Where Benzes are Built Part II: Untertürkheim

The second segment in a multipart history of the automobile factories of Mercedes-Benz.

Although Untertürkheim is the original Daimler-Benz complex, and built many of its most famous cars up into the 1950s, it now does everything except manufacture complete automobiles.

Article Graham Robson

Images Daimler Archives

First of all, a brief explanation of where Mercedes-Benz’s vast Untertürkheim complex fits into the scheme of things. Although it is corporate headquarters, it no longer assembles complete cars. Although it is the oldest of the company’s existing plants, it is by no means the most modern. And, make no mistake, if fire had not consumed an original Daimler factory at nearby Cannstatt, the firm might never have settled on Stuttgart-Untertürkheim at all!

There is more to explain. Although Untertürkheim is the original Daimler-Benz complex, where the company built many of its most famous cars up into the 1950s, it now does everything except manufacture complete automobiles. Top management still lives there; the new models are designed, styled and tested there; and engines, transmissions and many other vital components are all manufactured under those sprawling roofs. New and old are cheek by jowl – diligent spy photographers can sometimes see unfamiliar-looking prototypes slipping out to nearby roads – while the company’s magnificent museum and Classic Center complex is at one side of the plant, happy to proclaim its presence to the world.

Today, complete cars and commercial vehicles no longer come together in this crowded corner of Stuttgart, the vast majority of them now being assembled in huge modern buildings in Sindelfingen, Bremen and Mannheim, in Austria and Hungary, and of course in the always-expanding North American factory in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. There’s a reason for all this: A survey of today’s Untertürkheim site must begin with a look at events which happened more than a century ago.

In the beginning

Way back – and I do mean way, way, back in the 1880s and 1890s – two tiny operations began building some of the world’s very first cars. One was Benz, which set up shop in Mannheim (a town 80 miles north-west of Stuttgart), the other was Daimler, which established itself in Cannstatt, (just northeast of downtown Stuttgart) and soon became a suburb of that ever-expanding city.

Both survived, both prospered, and both grew – originally as head-to-head rivals – but their output was positively miniscule by present-day standards. Daimler, however, soon expanded enough to begin taking on overseas outlets (in Britain, Daimlers were originally sold through the H.J. Lawson empire, and after a complex series of financial maneuvers, that is where the original British Daimlers came from).

The ever-developing story that surrounds Mercedes-Benz evolved early in the 20th century when the first ultra-modern Mercedes sports cars were built at Cannstatt. Two major influences then followed. One was the ever-expanding demand for the cars, and the other was the damage caused to the Cannstatt factory by a serious fire in 1903. These led to the building of a new factory in Untertürkheim, which was a suburb of Stuttgart, just a few miles east of the city center.

From then until 1915, when the first portion of the out-of-town Sindelfingen complex was erected, the better to assemble military machinery, including aircraft and aero engines, the battle was not only to find the business to make profits, but to find space in the Untertürkheim buildings to make all such manufacture possible. However, as we recently described in our analysis of the Sindelfingen plant (see The Star, May-June 2017), the strategic decision, which made all the difference, was to buy the out-of-town 94-acre site, which began its operations in 1916 by making aircraft.

Reorganization

When peace came in 1918, top management then decided to take advantage of such recent expansion to rationalize its car-making activities by concentrating all its heavyweight mechanical operations in Untertürkheim – engine, transmission and chassis manufacture, the foundry, and all the machining operations – while redeveloping the Sindelfingen plant for the more glamorous side of the operation, which was to manufacture all its coachwork.

Untertürkheim, however, continued to be the nerve-center of the operation – which it still is, to this day – where the directors were all based, where the design and engineering of the latest products took place, and where (along with some projects carried out at Sindelfingen) the conception of the latest body styles took place.

Thus it was that, until the late 1920s (after the merger with Benz had taken place and the new Mercedes-Benz automobile brand had come into existence), every one of the Mercedes cars was completed at Untertürkheim. That, of course, included not only the building of the excitingly specified sports cars, but the mass of less-specialized road cars that gradually, and inexorably, built the company’s reputation, and added to the scale of its operations.

