For generations, Chemnitz has carried the epithet „cradle of German machine building.“ The title is more than city marketing: starting in the 1840s, within a few decades, the densest concentration of machine-tool, locomotive, and textile-machinery factories on the European continent emerged here. What is remarkable is less the finding itself than its durability: between the founder era and today lie the postwar wave of expropriations, forty years of planned economy under a new city name, and the abrupt regime change of 1990 – three deep ruptures in property order and political system, any one of which alone could have ended an industrial tradition. It did not. This essay asks what actually persisted in Chemnitz – and what did not.

Textile Economy as Origin: Derived Rather Than Original Demand

Machine building in Chemnitz was not a starting point but a consequence. The city was already a center of the textile economy in the 17th and 18th centuries; after the Seven Years‘ War (1756–1763), calico printing – the printing of colorful patterns onto cotton fabric – additionally established itself here. In 1798, the Bernhard brothers founded the first mechanical cotton mill on the English model in Harthau near Chemnitz – one of the earliest starting points of industrialization in Saxony altogether.

This early textile boom produced something that proved decisive for what followed: derived demand. Spinning mills and weaving mills needed spinning, weaving, and printing machines, which were initially imported or crudely reproduced in workshops. Whoever maintained, improved, or serially manufactured these machines accumulated technical knowledge, capital, and a network of foundries, locksmith shops, and skilled workers – the basic equipment for an independent machine-building industry. The same transmission mechanism – an upstream industry generates the manufacturing competence for a downstream one – appears, in a different constellation, in the transition from the sewing-machine to the automobile industry; in Chemnitz, it was the textile industry that played this role.

The Founder Era: From Workshop to Independent Industry

Out of this starting position, within a few decades, several firms emerged that marked the transition from textile-machinery supplier to export-capable, independent machine building.

Johann Zimmermann, born in 1820 in Pápa, Hungary, came to Chemnitz in 1839 as a locksmith and foreman and established there in 1848 the first machine-tool factory on the European continent – a machine tool being a machine that manufactures not end products but machine parts themselves, in effect the tool of industry. This makes Chemnitz the starting point of German machine-tool building in the narrower sense. Zimmermann was later honored several times for his entrepreneurial achievements, was raised to the Austrian knighthood in 1877, and died in 1901 in Berlin as „Ritter von Zimmermann.“

In parallel, Richard Hartmann, a trained tool-smith from Barr in Alsace who had come to Chemnitz in 1832, built up his own business: in 1837 he founded, together with Franz Carl Illing, a workshop for repairing spinning machines; the entrepreneurial breakthrough came with the invention of a roving frame („Continue“), for which Hartmann received the Saxon government’s Gold Prize Medal. From there the business grew rapidly: in 1842 he employed around 200 workers, by 1855 already nearly 2,000. In 1846 the Saxon government granted him a credit of 30,000 talers, which enabled his entry into locomotive building; in January 1848 the first steam locomotive built in Chemnitz, „Glück auf,“ rolled off the line, with support from engineer Theodor Steinmetz. The 100th locomotive followed in 1858, the 1,000th in June 1878 – a few months before Hartmann’s death that December. In 1867 the company built a new works hall with capacity for up to 100 locomotives a year; in 1870, with a capital of 2.5 million talers, it was converted into the joint-stock company Sächsische Maschinenfabrik, formerly Richard Hartmann, which thereafter produced across five divisions – locomotives, machine tools, steam engines, spinning machines, and looms. At times it was the largest company in the Kingdom of Saxony and played a decisive role in making Saxon locomotive building internationally competitive – including against Britain.

In 1852, David Gustav Diehl founded a third company, which in 1872 became the joint-stock company „Werkzeugmaschinenfabrik Union, formerly Diehl“ and presented its first boring mill in 1875 – by its own account the oldest still-existing machine-tool factory in Germany and Europe. In 1936, Union merged with the Karl Wetzel machine factory of Gera to form „Wetzel-UNION,“ headquartered in Chemnitz; this early link to Gera – not merely a post-reunification construct – explains why the Gera site belonged to the company for decades afterward. Also notable was Louis Ferdinand Schönherr, who together with a partner named Seidler drove forward loom production; „Schönherr & Seidler“ later became the Sächsische Webstuhlfabrik AG – evidence that the textile-adjacent branch of machine building itself became an independent industry, not merely its point of origin.

