Opelwerk Brandenburg

The Opelwerk Brandenburg was a truck vehicle assembly plant, located in Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany. Built within seven months, it was opened by Adam Opel AG in November 1935 on the re-armament initiative of the Nazi government in order to ensure supplies of Opel Blitz trucks for the Wehrmacht armed forces. Until 1944 more than 130,000 medium-weight trucks were produced at the Brandenburg plant. Devastated by an Allied air raid on 6 August 1944, the facilities were dismantled and shipped east as reparations to the Soviet Union after the war.

A press release early in 1935 stated that Adam Opel AG, backed by the Reich government, had decided to build a new plant at Brandenburg an der Havel because production capacity at their existing Rüsselsheim headquarters was fully employed. Opel, a subisidiary of General Motors (GM) since 1929, were an obvious candidate for the project, having pioneered mass production techniques in German passenger car production: by the late 1920s the company held more than 25% of the domestic passenger car market. Rapid progress was envisaged, with the factory scheduled to be ready for use in October 1935, in order to free up capacity at Rüsselsheim ahead of the launch of the 1936 passenger car range.

The available site in Brandenburg covered 850,000 square metres (9,100,000 sq ft) on the southern bank of the Silo Canal and is today the location of the town's Silo Canal East industrial zone. At the time of the Opel project, the vast area was not fully needed and much of it continued to be devoted to agricultural production. It appears that the project involved displacing local residents, but the 1935 press release reassured readers that the unused portion of the plant site would, until further notice, be made available free of charge to former residents displaced by the development.

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