The Siemens-Reiniger-Werke under National Socialism

The commercial register entries in Fürth and Berlin in January and February 1933 marked the first time that the founding companies of the medical technology arm of Siemens had been combined into a single enterprise: Siemens-Reiniger-Werke (SRW).  The new company was officially headquartered in Berlin, in a building known as the Haus des Arztes (“House of the Doctor”). Located in the immediate vicinity of the famous Charité hospital, the building was home to the company’s administrative and sales departments, which were led by Theodor Sehmer, a member of the company’s board. The headquarters of SRW in Berlin incorporated exhibition spaces and grand rooms for customer visits, whereas the company’s manufacturing and technical development were brought together in Erlangen under the leadership of the board member Max Anderlohr. This meant that Siemens-Reiniger-Werke was essentially under dual leadership – and the link with Siemens & Halske (S&H) was maintained by Heinrich von Buol, who was both a member of the board of S&H and chairman of the supervisory board of SRW. He was also frequently required to mediate in disputes between the two SRW board members.

Subsidiary organizations of the DAF, such as Kraft durch Freude (“Strength Through Joy”), organized vacations and leisure activities – although this provided another way for the DAF to exert social control and encouraged the spread of National Socialist ideas. The company introduced the Nazi salute at its Erlangen and Rudolstadt factories in August 1933 as a visible expression of the newly established “factory community.” As a result of the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, board members and authorized signatories had to provide proof of Aryan ancestry in order to continue receiving government orders. The extent to which human-resource policy was shaped by racial ideology is illustrated by an incident that took place in January 1939, when the SRW branch in Rio de Janeiro took out a newspaper advertisement seeking a Brazilian citizen of “Aryan extraction.” This led to an outcry in the South American country, with demonstrators laying siege to the SRW offices and the managers temporarily being placed under arrest. The fear of a negative impact on foreign business meant this was a disaster for the company’s head of sales, Theodor Sehmer.

The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 was a major turning point for Siemens-Reiniger-Werke, and the company became even more deeply integrated into the state-managed economy of Nazi Germany. Just as in World War I, the company saw part of its foreign sales collapse. However, it managed to continue supplying medical technology to neutral countries, and especially to the important South American market, via companies in Italy, Spain, and Sweden until 1942. Nevertheless, it became much more difficult for SRW to do business internationally. Despite this, SRW enjoyed growth not only in turnover but also in the size of its workforce. There were two reasons for this: Firstly, the volume of public contracts for the German armed forces continued to grow rapidly – with particularly high demand for field X-ray units, along with other electromedical products such as metal detectors or “Ultratherms” to tackle frostbite. By the financial year 1939/40, production for the armed forces made up 14 percent of the company’s output. 

From 1941 onward, with incoming orders for electromedical products already exceeding the production capacities of SRW, its management began awarding contracts to companies in the occupied territories – particularly in France. The priority here was to supply the German armed forces, followed by hospitals, and then private customers. In 1943, SRW’s production of electromedical equipment was designated as being vital for the war effort, which had important implications for the allocation of resources and staff. Secondly, from the financial year 1936/37 onward, the company complemented its production of electromedical equipment with a specialized manufacturing section for military hardware that had nothing to do with medical technology. Before the war, SRW was primarily engaged in the construction of radio equipment and directional gyros. Later, it also began producing a homing receiver known as the Ludwig device. These products were manufactured under license from the Siemens holding company Luftfahrtgerätewerk Hakenfelde GmbH in Berlin. No armaments were produced in Rudolstadt; the factory was struggling to clear the backlog of orders for X-ray tubes from the prewar years, a job made all the harder by the steady stream of new orders coming in. At the same time, specialized nonmedical manufacturing in Erlangen was playing an increasingly significant role for the company both economically and in terms of human resources – and accounted for 50 percent of turnover in the financial year 1944/45. The importance of the factory was highlighted when, on January 1, 1941, SRW board member Max Anderlohr was appointed as a Wehrwirtschaftsführer – a title awarded to executives of companies that were vital to the defense economy. In 1943/44, as the war raged on, the factory reached its highest number of employees to date, at over 3,000 people.

From 1943 onward, with Berlin under increasing bombardment, plans were put in place to relocate those manufacturing activities that were vital to the war effort. Against this backdrop, the SRW headquarters were gradually relocated over a period lasting from 1943 to just before the end of the war. The sales offices were moved to Erlangen along with the financial administration, technical sales, and advertising departments. Following the Allied occupation of Germany, both Rudolstadt and the SRW headquarters in Berlin found themselves within the Soviet Occupation Zone. As the war came to an end, a great many offices in Germany lay in ruins, but the factory in Erlangen was handed over to American troops intact on April 16, 1945. On May 8, 1945, the day of Germany’s surrender, the first sales meeting was held at the newly liberated factory.