mayor of Berlin’s Lichtenberg district since 1912. Dismissed from office in 1920 for his support of the Kapp Putsch, an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic, Maretzky had sided with the Nazi regime after it came to power and was appointed acting lord mayor of Berlin. He carried out his duties as a competent administrative figurehead of the regime without any real political influence.

When the independent municipal administration was abolished in 1937, he had to give up his office and joined Knorr-Bremse, where he was appointed to the executive board at the beginning of 1938. The former mayor enjoyed Vielmetter’s trust and also represented the company in negotiations with the Reichsbahn. However, he turned out to be a poor choice, as he not only failed to shield the company politically, but actively conspired against its leadership. By his own account, he persuaded the “labor trustee” in 1940 to pressure Vielmetter to relinquish his position as works leader.

Meanwhile, the company’s “council of trust” also went on the offensive. On November 7, 1940, it demanded that Vielmetter remove the head of personnel and other politically disfavored employees who were unwilling to perform their duties “in the National Socialist interest.” On December 16, 1940, Vielmetter stepped down from his role as works leader. The difficult position was taken up by Hellmuth Goerz, former managing director of the Volmarstein steelworks, who thus joined the executive board of Knorr-Bremse. Maretzky left the company again in January 1941 “by mutual amicable agreement.”

By this time, political coercion had significantly increased, while the strain on the company from the wartime economy continued to grow. It became increasingly evident that the company was lacking a truly solid leadership. On February 28, 1943, Wilhelm Hildebrand left the executive board. He passed away shortly thereafter, on December 24, 1943, at the age of 74.

After his departure, the board was expanded to include three new members. One of them was Friedrich Hildebrand, son of Wilhelm Hildebrand and a former technical assistant to the executive board. Another was Kurt Anhalt, who had been with the company for nearly 20 years and had established Unit III for automotive brakes. He was married to the widow of Johannes P. Vielmetter’s late son. The third new board member, Alfred Woeltjen, had only joined Knorr-Bremse in November 1942 in a technical leadership role. Since 1934, the engineer had worked in the Technical Office of the Ministry of Aviation under Hermann Göring.

Under political pressure, Johannes P. Vielmetter himself finally resigned from the Knorr-Bremse management in 1943, after initially taking on the newly created position of chairman of the (expanded) executive board. Oskar Maretzky once again acted against him, denouncing him to the head of the Main Committee for Rail Vehicles under the Minister for Armaments and Munitions, Gerhard Degenkolb, for alleged age-related weakness in leadership.

The new works leader Hellmuth Goerz was a member of the sub-committees responsible for brakes in the organization set up in 1942 to control production. However, these roles did not confer political influence. They apparently did not even ensure the usual level of participation in determining technical equipment standards. The primary goal of engaging with the committees’ work was to “avoid having our deliveries controlled by outsiders.” Not without reason, Degenkolb was praised by his minister, Albert Speer, as the “absolute dictator” of rail vehicle construction. An investigation initiated by Degenkolb had concluded that Knorr-Bremse’s production output lagged behind that of comparable plants. Maretzky’s denunciation was thus merely a superficial trigger for the subsequent events.

It was not ideological motives but rather the efficiency-driven technocracy of the Armaments Ministry that ultimately wrested control of the company from Johannes P. Vielmetter. Speer’s chief advisor, Karl Maria Hettlage, in a discussion with Knorr-Bremse’s supervisory board chairman, asked for Johannes P. Vielmetter’s resignation to be initiated “without any public fuss.” This led to Vielmetter stepping down on September 15, 1943, after more than 36 years on the executive board. Simultaneously, Otto Leibrock joined the board. As a legal advisor, head of the economic department, and Vielmetter’s assistant, Leibrock had been with the company since 1924, along with Friedrich Hildebrand and Kurt Anhalt.

In reality, Vielmetter’s grip on the reins of Knorr-Bremse had been slipping. The once tightly managed organization showed significant coordination deficiencies under the pressure of the wartime economy. Even Vielmetter’s secretary eventually held a kind of departmental authority, which, at least in the eyes of the supervisory board chairman, cost the company millions. Seeking a solution, the departing patriarch decided to appoint a leader with extensive powers at the helm of Knorr-Bremse. Despite numerous objections, he succeeded in installing Alfred Woeltjen as chairman of the executive board, granting him “decision-making authority in the event of disagreements.”

