A cup, a milk can, a ladle. If you could pick those household items up, you’d be amazed at how heavy they are!
Which is not really surprising, since they were made from leftover blanks – that were originally destined to be turned into armaments!
The large, conical cup was part of an anti-tank weapon; the milk can started life as part of a shell casing. And the colours of the enamel are the same as those used for war products. After the war ended, everything was in short supply. Like other manufacturing facilities, the Thale works improvised and used up its remaining stock.
The enamelware was also popular on the black market: it was traded for food or even for coal.
Fortunately, the Thale plant was not dismantled, but was able to continue production. In 1946, just a year after the war, it was converted into a "Soviet Joint Stock Company", SAG for short. It was a way for the Soviet Union to safeguard its influence over the plant without stripping out the basic means of production.
This was the time when "Deserving Inventors", "Outstanding Innovators" and "Heroes of Labour" were privileged. The economy of the new German Democratic Republic had to be kick-started and the population motivated. In November 1949, the miner Adolf Hennecke gave a speech to the workers in Thale. Hennecke had outperformed the daily quota by 380% in October 1948 and was now promoting an activist movement throughout the GDR.
A few years after the founding of the GDR, the legal structure of the ironworks also changed: in 1954, it was converted from an SAG, a Soviet Joint Stock Company, into a VEB, a "Volkseigener Betrieb" or Publicly Owned Enterprise. It retained that structure until 1990, when the GDR ceased to exist.
All depictions: © Hüttenmuseum Thale
