VEB Kraftfuttermischwerk Frohse
THE ABANDONED FACTORY IN GERMANY
‘Kraftfuttermischwerk Frohse’ was built in the 1940s. The site was used to process and store food for the Nazi army. Later it was used to produce animal feed. The site was eventually abandoned in 1992.
This location is a big site with silos, offices and a huge heating station built along the river Elbe. The first seven storage and production buildings were built during the Second World War as ‘Heeresverpflegungsamt Schönebeck’. They were built with reinforced concrete with double-secured roofs to make the food reserve bomb-proof. It was owned by the Reichsnährstand, a government body set up in Nazi Germany to regulate food production. It mainly focused on the control of the production, distribution, and prices of agricultural products.
The Reichsnährstand survived the German defeat in 1945 and was initially not dissolved because there was a huge food shortage in Germany. Eventually, the factory was abandoned in the early 1950s. But in 1956 it was the official start of the ‘VEB Kraftfuttermischwerk Frohse’, a company owned by the DDR government. The factory produced concentrate feeds for animals. This factory in Schönebeck was part of the ‘Getreidekombinat Magdeburg’. Major parts of the transport and drying technology were modernized during the 1960s. The factory closed in 1992 and is for sale at the present time. I visited the site in 2012 during my German road trip.
