Zbrojovka Phenomenon

Zbrojovka 

In the mid-19th century, the land behind the Zábrdovice monastery, adjacent to the then meandering Svitava River, was still open fields. Following the Joseph II reforms and the dissolution of the monastery, one of its farm buildings on the riverbank had been rebuilt as an administrative building at the end of the 18th century and was locally dubbed the ‘Zábrdovice Chateau’. In the 1840s, the space along its eastern margin was demarcated by the railway embankment of the line to Česká Třebová (the line was opened in 1849). 

Imperial and Royal Artillery Workshops 

At the end of the 19th century, the Brno entrepreneur Moritz Beran built a modern textile mill along the bank of the Svitava River, and although it burnt down in 1911, it was reopened in no time. Soon after the commencement of WWI, in the stretch of land between the Třebová line and Beran’s factory, was built the Imperial and Royal Artillery Workshops, as a branch of the Viennese state arsenal. In 1916, most of the buildings of the new factory were already built, and the equipment of the former workshops of the 4th Field Artillery Regiment was transported to Zábrdovice from the then Nová Street. Sidings were also built connecting to the neighbouring Česká Třebová line. The workshops made spare parts for field guns, sights for minomet mortars, and repaired arms withdrawn from the front. The new enterprise also worked heavily with wood: building carts for transporting artillery munition, covered munition wagons, and crates for rifle ammunition were manufactured in their hundreds of thousands. 

Rifle factory on Šumavská Street 

At the end of 1918 the repair shops were already employing 560 workers. In November that year they were taken over by the new Czechoslovak state, whereupon the workshops continued to operate under the new name Artillery Workshops of the Ministry of National Defence in Zábrdovice. On 20 January 1919 the state established a new enterprise in Zábrdovice – Czechoslovak State Armaments Factory (Československá státní zbrojovka). As this enterprise’s Czech name in brackets suggests, the brand Zbrojovka simply means ‘armaments factory’. This factory’s task was to carry out all repairs to military material at cost. The factory also assembled Mannlicher repeating rifles from supplied parts and completed the manufacture of hand grenades. It intensiveIy worked on generating solutions to the problem of dimensional tolerances directly affecting the interchangeability of machine parts, a pre-requisite for effective series production. At the outset, the business also processed timber supplies and continued to assemble horse-drawn carts. During the years immediately following the war, Zbrojovka also became, for a brief while, an important repair shop for railway carriages – these operations were performed both in existing buildings and in purposely built halls (facing towards the Třebová line). The works in Zábrdovice were not equipped for the serial manufacture of armaments, and so in 1920 the site of a former textile factory at today’s Šumavská Street, no. 15, was offered for the needs of the Czechoslovak State Armaments Factory (at the time it was referred to as the Nová Street plant, in accordance with the cadastral territory). This was the site of the rifle factory. Official documentation and a manufacturing licence was acquired from the German company Mauser to manufacture its 1898 model repeater rifle, and serial production was subsequently launched in Brno. From this model was derived a series of versions of the famous Czechoslovak army vz. 24 rifle. Meanwhile, the Zábrdovice works had a firing range and a workshop for making rifle butts. 

Modern armaments factory 

In the years 1923–1924 Zbrojovka was transformed into a joint stock company (Československá Zbrojovka a. s., Brno) with a three-quarter share owned by the state, and the enterprise rapidly became a renowned manufacturer of firearms. By 1926 it had already left the Šumavská Street site and started to build the machine gun factory (whose façade bore the legendary symbol ‘Z’ in the gable); over the coming years, more and more buildings were added to the area beside the Třebová sidings, among them an automobile plant, firing range, and the still-standing boiler house with its chimney (1927). Later, Zbrojovka was connected to the combined heat and power distribution system (1935–1936). In 1928 a new administration building (directorate building) with its iconic tower and factory sign was built on the corner of Lazaretní Street. 

Production at Zbrojovka centred primarily on hand-held firearms – especially rifles and light machine guns – which gained a strong reputation abroad for their excellent parameters. In the period 1923–1925 the factory agreed with Prague’s Zbrojovka Praga to take over production of light machine guns, which included hiring the soon-to-be-famous head of workshop Václav Holek. The machine gun design was constantly being tweaked and upgraded, and during the interwar period the Czechoslovak army took receipt of 45,000 legendary ZB vz. 26 machine guns, and a further 100,000 were exported. The licence to manufacture the light machine gun was even offered to the British, so that ultimately within the Commonwealth over half a million British BREN machine guns (adapted from the vz. 26) were produced (BREN is derived from the factory sites BRno+ENfield). 

