Mauser Engine Car Production 1920-1930 period
 

Dear All,
For a certain period of his history (mainly 1920-1930), Mauser was involved in the production of cars and components for car.
In the Archive, it is available a folder containing around 400 letters, documents and blueprints providing a nice story of this period.
Apparently, Mauser and BKIW were deeply involved in the production of engine components for Citroen, Fiat, BMW and Chevrolet…
A complete price-list is available for the Chevrolet Car Model 1928.
Cheers,
Mauro

Quite interesting! :) And also somewhat confusing... :(

Here on the letterhead we see both BKIW and DWM under a DWF banner/logo...

Was this a transition period, when both DWM and BKIW were still separate companies, yet to merge??? Who/what was DWF??? :confused:

'Früher' means 'formerly known as'.

They bought a number of companies and used the brand names if they saw that as an advantage. But DWF was an attempt to disguise the name after 1918. Deutsche Waffen Fabriken. It was shortlived. DWM changed into BKIW and DWF was dropped again.

Another example is Berka Werke that made cutlery.

DWM was quite big in ball bearings and that was an area where Hugo Borchardt was quite active in.

An interesting side note is that DWM Berlin rented out part of the complex to General Motors after WW1.

Mauser was pushed out of the car business because it conflicted with another car company the banks and board members had an interest in: Daimler-Benz.

One of the funnier DWM products after WW2 was the Ampficar.

Entertaining link, lying about their company history :)
https://www.iwk.de/en/company/history/

Illustrated: A tin box with a (still wrapped) DWM bicycle chain, a little spoon made by 'BERKAWERKE' (with DWM's 'bombe' logo) and a presentation card stating that it is an honorary gift from BKIW / DWM.

So, why all these name changes: It's simple, really. If your company is called German Weapons and Ammunition factory, and the Allies want to wipe out German's arms and ammo production, you're screwed.

The only thing DWM could do was try to mask and alter it's name and take up production of the largest quantity of household crap they could come up with. All this to avoid seizing of factories, equipment, tools and other assets. DWM went as far as to use their large ammunition production machines to produce cutlery, buttons, buckets, etc... Apart from that, they moved some of their heavy tooling across the border to the Netherlands for safe keeping. They were stored at a metal dealer's scrap yard until it was safe to return them after 1930.
All this in order to avoid losing their assets to the Inter Allied Control Commission. When the political climate changed after 1933, the charade and facade was dropped and DWM was 'born again', only to repeat the trick after 1945. Berlin became 'Deutsche Waggon- und Maschinenfabriken' (German railroad car and machine factories), and Karlsruhe became 'IWK'', 'Industriewerke Karlsruhe' which sounded a lot more neutral than the former name. To finish it off, IWK became IWKA in the 1960s when they merged with a company in Augsburg (explaining the A). When IWKA withdrew from Karlsruhe and moved to Augsburg, they chose to adopt the name of the former Augsburg company: Keller und Knappich or 'KuKa' in short. There were a lot of movements in the corporate history, companies sold, bought, merged, etc.. so it's still possible to find remnants of the DWM, IWKA names in other enterprises, even the old logo is sometimes still recognizable.

Too funny not to mention:

After 1929, DWM and Mauser were part of the Quandt Group. This industrial group was massive and the Quandt family is still one of the richest in Germany.

I obtained a 345-page thick report from 1969 which lists all the companies that did business with the Quandt group. This includes their own companies and subdeliverers with a turnaround of at least 10,000 DM.

The document came from a library in the GDR... Think about that one :D

It is property marked of the Deutsches Wirtschaftsinstitut, which was succeeded by the Institut für Internationale Politik und Wirtschaft in 1971.
The IPW property marking is also there. The IPW lasted until the end in 1990.

I selected some interesting companies:

Dynamit Nobel AG supplied IWK with components for ammunition production (blanks, powder and primers).
Dynamit Genschow (Geco) supplied Mauser with ammunition (for test firing).
Albrecht Kind (AKAH) supplied Mauser with weapons accessories.
Winchester in Düsseldorf supplied Mauser with .22lr ammunition, which Mauser sold as their 'KK80' ammunition.

And, if I remember correctly, the Quandt group and Herbert Quandt was effectively the owner and person that saved BMW, bringing this story completely back to motor vehicles.

This was done about 50 years ago with the promotion of the BMW 1500. Here's one shown recently by BMW to one of their business partners: