This meticulous study charts the ups and downs of a well-known, medium-sized manufacturer that produced weapons and vehicles in Suhl from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1990s. Operating during the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic, as well as under National Socialism and in the GDR before closing its gates in 1993, this firm—founded by the Jewish entrepreneurial family Simson in 1856—allows for an examination of longevity in the economic arena across numerous political and economic transformations.

When the Simsons moved into arms manufacturing in the 1850s, this craft-based mainstay of the regional economy in Thuringia was in decline because of industrial competition. The Simsons bucked this trend by adapting and adopting the standardized routines of the American system of manufacturing, as well as by diversifying their product range. Not just limiting itself to weapons, the expanding family firm from Suhl became one of the empire's leading bicycle producers and established itself as a luxury carmaker. Armaments naturally became the company's main focus during World War I. While the Simsons strove to return to their mixed-product palette after 1918, the Reichswehr selected the firm as its main purveyor of small arms and invested heavily in the company in the 1920s. The involvement of the military not only fueled internal conflicts over strategic investment decisions, but also drew the attention of the rising Nazi movement to the company.

That a firm under Jewish ownership was among the suppliers of the military rankled, in particular, Thuringian Nazi leader Fritz Sauckel, who orchestrated a vicious campaign against the Simsons beginning in the early 1930s. In 1935, Sauckel brought the works under his control, and the Simsons, who had managed to transfer part of their fortune abroad, fled Germany, eventually settling in the United States. Operating under the umbrella of the state-owned Wilhelm-Gustloff Foundation between 1936 and 1945, the works became Germany's leading maker of machine guns. This period under Sauckel's directorship offered opportunities for expansion, but his attempts to turn the factory into a model Nazi enterprise yielded a series of disruptive and unrealistic schemes that disturbed production processes and compromised profitability. Even though the company had accumulated heavy debts by 1945, manufacturing continued right until the end of the war, not least because the management resorted to the use of forced labor.

The Soviet Union dismantled a large number of German factories as part of its reparations program, but the factory in Suhl escaped this fate. It survived into the postwar period as a “Soviet joint-stock company”—a curious legal construction, since the stockholder was the council of ministers in Moscow. This new ownership model, which the Soviet occupiers applied to several East German companies to fend off restitution claims, ensured that the works continued operation as a manufacturer. Initially contributing to reparations payments by turning out hunting weapons, the factory soon became the target of significant Soviet investment: the aim was to position it as an internationally competitive producer of motorcycles.

After control of the works had moved from the Soviets to East German planners in 1953, the “publically owned company” (Volkseigener Betrieb, VEB) evolved into one of the GDR's leading industrial enterprises. While maintaining the production of hunting weapons, the planning commission decided in the early 1960s to make moped production the main focus of operations in Suhl. The factory largely owed its standing in the GDR to the iconic Schwalbe moped, which enjoyed six-figure annual production runs into the 1970s and 1980s. Even though mopeds remained best sellers due to the shortage of automobiles in the Eastern bloc, long-term underinvestment in the company for the last two decades of the GDR led to significant problems later on. In 1976, more than half of the machine tools at this VEB were over seventy years old. It is not very surprising, then, that the works failed to survive the GDR's collapse. Within months of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the factory in Suhl was in deep trouble following the implosion of its East European export markets. Long-term employees demonstrated against the impending closure in 1990, but even those about to lose their jobs sensed the intractable difficulties the company faced. One erstwhile protestor recalled that, as he was marching with his colleagues, he “stopped” suddenly, realizing that he “had absolutely no idea” (389–90) how to save the production site.

In her excellent conclusion, Schulz attributes the longevity of the factory founded by the Simson family to two overarching factors: a diversified product range, and a surprisingly stable core of skilled employees that bridged political ruptures and thus stabilized operations. While this work is primarily a business history, it deserves a wider readership because the analysis deals with numerous issues that lie at the heart of twentieth-century Germany. Schulz, for instance, handles with clarity the complexities surrounding the expropriation of the Simsons during the Third Reich, while maintaining a cool analytical focus on what this “Aryanization” meant for the operations of the company—an important theme that some other works on similar issues have neglected. The author's determination to move beyond conventional judgments also manifests itself in the sections about the works' demise in the 1990s. While it has become received wisdom that the Treuhandgesellschaft played a large part in the industrial desertification of Eastern Germany, Schulz points out that in the case of the VEB in Suhl, larger structural factors (e.g., globalization, a rapid disappearance of markets for mopeds, and pending restitution claims) had made the company's survival highly unlikely. The book thus offers rewards not only for scholars interested in economic history, but also those thinking about continuity and rupture in twentieth-century Germany as a whole.