However, even the new strongman was unable to impose tight leadership on the increasingly embattled company. Woeltjen was held primarily responsible for the declining production and the resulting financial crisis at Knorr-Bremse. When the 84-year-old Johannes P. Vielmetter died on May 6, 1944, a few months after stepping down and while serving as honorary chairman of the Knorr-Bremse supervisory board, the situation spiraled out of control. The new operations director Walter Nase’s calls for an end to the “total in-house war” went unheeded. In May 1944, Woeltjen was stripped of financial responsibilities. Clinging to Vielmetter’s legacy, the increasingly isolated chairman of the executive board stubbornly remained in the role until April 13, 1945, when he was unceremoniously ousted from his office. By then, Berlin was under constant bombardment by Soviet artillery.

Beneath these personnel conflicts lay a deeper crisis, one that gradually engulfed the company as the war dragged on. Despite the growing shortages of labor and raw materials, Knorr-Bremse managed to continuously increase production until 1943. Total sales rose from RM 41.3 million in 1938 to RM 98.2 million in 1943. However, in the fall of 1943, due to bomb damage and production relocations, a persistent decline in production output, and consequently sales, began. This led to financial distress, exacerbated by the inability to collect significant receivables. Knorr-Bremse’s debts to Deutsche Bank took on ever more worrying proportions. Given the wartime economic circumstances, these problems did not yet have any far-reaching consequences. However, Deutsche Bank’s supervisory board chairman, Fritz Wintermantel, made it clear to the executive board in August 1944 that it would not extend the already exhausted credit lines any further. Research and development, a crucial factor for the company’s future, became more and more difficult to conduct.

The war began to take its toll on Knorr-Bremse. Starting in early 1943, the Berlin plant was repeatedly hit by air raids. On May 8, 1944, an attack claimed eleven lives and left over a hundred injured. The company’s other facilities also suffered bomb damage. On the night of March 8, 1943, approximately 600 incendiary bombs fell on the Südbremse plant, destroying, among other things, the engine testing facility. The branch plant of Carl Hasse & Wrede in Britz was half-destroyed by incendiary bombs on January 30, 1944.

The growing threat to the facilities spurred feverish efforts to find alternative locations. A proposal to move into the world-famous Meissen porcelain factory in November 1944 was abandoned due to its cramped layout. Similarly, a plan to set up alternative production in evacuated Dresden museums was fortunately never realized; Dresden was obliterated by Allied bombing during the night of February 13, 1945. Süddeutsche Bremsen, on the other hand, found a closer refuge from the hail of bombs that ravaged German cities in the final years of the war. In the empty beer cellars of the Franziskaner brewery, it set up a second plant to produce pumps for aircraft engines.

As the Red Army advanced, Knorr-Bremse lost its most valuable machinery at its relocation sites in Myszków and Sosnowiec. On January 20, 1945, 300 employees from Berlin and 100 foreign workers began a ten-day march from Sosnowiec to Berlin. Meanwhile, despite official prohibitions, thoughts turned to transitioning to peacetime production. The company placed hope in selling pneumatic-powered demolition hammers. On March 12, 1945, the executive board decided to remain in Berlin even in the event of the city’s capture by the Red Army, as moving the heavy machinery westward was far more difficult than relocating assets such as securities from Deutsche Bank’s vaults. Deutsche Bank had already decided to set up a backup headquarters in Hamburg.

Its board member Fritz Wintermantel, who had succeeded Gustaf Schlieper as supervisory board chairman after Schlieper’s death in 1937, was also the executor of Johannes P. Vielmetter’s estate. As bomb alerts increasingly disrupted factory operations, the company gradually prepared for “Day X.” Special orders were brought in to keep the remaining skilled workers from being drafted into the Wehrmacht or the national militia. Five days before the plant’s capture by the Red Army, the supervisory board chairman urged the company not to neglect the production of peacetime goods in anticipation of the months ahead.

In a Christmas 1944 letter to Vielmetter’s grandson and designated successor, who was in active military duty, Wintermantel wrote:

“Let us hope that during the coming year, the peaceful sounds of reconciliation will ring out, announcing a good peace. Stay healthy and enterprising; you will have endless opportunities to devote yourself to great tasks.”