KELLER HCW GmbH

Carl Keller first found an Osnabrück company as a partner, which patented his skip truck and received permission from him to build and market it for 10 years. However, he was not satisfied with the quality of the dump trucks he built and set up his own repair shop in Laggenbeck, where he improved them. After the patent expired, he took over production at the Laggenbeck site in 1904. A few years later, the product range had already been expanded to include slewing and lifting scaffolds, transfer tables and elevators. In 1910 the first fully automatic machine of the "Hörstel" type, a combination of cutter, frame transport and elevator, was developed. This was the breakthrough to mechanization.Carl Keller put a lot of heart and soul into marketing and selling his products. So he traveled to Russia before the First World War, where the first fully automatic machine was installed in Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea.As part of the reparations payments that the German Reich had to pay after World War I, KELLER delivered machines to northern France and Belgium. The first machines were also sold to Uruguay and Argentina.After the difficult years of the global economic crisis at the beginning of the 1930s, business picked up speed again. KELLER rediscovered its old domestic and foreign markets and also found increased access to the underdeveloped south-eastern European countries.During World War II, KELLER became an armaments factory. Russian prisoners of war were assigned to the company, and most of its permanent staff had been drafted into the military. A quarter of them died in the war.After the reconstruction, the KELLER company got off to a flying start and became a global machine and plant manufacturer.