[rollei_list] Re: A visit to Franke und Heidecke, then and now

> http://www.rollei-gallery.net/e-bigler/image-95663.html
> 
> after to see the same sector with workers and tools in
> my folder about the factory on 1959,
> 
> http://www.rollei-gallery.net/itar/image-59574.html

Thanks Carlos ! I had forgotten that you had those images from 1959 in
your folder ! As you can see the now empty the Kraemer machine shop
has been carefully renewed. This might have been a really modern
workshop in the fifties, with a lot of light. I have no idea about
what will happen to this building, but certainly it will not be
destroyed. 

As of 2006 visitors can frelly enter the backyard an see what we have
seen with Dirk-Roger outside the factory. The place is located about
15 minutes walk from the train station.

There is near the main entrance on Slazdahlumer Str. a small building
labeled "Rollei museum" but we have no idea to whom it belongs and if,
an when, it is, or it will be opened to the public.

I was also very surprised to discover that the former Voigtländer
factory had not bee destroyed. The vintage picture of the factory
shows that there was a special tram line connecting the factory to
downtown.

There is also a lot to say about the city of Braunschweig. It is a
very industrial city with an old tradition in mining and steel
industry. Wolfsburg, one of the most famous centres of the German
automotive industry, is close to Braunschweig. So the place at a first
glance is not exactly a holiday resort ;-);-)

Dirk-Roger explained to me that after WW-II, Braunschweig was in the
British occupation zone, very close to the Russian zone ; during the
Cold War there were many British troops in Braunschweig which was on
the border with east-Germany.

The British authorities have decided after the war to transform a
former Luftwaffe airfield north of the city into a modern scientific
campus to host the German equivalent of the US National Institute for
Standards and Technology, the renowned PTB (Physikalisch-Technische
Bundesanstalt). Before the war the PTB was located in Berlin and the
facilities they developed in Braunschweig is superb. The PTB hosts
several of the most precise atomic clocks in the world and they are
the pionners of new kinds of so-called "cold-atoms optical clocks"
which are projected to be ten thousand times more precise that the
best commercial atomic clocks. 
The competition with the Time & Frequency division of the NIST at
Boulder, Colorado, is hard ;-);-) 

The city hosts other famous German research institutes.

Taking into account the huge fire that destroyed the city at the end
of WW-II, it is nice to see that many historical buildings downtown
could be rebuilt. All roofs had burned but hopefully the walls were
left. A Braunschweiger citizen told me that a brass fountain melted
under the effect of the intense heat generated by the fire ; a copy of
the fountain was re-built exactly identical from detailed pictures
that had been taken before the war.

-- 
Emmanuel BIGLER         
<bigler@xxxxxxxx>
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