. NMT06-T0638
Volume VI · Page 638
| Now the brown coal holdings of
the Lauchhammer works and of the later Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke were
exceedingly small, especially if one takes the fact into consideration that
apart from the brown coal, scrap iron was the most important raw material to
our steel works. In other words, to avoid a misunderstanding I would like to
mention the fact that we had Martin steel works, in other words no blast
furnaces, and that in contrast to the blast furnaces of the Hermann Goering
Works, we used only brown coal for our steel production in Riesa, while the
blast furnace works can use only soft coal and coke. When in 1923 I came to Lauchhammer, our coal deposits were only good for 25 years, and the holdings at that time, Your Honor, can be seen on the chart about in the middle, where you have the red square, Lauchhammer, and there are two red spaces about in the middle, two areas in the middle — it's in red shading, Your Honor — and you can see that the holdings are divided in two parts, one of them north of Lauchhammer and the other one to the west of Lauchhammer, and we were encircled south, west, and north by the green shades there, the green squares; in other words, the Bubiag, and further south the Niederlausitz Coal Works, that is orange shaded. Now, every few years our coal deteriorated in quality, and when Mr. Flick had gained his influence over the Lauchhammer group and when the Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke had been founded, then in 1926-27 we made an attempt, in cooperation with the banker Goldschmidt, Jakob Goldschmidt of the Darmstaedter National Bank, to gain an influence over the Bubiag, either by getting the majority of the shares or by forming a company of joint interest. Unfortunately these plans were not carried out because at about that time the majority of the Bubiag passed from the weak Friedlaender group to the hands of the very strong Graf Schaffgotsch of Upper Silesia. In other words, our plans of getting coal right near our own pits did not succeed at that time. Therefore, in those good economic years of 1928-29, we had to buy brown coal from the syndicate, from the East Elbian Brown Coal Syndicate which was controlled by the Petscheks, and we had considerable difficulty, especially for the Hennigsdorf Works near Berlin, to get this brown coal which we absolutely needed. The brown coal supplies for the concern Mittelstahl was our weakest point, the weakest point of the whole concern, and that was the reason why we were, of course, extremely interested when it was said that brown coal holdings or brown coal shares from the Petschek holdings were to be put on sale, and as Mr. Flick states, that was for the first time in 1935 and then later on, in 1937 again. |
