Glashütte Original

After the Second World War the Glashütte watch firms were expropriated and merged in 1951 into the state-owned VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB), which made mechanical and later quartz watches in large numbers for East Germany and the Eastern bloc. After German reunification the company was privatised in 1994 as Glashütte Original.

The Swatch Group acquired Glashütte Original in 2000. Its watches use the traditional features of Saxon watchmaking: three-quarter plates, gold chatons and hand-engraved balance cocks. The catalogue includes GUB watches as well as later Glashütte Original models.

Glashütte's watch industry was almost destroyed at the end of the Second World War: the town was bombed on the last day of the war, and the Soviet occupation authorities removed much of the remaining machinery as reparations. The 1951 combine (VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe, 'GUB') brought together the expropriated firms, among them A. Lange & Söhne and the movement makers UROFA and UFAG, and rebuilt production for the planned economy of the German Democratic Republic.

GUB made wristwatches in large numbers, from simple hand-wound calibres (dials marked '17 Rubis' are common) to the Spezimatic automatics of the 1960s and 1970s, whose slim rotor movements were the combine's best-known products; it also made marine chronometers and, from the late 1970s, quartz watches. Dials carry the name 'Glashütte' or 'GUB' rather than an individual maker, and some also show the East German state quality mark, a stylised 'Q'.

After reunification the business was run by the Treuhand privatisation agency, then sold in 1994 to private investors, who launched the Glashütte Original name. Under the Swatch Group from 2000 the company has made its own movements, including large-date, chronograph and tourbillon calibres, and in 2008 the Deutsches Uhrenmuseum Glashütte opened in the old watchmaking school, with the company's support.