The effect of this wave of founding was an unusually high regional concentration of machine-building competence in a confined space: knowledge, skilled workers, and suppliers accumulated in one place, which favored new foundings and spin-offs – a mechanism economic geography calls external economies of scale: advantages that arise not from the size of the individual firm but from the density of the location as a whole. The epithet „Saxon Manchester,“ which Chemnitz acquired because of its many factory chimneys and the associated smoke and grime, was the visible flip side of this densification. Around the turn of the century, Chemnitz was at times considered one of the wealthiest cities in Germany; in 1883 the city crossed the threshold of 100,000 inhabitants and thus became a major city, and in the early 1930s its population peaked at over 361,000.

The First Rupture: Expropriation, Consolidation, Combine Formation

The first deep break came after 1945. The historic founding firms were expropriated in the Soviet occupation zone – in the case of the Union machine-tool factory this happened in 1946 – and converted into publicly owned enterprises (VEB). In 1953, Chemnitz itself was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt.

The transition to the full combine structure in fact took place in two stages that are often collapsed together in retrospect. First, the expropriated firms were incorporated into Associations of Publicly Owned Enterprises (VVB), a looser administrative layer of the 1950s and 1960s. Only on January 1, 1970, following the dissolution of two predecessor organizations, was the VEB Werkzeugmaschinenkombinat „Fritz Heckert“ established, headquartered in Karl-Marx-Stadt – named after the communist politician Fritz Heckert, not after an entrepreneurial family. It united more than twenty enterprises across the entire territory of East Germany, including VEB Mikromat Dresden, VEB „Union“ Gera, VEB RAWEMA Karl-Marx-Stadt, and VEB Vorrichtungsbau Hohenstein-Ernstthal. In 1976 it was classified into „value category 1“ – the highest tier the GDR assigned to combines of supra-regional significance for the socialist economy.

What matters for the later assessment is what survived this rupture and what did not. The firms as legal subjects and as independently market-acting enterprises disappeared. The production sites, the accumulated technical knowledge, and – above all – the spatial concentration of the industry in and around Karl-Marx-Stadt remained, and the planned economy even deliberately made use of this, building the existing competence into a central industrial site for machine tools across the entire Comecon region.

The Second Rupture: Treuhand, Privatization – and the Migration of Substance

1990 brought the second, economically more incisive break: in October 1990, the „Fritz Heckert“ combine was formally dissolved, with PRISMA-Werkzeugmaschinen-Gesellschaft mbH as its legal successor. What followed was the privatization of the individual enterprises by the Treuhandanstalt and the general collapse of East German industrial production in the early 1990s.

The case of the Union machine-tool factory shows how uneven this transition was: after reunification the company was privatized; in 1994 the Gera site closed – the very link that had existed since the 1936 merger with Wetzel; in 1996 an employee-owned company called „Neue Union“ emerged from the Chemnitz plant. In 2009 the investor group Nimbus took over the company; since June 2011 it has belonged to the family-owned Swiss HerkulesGroup. Since 2020, the actual manufacturing of Union machines has been carried out by its group sisters WaldrichSiegen and Maschinenfabrik Herkules; what remained in Chemnitz was essentially the service and spare-parts business.

The case is instructive because it shows that „persistence“ here does not mean the individual firm endured unchanged. The name Union survived for over 170 years, but ownership, group affiliation, and, most recently, even the location of actual value creation changed several times. What was actually continuous across this and comparable cases was not the continuity of the firm, but the continuity of the location as a place where machine-tool competence held on or resettled – regardless of the respective owner.

The Location Today: Reassembled, Not Reinvented

According to the Saxon economic development agency Wirtschaftsförderung Sachsen (as of 2024), Saxony’s machine-building sector comprises around 1,000 companies with more than 45,000 employees; the industry contributes 10.7 percent of Saxon industrial revenue and 13.7 percent of the state’s industrial export revenue.

