Knorr-Bremse Brand Guidelines: Georg Knorr’s Air Brakes, Berlin & Munich

An engineer and a faster brake.

Knorr-Bremse was founded in 1905 by the engineer Georg Knorr in Boxhagen-Rummelsburg, then just outside Berlin and now part of the city. The company says Knorr set it up with the involvement of the machine-tool maker Loewe & Co., after some twelve years working on air brakes for trains as owner of Carpenter & Schulze. German Wikipedia says the business rested on the K1 rapid-release air brake, introduced on passenger trains of the Prussian-Hessian state railways. In 1911 the company became Knorr-Bremse AG, taking in Continentale Bremsen-GmbH.

The Berlin works became a landmark. Between 1913 and 1916 the architect Alfred Grenander extended the factory and added an administration building, and in the 1920s a main works with tower-like corners rose beside the Ringbahn; German Wikipedia says both are listed monuments today. In 1918 the company introduced the Kunze-Knorr freight brake, developed from an idea by Bruno Kunze of the Prussian railway administration, and in 1931 the Hildebrand-Knorr, or HiK, brake designed by its technical director Wilhelm Hildebrand. Road vehicles followed: the company says it filed a patent for a truck air brake in 1922 and showed a Horch truck fitted with air brakes at the Berlin motor show in 1923.

Between the wars Knorr-Bremse grew into a group. From 1920 it owned the original Bayerische Motorenwerke in Munich, renamed Süddeutsche Bremsen-AG; German Wikipedia says the engine department and the BMW name were sold on in 1922, and the Munich site is today the group’s headquarters. It also took holdings in the Berlin machine-tool maker Hasse & Wrede and, in 1926, a majority of Motoren-Werke Mannheim.

The war years.

Knorr-Bremse used forced labour during the Second World War, and the company says so. Its website carries the chapter on 1933 to 1945 from Safety on Rail and Road, the centenary history by Manfred Pohl published in 2005. It records that a list drawn up on 11 July 1942 for the Berlin parent plant showed foreign workers from 19 countries, among them so-called “Eastern workers” from the Soviet Union, many of them women, as well as Belgians, Czechs, Italians, French, Dutch and Poles, and that prisoners of war were also forced to work at the plant. The same chapter says that in 1943, on the instructions of the armaments ministry, the company moved parts of its production to leased plants at Myszków and Sosnowiec, in the part of Upper Silesia annexed by Germany, where between 1,000 and 1,200 mainly Polish workers were employed, and that it supplied the German air force.

An independent record comes from Berlin’s Lichtenberg district. A survey of the district’s forced-labour camps from 1939 to 1945, published by the Berlin house trafo and online since 2001, lists several camps run by or for Knorr-Bremse, most built under a barracks programme of 1942 and 1943. One company camp had 22 barracks for 1,080 people and housed 430 people in January 1943 and 790, French and Czech, by September 1943; another company camp was built for up to 1,600 people, and its residents included French, Russian and Ukrainian men, women and children.

The war ended the Berlin company. The works lay in the Soviet sector; the company says the main plant in Lichtenberg was dismantled, confiscated and expropriated for reparations, and German Wikipedia says the site passed to a Soviet-owned company and, from 1954, became the East German VEB Berliner Bremsenwerk. In the west, staff resumed development and production at the Südbremse plant in Munich, which became the headquarters in 1953, the company says. That year it presented the KE brake for rail vehicles, which the company says went on to be used in more than 40 countries.

How rail makers present themselves.

Rail vehicle and track-machine makers sell to a small circle of buyers: national railways, regional transport authorities, metro operators and the contractors who build and maintain track. Their brands are seen less in advertising than on the vehicles themselves, in tender documents and on the stands of the trade fairs where the industry meets.

The pictures these companies choose tend to repeat. A new train is rolled out of a works hall for its handover, often with the customer’s livery already applied and the maker’s name in smaller lettering on the cab. Track-machine makers favour a different scene: tampers, ballast cleaners and rail grinders, often painted yellow, working at night under floodlights while the line is closed to traffic. Suppliers of components show bogies, brake units and couplings on test stands, photographed close up in clean factory light.

Trade fairs give these brands their largest public stage. InnoTrans in Berlin is one such stage: Polish Wikipedia records Newag showing new vehicles there in even-numbered years since 2012, and English Wikipedia says Hyundai Rotem displayed its hydrogen fuel-cell tram there in 2022 and 2024. National fairs such as Trako in Poland fill the years in between.

Some of these firms are old, and several grew out of railway workshops, engineering works or family companies founded long before the brands they carry today. This guide sets out what can be checked about each one — who founded it, who owns it now, what it makes and where — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Trains and trucks.

A change of owner in 1985 reshaped the group. German Wikipedia says Heinz Hermann Thiele took control that year, and Knorr-Bremse sold its diesel-engine and machine-tool businesses to concentrate on brakes for rail and commercial vehicles; in 1993 those became two separate divisions. Acquisitions followed in both: New York Air Brake in 1991, Westinghouse Brake and Signal, with sites in Chippenham and Sydney, in 2000, and Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems of Elyria, Ohio, fully owned from 2002. On 21 December 2016, Railway Gazette International reported, Knorr-Bremse agreed to buy Vossloh’s Electrical Systems unit, the former Vossloh Kiepe; German Wikipedia says it was renamed Kiepe Electric and sold again in 2024, and that the group took over the Swiss railway-electronics firm duagon in 2026.

Knorr-Bremse listed its shares on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange on 12 October 2018. German Wikipedia says the shares offered came from the Thiele family, and that a Heinz Hermann Thiele family foundation took control of a holding of almost 59 percent in December 2024. The headquarters is a listed neoclassical building of 1917 and 1918 in Munich, and the group has more than 100 sites in 30 countries. The rail division equips metros, trams, regional and high-speed trains, freight trains and locomotives; the truck division supplies brakes and related systems mainly for trucks, and also for buses, trailers and farm machinery. A name trap: the Knorr soups and stock cubes belong to an unrelated food brand.

For a design guide, Knorr-Bremse shows a founder’s surname joined to the German word for brake, carried from a Berlin works to Munich and onto trains and trucks, with a war record that its own published history sets out. Compare it with Wabtec, heir to Westinghouse’s air brake, and Plasser & Theurer, the Austrian track-machine maker. For this guide we use a deep brake blue, graphite and a signal amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Knorr-Bremse’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.