The Tale of the Fledermaus - Hasag & BAT by Neil McRae First an apology. I am a Pressure lamp collector and researcher. I have a passing knowledge of stoves but that is mainly because a lot of lamp manufacturers also made stoves so there is a common interest in the companies who made these things that we collect and treasure. However my research base is lighting so please bear with me as this is a saga of company machinations but has to be told from the lamp researchers point of view as this is the only way I can do it. Fledermaus is not just an opera but was also the trade logo of a lamp maker in Germany. In England this company marketed lanterns and stoves as BAT products. The saga of this logo and where it was used and by which company is a strange and convoluted one which has taken a lot of digging to sort out and even now I am not sure we have it exactly right but nevertheless I can give some idea of how it all happened and why. We start in the late 20s with an unhappy marriage. After the Great War Germany had serious financial troubles and by the late 20s German industry was being forced into some previously unthinkable mergers and mutual projects. One such joint project was the patenting in 1927 and 1928 of a lantern. This is the well known Petromax lantern that has been used in most countries and copied in quite a few as well. The joint patentees were Four of Germany’s major lamp and stove manufacturers. The four were :- J Hirschhorn AktienGesellschaft, Continental-Licht und ApparatebauGesellschaft, Hugo Schneider AktienGesellschaft, and Ehrich & Grætz AktienGesellschaft. There were two other lamp manufacturers in Germany also making pressure products. These were Firma Stuebgen and Standard Licht AktienGesellschaft. The companies we are interested in here are Hugo Schneider and Stuebgen but I digress. There was obviously some financial manoeuvring going on and in 1928 Ehrich & Grætz appear to have bought out Hirschhorn. This gave Ehrich & Grætz two well known brand names. Their own Petromax brand and the Aida brand of Hirschhorn. So out of the joint project one of the four swallowed another so there were three. In the meantime Stuebgen and Standard seem to have kept a low profile and avoided aggressive take over bids. In 1935 Stuebgen used the Fledermaus as a trade name for the first time and a year later in 1936 registered BAT as a trade name. Enter the bad guys. In 1938 Germany is gearing up for war and there is pressure from the national government for efficiency and war production. The old family firm of Stuebgen is taken over by Hugo Schneider. So now The HASAG brand of Schneider and the BAT brand of Stuebgen are joined in the same company. Bad Guys? Well yes. After the second war was over and retribution was being handed out by the War Crimes Tribunal, justice was visited on Hugo Schneider, and this company was liquidated for war crimes. Specifically for the use of slave labour. So in theory we now have a couple of lapsed brands, HASAG and BAT. However some of the directors were not so indicted and the Stuebgen family, who were still managing the BAT works in Erfurt just outside Leipzig, managed to retire gracefully. Now a little geography comes into the tale. The BAT works was in Erfurt which is just by Leipzig and only a few miles from the HASAG works. It seems that, liquidation notwithstanding, as the whine of the last bullets was fading away the workers at the HASAG and BAT factories, realising that only by selling product can they afford to buy food, come out of their shelters and begin lantern making again. Now we are in the Russian zone here and for a year or so there was much stripping of assets and a great deal of machinery was carted off to Russia. I have heard that they took just about everything they could unbolt and move, including sanitary fittings and light bulbs. They obviously did not get the tooling for the HASAG lanterns though because there is continuity of product from 1923 to the mid 50s from the same tooling being used in Eastern Germany. Now politics in the Communist style takes control of the lamp making business and all the lamp making machinery is gathered together in the old Feuerhand factory in Beierfeld which is another small town just outside Leipzig. In 1949 the BAT brand surfaces again on a lantern. I have in my collection four near identical lanterns. First a mid 20s PIFCO made by HASAG, second a WW2 military HASAG, third a Post WW2 MEWA, and fourth a post 1949 BAT. The same tooling was used to make all four. There are some very minor alterations in the detail but the main stampings and castings are identical. Also I have seen several HASAG lanterns that should be pre 1945 but are in much too good condition to be that old, so I strongly suspect the East German factory was also using the HASAG brand until well into the 1950s. During the Iron Curtain period simple economics forced trade through the curtain. The East German government badly needed western currency, so product was shipped to a West German Agent who then marketed the products in the west. In the mid 50s the English company Veritas was importing BAT product into the UK. So if you have a product stamped HASAG or BAT it is not a simple matter to say who made it. Depending on the age of the piece it could be any one of the several companies who owned the brand names at various times. I know this has not simplified matters but then history is rarely simple. Perhaps though it will give a little more interest to an otherwise ordinary product to know some of the background. At least I hope so.
