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.