Cars and typewriters 

Alongside manufacturing for the military, from the very beginning Zbrojovka was also producing non-military equipment. The focal point here was the manufacture of the ‘Z’ make of automobiles. The first popular passenger car was the DISK (1923), quickly followed by a series of Zetkas – the Z18, Z9, Z4, Z5 Express and the Z6 Hurvínek. In total, there were over seven thousand two-stroke cars manufactured at Zábrdovice. In light of the growing drive towards re-armament, the manufacture of motor vehicles was halted in 1936. Also manufactured at Zbrojovka during the First Republic were ball bearings and (in large numbers) bicycles. In many places you will still find people using Zbrojovka bathroom scales, and there were also electric cutting machines produced for butchers and smokers of meat. Additionally, the company bought the copyright to make Remington typewriters and started their mass production. To create space for its non-military engineering programme, in 1930 the company bought out the neighbouring Beran factory and set about radically expanding it. In Zábrdovice they also manufactured lathes, especially for making firearms (although in 1941 their manufacture was shifted out of town to the new plant in Kuřim). Following the Great Depression, the whole world considered the next big war to be inevitable. In the 1930s, Brno’s Zbrojovka became – for a short time – the biggest exporter of weapons in the world. Facing the threat of attack by Nazi Germany, the young republic began to accelerate the construction of its permanent border fortifications: all the light weapons for the nation’s light and heavy fortifications, including gun carriages, were made at Brno’s Zbrojovka. Non-military production was further reined back, and mass production of heavy machine guns was prepared instead, with all production capacity subsequently shifted to a new plant in Vsetíń. The number of Zbrojovka plants throughout Czechoslovakia witnessed a steep rise. 

WWII and economic renewal 

Once German occupation of the country was in full swing, Zbrojovka became known as Waffenwerke Brunn, part of the concern Reichswerke Hermann Göring A.G. Occupation and the outbreak of war brought an abrupt end to all non-military production and maximum concentration on arms manufacture. The final large buildings of the main complex were completed (a tool shop and machine shop). The complex gradually expanded, absorbing the neighbouring, ‘aryanised’ enterprises – the Briess malt house in Husovice, the Zerkowitz textile mill between Zábrdovice and Lazaretní Street, and another mill, Himmelreich & Zwicker, on Cejl Street (at the intersection with Vranovská), which was adapted as a development workplace for new types of weaponry. In the second half of the war, Zbrojovka was incorporated into the holding Waffen Union Škoda Brunn. Unlike other Brno factories, however, Zbrojovka was almost entirely spared any war damage, and so, days after liberation, it was able to swiftly restart its business. Here were assembled cars (Dodge, Ford Canada, Willys Jeep) that were delivered under a post-war UNRRA programme, and especially Farmall tractors. Also relaunched was the production of scales, cutting machines, typewriters and new kitchen appliances, hand drills, children’s toy cars, scooters, and other toys. Engines for OGAR motorcycles were also briefly built here, as were others for Aero 150 trucks. Arms manufacturing, save for hunting and sports firearms, was discontinued. At the end of the 1940s the individual pre-war and wartime plants gradually went their own ways. 

The rise of the tractor 

Immediately after liberation came the idea to manufacture the nation’s own tractors at Zábrdovice. A prototype Z25 tractor had already been built by November 1945, and this was quickly followed by its series production alongside the introduction of the small Z15 tractor. The enterprise registered the trademark ZETOR (ZET + tractOR) and by the end of 1947 3,406 tractors had been built, which was 60% of all tractors in Czechoslovakia. In February 1949 the company were already celebrating the ten thousandth tractor leaving the production line. At the beginning of the 1950s the manufacture of small firearms for the army again returned to the city for a few years, but shortly thereafter Brno’s Zbrojovka was steered back to a fully civil programme of mechanical engineering – tractors, office machines, tools, instruments, and hunting and sporting weapons. Large diesel motors were also being temporarily manufactured in Zábrdovice, and for this purpose an existing hall on the banks of the Svitava River was developed (the so-called New Hall). In the 1950s and 60s the factory was renamed the Jan Šverma Works. The manufacture of Zetor 25 tractors was shifted in the 1950s to the plant in Líšeň, under the cliffs of Stránská skála, which was simultaneously hived off as a separate company. All engines for Líšeň’s Zetor plant continued to be made in Zábrdovice, where production of the Zetor 35 and 50 Super tractors was meanwhile being initiated. These models continued to be manufactured until 1968, when the series were completed, having manufactured a total of 130,000 models. The Zábrdovice plant carried on producing engines for the Líšeň tractor plant, and at the end of the 1980s there was even an imposing, brand-new engine hall built along the banks of the Svitava River on a former sports and recreation area. Zbrojovka had had its own foundry from the pre-war era at the Vaňkovka factory. 

