Dobbelmann

Dobbelmann is a German brand that made tobacco and pipes in the town of Rees, in the Lower Rhine region, for a little over thirty years. Its founder was not a local workshop but Louis Dobbelmann, the Netherlands' established tobacco firm: based near Rotterdam, this company set up a branch factory in Rees on 8 April 1929 to gain a direct foothold in Germany, one of the era's largest tobacco markets. Production began that same autumn with twenty-five workers, producing pipe tobacco alone.

A Tobacco Factory in Rees

The factory was built on grounds vacated by the town's closed margarine industry, and within a decade grew its workforce to forty. The Second World War cut this progress short; by 1945 more than ninety percent of the factory buildings had been razed to their foundations. The reconstruction carried out between 1946 and 1948 covered not only the production buildings but housing for the workers as well. The new workshop building, completed at the end of 1947, was considered advanced by the standards of the time.

In the same town of Rees, just a few hundred meters away, the Oldenkott factory was operating. The two firms standing side by side allowed a small provincial town to become one of Germany's pipe manufacturing centers.

Move into Pipes

The company entered pipe making in 1946/47, under the shortage conditions of the postwar period. The first pipes were made from apple, cherry, and beech wood; these were forced solutions resorted to because briar was unavailable, a widespread practice across postwar Europe. When briar supply from the Mediterranean again became possible around 1950, the factory quickly returned to it.

The decade that followed became the brand's most productive period. Tight coordination between production and the sales organization, delivering products fresh to dealers, and rigorous quality control were the hallmarks of the era. Staff numbers reached around seventy by around 1950. According to records, the firm's tobacco turnover roughly quadrupled between 1953 and 1959; it won an honorary certificate at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair and rose to become Germany's third-largest pipe and tobacco manufacturer in the industry ranking. The rhyming advertising slogan meaning roughly "Great and small, everyone smokes Dobbelmann" even made it into the German press of the time.

Closure

This rise did not escape the notice of the industry's big players. The Bremen-based tobacco company Brinkmann bought Dobbelmann in autumn 1962; its aim was not to continue the business but to eliminate a rival. Tobacco production was halted on 15 September 1962, while pipe production continued at a reduced level until year's end. Eighty people lost their jobs. The remaining machinery and stock are said to have been transferred to Oldenkott. According to records, the company's legal entity persisted on paper until spring 1964.

The brand survives today only among collectors. The sole visible trace left of the factory in Rees is an old company emblem on a building's façade. Dobbelmann-stamped pipes are considered short-lived but quality examples of postwar German series production, and are covered under this heading within the Germany pipe brands index.