Not only that, of course, but in a secret corner of the complex, the lastingly famous and latterly dominant Mercedes racecars also took shape, including the 1908 and 1914 Grand Prix winners, and (in the early 1920s) the first of the supercharged machines that made the company so famous. 

Ferdinand Porsche

It was in the early 1920s that Untertürkheim welcomed the noted automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche to its ranks; it was Porsche who inspired the evolution of the K/SS/SSK/SSKL sports and racing cars, which so dominated the competition rankings at the end of that decade. Porsche’s reign, however, could be described as tempestuous; not long after the fusion of Daimler with Benz (which meant that the first true Mercedes-Benz cars were made), he moved on. After this, the new company developed steadily, from building rather specialized machines into a business that built – and sold – its machines in the thousands, not handfuls.

Untertürkheim in the 1930s

There were two completely different aspects to what Untertürkheim could, and did do, in the 1930s. On the one hand, it built masses of what we might now call middle-class machines – 13,259 Stuttgarts, 13,775 170s, 15,622 200s and no fewer than 74,964 new-generation 170Vs, for instance – while on the other hand it lovingly assembled tiny quantities of exotic machines such as the 117 Grossers of 1930-1937, less than 500 540Ks and a mere 88 of the second-generation Grosser.

Not only that, but in that exclusive little corner of the crowded site devoted to the racing department, engineers built a series of stupendously successful Silver Arrows single-seaters, a handful of even more specialized record cars, and even a potential land-speed record contender.

By 1939, in fact, the buildings at Untertürkheim had already reached the limits of their estate, while the facilities under their roof now had to deal with increasingly complex chassis, for first there had been the use of independent suspension, then the introduction of rear-engine models, then the arrival of diesel-engine alternatives, and latterly – and most important, commercially – the arrival of large quantities of all-steel body shells that had been manufactured at Sindelfingen.

War and devastation

Then came World War II; because this started almost 80 years ago, we feel that we can now repeat the comment recently made to us by a Mercedes-Benz insider:

“When war broke out, we anticipated bombing by the British, so we emptied Untertürkheim of much equipment, tooling, cars, records, and the archive, moving much of it into storage further east, out of bombing range. Then the British invented the long-range Lancaster, and there was also the B17.”

This explains why much of the company’s heritage survived the devastation. But the buildings themselves did not, for a series of aerial attacks in 1944 saw much of the historic Untertürkheim site flattened and left in ruins. A postwar analysis revealed that every building had suffered severe damage and that at least 70 percent of the factory had been leveled.

What followed was a perfect example of German grit, determination and the will to make good in an entirely new and forbidding atmosphere. After an interim period when it was only possible to carry out repair and maintenance work on existing vehicles – and to carry out work for the American occupying powers – life was somehow pumped back into the site. In its heyday during the 1930s, Untertürkheim had employed 20,000 people; in 1945, no more than 1,240 could start work on clearing the debris, salvaging what could be restored and getting the buildings up and running again.

Resurrection

In 1945-1946, the factories initially were short of coal, gas and electricity – these gradually becoming available once again as the entire Stuttgart area got back on to its industrial feet – but this was also a time when some machinery was miraculously found to be undamaged under the rubble, when other machinery was brought back from dispersal, and when it proved that there might even be a chance of recommencing small-scale assembly of the best-selling 170V models. Somehow, the very first postwar 170V engines were completed in February 1946 and the first car was completed in June. Even so, it was a backbreaking struggle, and the first batch of products had to be for police, ambulance and light-delivery purposes. Only 214 cars were built by the end of 1946 and just over 1,000 followed in 1947. Even so, more than 5,000 cars – all of them finally assembled at Untertürkheim – were then built in 1948, by which time many of the buildings had been repaired and re-erected and the workforce had risen to 14,000, which was not as high as in the 1930s, but an indication of the way that Mercedes-Benz was planning for its future.

