VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB)

GUB grew out of what was left after 1945. In August that year the Soviet occupying power had the town’s watch industry dismantled: machines, tools and stock went away in 32 lorries, and the workers who stayed rebuilt equipment from surviving moulds and from memory.^1, 2

Work began again almost at once. Glashütte Original dates the first design drawing of a new movement, Calibre 61, to 6 October 1945, five months after the surrender.¹

The firms were then nationalised one by one. A. Lange & Söhne was taken from the family in 1948, and the sister companies UROFA and UFAG, which had made and assembled wristwatches since the 1920s, applied to become state property themselves.^1, 2, 10

In 1951 they were merged into VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe. For the next four decades it was the town’s watch industry under a single name, making watches and other timekeeping products until reunification.^1, 2, 3

Between 1951 and 1991 the company developed four automatic movements. Glashütte Original calls one of them, the Spezimatic of the 1960s, the most successful watch the town has made.^1, 2

How many people worked there is told differently: about 2,500 near the end of East Germany by one count, around 2,000 over its forty years by another, and about 3,000 around 1990 by a third, of whom 72 were kept on.^1, 2, 3

From 1 March 1967 GUB was one of the works of the VEB Uhrenkombinat Ruhla, and from 1978 of the Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt.^{13, 14, 15}

Reunification turned the state company into Glashütter Uhrenbetrieb GmbH, entered in the commercial register on October 16, 1990, and run for a time by the Treuhand, the agency that privatised East German firms; the whole turn in the town is told under Glashütte after reunification. The Treuhand sold off much of its property and the rights to the A. Lange & Söhne name.^1, 2

Privatisation was completed in 1994, when the entrepreneurs Heinz W. Pfeifer and Alfred Wallner bought the business and gave it the name Glashütte Original, after an “Original Glashütte” seal of the 1920s. In 2000 it passed to the Swatch Group, which owns it today.^1, 2, 3