VEB Uhrenkombinat Ruhla

By the 1960s East Germany’s watches came from three state works: the old Thiel works at Ruhla, state-owned since 1 May 1952 as the VEB Uhren- und Maschinenfabrik; VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe, formed in 1951 from Glashütte’s expropriated firms; and a works at Weimar, founded on 1 July 1950 as the VEB Feingerätewerk.^{1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7}

On 1 March 1967 they were joined in the VEB Uhrenkombinat Ruhla. Its director-general was Heinz Wedler, until then head of the Ruhla works.^1, 2, 3

The combine belonged to the economic reform of those years. A 1967 file in the Saxon State Archives is titled a model for introducing the economic system of socialism in the VEB Uhrenkombinat Ruhla, and Wedler told the SED’s Seventh Party Congress that April that the combine’s new factory was possible only through the new economic system of planning and management.^3, 8

Ruhla made the everyday watch, on its pin-lever calibre 24 of 1963; how many it made is told under Ruhla.^1, 2, 3

Glashütte kept to jewelled lever watches: the German Wikipedia dates GUB’s Spezimatic automatic to 1965 to 1979 and says it made marine chronometers until 1976.⁷

Weimar supplied the others. The diving-history journal TauchHistorie says it delivered mainly cases and other parts to its partners in the combine, besides simple clocks such as alarms, and that most East German wristwatch cases were made there; the German Wikipedia records about 1,500 workers there by 1976.^4, 5

It was a combine of machines as well as watches. The German Wikipedia says the Ruhla works also built machine tools and integrated circuits for watches and at times employed more than 10,000 people; Ruhla’s chronicle records a new machine factory at Seebach in 1971, when the combine was renamed VEB Uhren- und Maschinenkombinat Ruhla.^1, 2

Wedler told the party congress in April 1967 that Ruhla was automating calibre 24 two years ahead of plan, from electronic data processing for planning to fully automatic departments; a computer centre for the combine and a highly automated watch factory had been built for the congress, where 38 automatic machines replaced 87 mostly manual operations.³

He put the gain at a rise from 2 million to 3.3 million wristwatches over four years with the same workforce, and said that 300 workers, 98 per cent of them women, had been won for shift work, breaking, in his words, decades-old traditions of the watch industry.³

The division of labour had limits. TauchHistorie says Weimar could make brass cases but not steel ones, so steel cases still had to be imported, and that a GUB chronometer was refused by its West German importer until it had an imported case.⁴

In 1978 the combine’s works passed into the new VEB Kombinat Mikroelektronik Erfurt. Ruhla became the lead works for timekeeping, Wedler became director-general of the whole Erfurt combine, and the Glashütte and Weimar works went with it.^{1, 2, 4, 5, 9}

The German Wikipedia describes the Erfurt combine as one of the bases, with Robotron and Carl Zeiss Jena, of East Germany’s electronics programme, reporting directly to the Ministry of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, with 60,000 employees before it was dissolved.⁹

After 1990 the Treuhand privatised the works in pieces. Ruhla’s chronicle counts 26 new firms sold to outside investors and 22 management buy-outs there, among them the watchmaker Gardé of 1991; the Glashütte works became Glashütter Uhrenbetrieb GmbH, registered on 16 October 1990, and later Glashütte Original.^{1, 2, 6, 7}

The German Wikipedia says some 40 companies came out of the Ruhla works, and that the Weimar works, split off from Ruhla under the Treuhand, ended with about 2,000 employees.^2, 5