In Chemnitz itself one finds both descendants of the historic structure and genuinely new foundings. Niles-Simmons-Hegenscheidt, which points to a more than 185-year German-American machine-building tradition, ranks among the thirty largest machine-tool manufacturers worldwide and employs around 330 people at its Chemnitz headquarters, complemented by plants in Glauchau (brand Wotan, roughly 80 employees) and Döbeln (brand Rasoma); the company now works, among other things, on manufacturing solutions for electrified drivetrains and for electrolyzers used in hydrogen production.

Even the name of the old combine itself has survived in an unusual way: in 1998 the Swiss Starrag Group acquired „Heckert Werkzeugmaschinen GmbH Chemnitz“ with around 198 employees – the part of the company that traces back to the „Fritz Heckert“ combine founded in 1970. To this day, the Chemnitz site operates as „Starrag GmbH, Heckert product division“: the very name under which the state-owned combine was once formed lives on as a brand name of a private, family-owned Swiss machine-building group.

Sitec Industrietechnologie, an automation specialist, was founded in 1991 and thus represents a genuinely new generation of founding after reunification; over thirty years the company has built around 3,000 production systems, for instance for laser welding, assembly, and testing technology in the automotive, fuel-cell, electric-motor, and medical-device industries. Added to this are more recent networking initiatives such as the cross-industry innovation cluster Robotics Saxony, built up since April 2025, and the VEMASinnovativ network, as well as TU Chemnitz as the local technical university – in other words, precisely the infrastructure elements (knowledge transfer, skilled-worker training, supplier density) that already carried the original cluster effect in the 19th century. The fact that Chemnitz was European Capital of Culture in 2025 made this industrial history additionally visible: the city’s industrial heritage was a dedicated programming focus of the Capital of Culture year.

This allows the question posed at the outset to be sharpened: what endured in Chemnitz across three political systems was not a particular firm, a particular property arrangement, or even a particular economic order. It was a place-bound combination of technical knowledge, skilled-labor supply, supplier density, and – increasingly since reunification – research infrastructure, which reassembled around the same geographic core after every rupture, even as the individual building blocks (firms, owners, even the city’s name) changed. That, of all things, a brand name from the socialist combine era – „Heckert“ – survives today under the roof of a Swiss family business is a particularly pointed piece of evidence for this.

Assessment

The thesis rests on a limited number of exemplary cases examined (namely Zimmermann, Hartmann, the Union machine-tool factory, and – as an addition from further research – the transition from „Fritz Heckert“ to Starrag) as well as general population and industry data, and should accordingly be understood as provisionally corroborated, not as proven. A systematic study of how many of the original Chemnitz founding firms, and how many of the more than twenty combine enterprises across the entire territory of East Germany, actually continue in an unbroken institutional line to this day, and how many production capacities since 1990 actually arose newly and without reference to the historical structure, does not underlie this essay. Individual quantitative figures from older accounts of Chemnitz’s industrial history – for instance on concentration shares of Saxon machine building around 1850, or world-market shares of individual textile segments around 1900 – could not be reliably verified within the scope of this research and were therefore deliberately not adopted.

Ralf Keuper

Sources

• Johann von Zimmermann – Wikipedia
• Richard Hartmann – Saxon Railway Museum Chemnitz-Hilbersdorf
• Richard Hartmann (machine manufacturer) – Wikipedia
• Union Werkzeugmaschinen – Wikipedia
• VEB Werkzeugmaschinenkombinat „Fritz Heckert“ – Saxon State Archive
• Werkzeugmaschinenkombinat „Fritz Heckert“ – Wikipedia
• Chemnitz – Wikipedia
• Chemnitz – „Saxon Manchester,“ „Socialist Karl-Marx-Stadt“ (Leipzig University)
• Machine building in Saxony – Wirtschaftsförderung Sachsen
• NILES-SIMMONS-HEGENSCHEIDT – Wirtschaftsförderung Sachsen
• Starrag GmbH Chemnitz – History
• Sitec Chemnitz: 30 Years of Top-Class Automation – Wirtschaftsförderung Sachsen