Betting on the future – communication and computing technology 

And what else did the production programme consist of? A lot of work went into developing typewriters. The plant was already designing its own models under their Consul brand, both in electronic and portable versions. Typewriters were assembled in workshops on Šumavská Street, which was once more under Zbrojovka’s wing. In collaboration with other companies, they were also developing teleprinters (Dalibor teleprinter in 1960; Czechoslovakia becomes the fifth ever nation to manufacture such a device), electronic calculators, the first Czechoslovak automatic computer, and embryonic NC machines, etc. In 1960 Zbrojovka had 12,617 employees, with an average monthly wage of 1,460 CZK. The plant’s manufacture of tools and instruments was boosted in the early 1970s by the construction of a new multi-storey tool shop that ran along Baarovo Embankment. In the 1980s, the previous vocational school on the Zerkowitz site was replaced with an alternative training facility, newly built on Olomoucká Street. The final big structure built at Zbrojovka was the energy centre (still extant) on Baarovo Embankment. Even after yielding the production programme for computational technology to the ZPA concern in the late 1960s, Zbrojovka still saw its future in developing computer technology, and the result was an office system for the preparation, pre-processing, operative processing, and transfer of data – the Consul 271x, in particular the micro-computer Consul 2717 Zbrojováček, of which approx. 10,000 units were delivered to schools in the years 1988–1990, costing them a cool 12–13 thousand CZK a piece. Also manufactured at Zbrojovka were keyboards, diskette drives, and dot matrix printers. The Siemens T100 teleprinter was likewise being produced under licence. 

Abrupt demise and Nová Zbrojovka 

Post-Velvet Revolution changes had fatal results for Zbrojovka. Due to the massive imports and a general boom in computing and communication technology, the works production programme became uncompetitive. In the years 1990–2006, Zetina/Pfaff sewing machines were assembled at Zbrojovka, later an already separate company made mandles. A trend formed according to which parts of the business separated themselves off from Zbrojovka to form new companies manufacturing discrete commodities, such as hunting and sporting firearms or automobiles. Years spent vainly fumbling after economic success culminated (after declaring bankruptcy) in complete collapse in 2003 and the definitive end of manufacturing in 2006. The complex of failed factories was acquired in 2007 by the J & T investment group. Buildings were subsequently leased to individual tenants with manifold business objects, and – with one or two exceptions – the area fell into ruin. Even the manufacture of motors at the new motor shop in Husovice ended in 2006. In 2016 the complete Zbrojovka site was bought lock, stock, and barrel by the property and investment company CPI Property Group, who put forward a project to have the entire area reconstructed as a new municipal quarter called Nová Zbrojovka. Demolition and reconstruction work began in October 2017. By 2022 more or less the whole area of factories had been cleared and decontaminated, with the only structures preserved being the directorate building on the corner of Lazaretní Street, the former boiler house and chimney, the so-called New Hall on the banks of the Svitava River, and the nearby torso of the Beran factory’s chimney. The building of the so-called New Tool Shop was rebuilt as a new office building called ZET Office. 

Jiří Mrkos 

Lathe operator working at Zbrojovka Brno 

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Book Fenomén Zbrojovka (The Zbrojovka Phenomenon)  

The impetus for the book was the extraordinary discovery of the Zbrojovka photographic archive. The Brno photographer Roman Franc saved it from destruction and offered it to the city of Brno for preservation and publication. A part of the archive you can see in the book.  

The focus of the archive is on images from the post-war period, historically valuable footage documenting, for example, visits by important personalities, the opening of exhibitions and fairs, sports events, the introduction of new products and others. From a photographic point of view, there are interesting images that capture the fleeting moments of the daily routine in Zbrojovka factory. You can buy the book in TIC BRNO info centers or in the e-shop.