61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

eaching market agreements with. The chairman of the Board of Directors and
Swiss figurehead was Hermann Obrecht, who later became a Federal Councillor.
The Solothurn Waffenfabrik’s most important task was to continue the development
of Rheinmetall’s automatic weapons and to sell them to countries
which, according to international law or the League of Nations, were not to be
supplied with arms. Solothurn thus defied the rearmament regulations of the
time and supplied arms to Germany, Austria, and Hungary, as well as being
involved in delicate business transactions with the Soviet Union and China. In
1933, the company directors in Düsseldorf considered that the Solothurn
factory had served its purpose and decided to transfer the construction of the
improved Rheinmetall weapons to Düsseldorf and Berlin. Hans Eltze, Fritz
Mandl, and Waldemar Pabst managed to persuade them to maintain the factory
as a front for Rheinmetall’s foreign business and a safe haven for foreign
currency. 15
Siemens also shifted its production sites because of the stipulations of the Treaty
of Versailles. Together with Albiswerk Zürich, Siemens ran a plant for manufacturing
military radio equipment, which it further developed at its «Technical
Bureau» founded in 1924 by Telefunken Berlin in Zurich. In 1921, the Dornier
aircraft company in Friedrichshafen moved its assembly unit for military and
civil aircraft, which «did not correspond to the construction restrictions
concerning German aircraft laid down in the Treaty», to the other side of the
border in Altenrhein. 16 From 1921 on, Heinrich Wild, who had joined Carl
Zeiss in Jena in 1908 and as chief engineer had developed civil and military
optical instruments up until the end of the First World War, established a
factory for producing geodetic and military optical instruments in Heerbrugg
in the St. Gallen Rhine valley. He was supported in this project by capital
provided by Schmidheiny as well as by development contracts from the War
Technology Division (Kriegstechnische Abteilung, KTA). Wild also speculated on
the fact that «German companies are forbidden to manufacture war material
under the terms of the peace treaty. The Heerbrugg factory can therefore take
over from Zeiss to a certain degree». 17 In addition, in 1923 the Maschinenfabrik
Augsburg-Nürnberg (MAN) transferred its production of submarine engines –
now forbidden in Germany – to the Maschinenfabrik Rauschenbach
Schaffhausen (MRS), which had merged with Georg Fischer AG two years
earlier. 18
The further development of the automatic weapons mentioned above in
Oerlikon, Solothurn, and Kreuzlingen represented an important contribution
to the construction of armaments that Germany would later deploy in the
Second World War. These included the machine gun developed by «Mauser, in
conjunction with the Metallwarenfabrik Kreuzlingen», 19 which led to the LMG
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