It was at about this time that West German industry embarked on what is now known as the “Economic Miracle,” and Mercedes-Benz was in the vanguard of that movement. New model followed new model, a brand-new 6-cylinder gasoline engine – the overhead-camshaft M186 – was put into production (originally to power the all-new 300, which appeared in 1951, but soon to grace the 300SL, as well), and the entire production complex began to seem overcrowded.

Racing into the future

Two major events, however, were to involve cars that were being designed and assembled at Untertürkheim – one being the arrival of the complex space-frame 300SL, the other being the all-conquering racing program that followed. Competition team boss Alfred Neubauer had retained an office in the restored administrative block and technical chief Rudolph Uhlenhaut had always been nearby; it made sense to keep the location and retain those mechanics that had survived the fighting.

As already noted in the Sindelfingen article, the major change came in 1953 when the original Ponton (Type W120) was put on sale, for this ushered in a total change in production facilities. Because this was the company’s first unit-body (monocoque) production car, and because it was always planned that it would stay in production for up to 10 years, a much lavish, large and extensive assembly plant was built at Sindelfingen, though the engines, transmissions and other chassis components were all trucked from Untertürkheim up the road.

For the time being, therefore, Untertürkheim not only remained as the corporate headquarters, which it was always to be, but it was still the center of what might be called the surviving separate-chassis models. However, as an assembly of their successors moved inexorably to Sindelfingen, redundant assembly-line space at Untertürkheim was cleared, redevelopment forged ahead, more and more major building blocks (such as engines and transmissions) could be made, and production soared.

A study of aerial images of the site shows that over the years that followed, almost every building on the postwar site was either modified, razed and rebuilt, or given a new identity so that new engines and automatic transmissions, and a myriad of chassis components could all be developed. The first elements of the company’s now-famous test track were opened in 1957, but the entire layout, complete with its near-vertically-banked high-speed corners, was not ready until the mid-1960s.

Today’s Untertürkheim

And so it has continued to this day. Much of the work carried out is of the mass manufacture of the unglamorous parts of cars, but space was also found for the excellent Mercedes-Benz Classic operation, which includes the must-visit museum. A significant proportion of the site forms the administrative center of a vast organization, which now encompasses 60 manufacturing or kit-assembly operations in 18 countries. Complete cars are produced on eight sites in Germany and at six international locations – the farthest from home in China.

One day, who knows? Mercedes-Benz may elect to move its top-management, its engineering, its styling and its other central-planning facilities to an out-of-town setting – but Untertürkheim looks set to remain as the major historic manufacturing center for years to come.

The complex is well worth a visit – you can even get the chance to be driven on the track where the legendary racecars were tested – and is always included on the Mercedes-Benz Club German tours, so you should take any opportunity to go and see for yourselves.

Images:

FEATURE ARTICLE IMAGE ABOVE: Street view of Daimler Motor Company, Untertürkheim, 1908.

View in the final assembly hall, Untertürkheim, 1912.

Members of the racing department in their SSKL racecars make ready to leave their home base at the Untertürkheim factory, en route to the German Grand Prix, 1931.

The large Hartmann/Chemnitz drop forge hammer – dating from 1916 – in use in the Untertürkheim smithy, circa 1940.

Large-engine development underway in Plant 6 (later Plant 60) at Untertürkheim, 1935.

Clean and orderly: Untertürkheim’s passenger-car finishing shop, 1940.

The main administration building, Untertürkheim, 1984.

Aerial view of the vast Untertürkheim complex, 1984 – note the circular test track at bottom center.

A group of the firm’s vintage fire trucks on display in front of the famed Mercedes-Benz Museum, opened to the public in 2006.

Plant workers on the way home on Mercedes Street, 1944. In the background are ruins of the main administration building, Untertürkheim 1953.

The new administration building, Untertürkheim, 1953.