Ottobock Brand Guidelines: A 1919 Berlin Prosthetics Maker, Königsee & Duderstadt

A Berlin start, a Thuringian factory.

Ottobock began in Berlin on 13 January 1919 as the Orthopädische Industrie GmbH. German Wikipedia says it was set up by a group around a manufacturer from Krefeld to supply prostheses and orthopaedic products to the many thousands of men disabled in the First World War, with Otto Bock as production manager. A 2019 anniversary portrait by the Berlin-Brandenburg health-industry cluster places the founding in Kreuzberg and credits it to Bock.

In 1920 production moved to Königsee, in Thuringia, where up to 600 people worked at times, according to German Wikipedia. Because demand could hardly be met by hand, the company began making prosthetic parts in series, and the encyclopedia says this laid the groundwork for an orthopaedic industry; it adds that aluminium parts were already in use in the 1930s. Bock joined the management in 1924 and became sole managing director in 1927.

The Nazi years are part of the record. German Wikipedia, citing Die Zeit (2009) and manager magazin (2023), says Bock joined the NSDAP in May 1933 and was a supporting member of the SS during the 1930s, and that the old company was later liquidated and renamed Orthopädische Industrie Otto Bock. It says the company used forced labourers during the Second World War: a company chronicle quotes former employees as saying that from 1942 about 100 young Russian women worked in the bandage, sewing and wood departments. Max Näder, who trained at the firm from 1935, married Bock’s daughter Maria in 1943 and later led the company.

Duderstadt, the knee and the arm.

After the war the Soviet occupation authorities confiscated the Königsee factory and the family’s assets, and the company started again in Duderstadt, in southern Lower Saxony. German Wikipedia dates the move to 1946; the 2019 cluster portrait says production resumed there from 1948. Duderstadt has remained the headquarters.

German Wikipedia credits a braking knee joint, the Jüpa knee, with the company’s economic breakthrough after 1949. In 1955 it exported its first 500 Jüpa knees to the United States, and a branch in Minneapolis followed in 1958, the start of its international sales network.

In 1965 Max Näder brought myoelectric arm prostheses to market, in which weak electrical signals from the muscles control the hand; both German Wikipedia and the cluster portrait record the date. In 1969 the company patented a pyramid adapter, a connector that joins a prosthetic foot, knee joint and socket in modular leg prostheses, and German Wikipedia says it remains part of the company’s joints today.

In 1990, after German reunification, Hans Georg Näder took over the management from his father and the company bought back its old site in Königsee, where manual and power wheelchairs and children’s rehabilitation products are now made, according to German Wikipedia. In 1997 it presented the C-Leg at the world prosthetics congress in Nuremberg; German Wikipedia calls it the world’s first microprocessor-controlled knee joint. In 2017 it added the bebionic hand prostheses, bought from the British company Steeper.

German Wikipedia lists further additions. In 2018 the Traunstein orthopaedic company Pohlig became a wholly owned subsidiary, and in the same year exoskeletons for overhead work in industry were moved into a business of their own. In 2021 Ottobock took over SuitX, an exoskeleton company spun out of a robotics laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and in March 2023 it bought the Brillinger chain of medical supply stores.

The company also has a long sporting link: German Wikipedia says it has provided a technical service at the Paralympic Games since Seoul in 1988 and is a worldwide partner of the International Paralympic Committee.

How the category presents itself.

Hospital bed and patient-handling companies present themselves mainly through brochures, websites and trade-fair stands. A common picture is a bright ward room: a bed raised to working height, the side rails up, a bedside cabinet in a pale wood decor and a window letting in daylight. Care-home ranges are shown differently, with warmer colours, wood-look panels and beds styled to look less like hospital equipment and more like bedroom furniture.

Patient-handling makers work with a different set of images. Ceiling lifts are photographed on rails running over a care bed, mobile hoists and slings beside a wheelchair, and transfer aids in narrow bathrooms. People are almost always present: a carer and a patient or resident, usually models in staged scenes, with the equipment placed at the centre of the frame and the room kept calm and uncluttered.

Trade fairs are the other stage. MEDICA in Düsseldorf and the Dubai health fair long known as Arab Health draw bed and lift makers from Europe, Asia and North America, and many of them build furnished room sets on their stands so that buyers can walk round a bed, try the controls and see a lift in use. Several companies also keep showrooms at their headquarters for the same purpose.

Many of these companies are family-owned or have passed through several owners, and some of the oldest began as makers of wire mattresses, iron beds or orthopaedic parts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each company, who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made, and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name, a new logo and a listing.

The name has changed form over the years, from Orthopädische Industrie to Otto Bock and now Ottobock, written as one word. German Wikipedia says the old logo, based on Otto Bock’s own signature, was replaced internationally by a new logo at the end of 2011. The company now describes its aim as “Futuring Human Mobility,” the 2019 cluster portrait reported, and it runs research and development teams in Duderstadt, Berlin and Vienna, with a Berlin base in the former Bötzow brewery since 2018.

Not every expansion went through. In May 2019 the regional newspaper Harz Kurier reported that a judge of the US Federal Trade Commission had ruled, at first instance, that Ottobock must sell assets of the prosthetics maker Freedom Innovations, which its North American arm had bought in September 2017; the company called the decision disappointing.

Ownership has stayed with the founder’s descendants. German Wikipedia says the Näder family holds the company through Näder Holding, that the Swedish investor EQT took a 20 per cent stake in 2017, that the family bought it back in March 2024, and that Ottobock shares have traded on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 9 October 2025, with Näder Holding keeping about four-fifths of the shares.

For a design guide, Ottobock shows how a founder’s name can carry a maker of engineered parts across a century and two homes, Königsee and Duderstadt. Compare Permobil, a Swedish power-wheelchair maker, and Sunrise Medical, a wheelchair group run from Germany. For this guide we use a navy, a pale grey and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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