SAG/SDAG Wismut was a uranium mining company in East Germany during the time of the Cold War. It produced a total of 230,400 tonnes of uranium between 1947 and 1990 and made East Germany the fourth largest producer of uranium ore in the world at the time. It was the largest single producer of uranium ore in the entire sphere of control of the USSR. In 1991 after German reunification it was transformed into the Wismut GmbH company, owned by the Federal Republic of Germany, which is now responsible for the restoration and environmental cleanup of the former mining and milling areas. The head office of SDAG Wismut / Wismut GmbH is in Chemnitz-Siegmar.
History
The Ore Mountains (; ) in southern East Germany at the border with the Czech Republic are closely connected to the history of uranium exploitation. The metal was discovered in a sample from a silver mine in the mountain range, and uranium was produced first as a by-product in the early 19th century and later as a main product from the 1890s on. The chemists Marie and Pierre Curie discovered the elements radium and polonium in pitchblende tailings from a Czech uranium mine in these mountains. Radioactive waters were used in several towns for health treatment.different authors: Uranbergbau im Erzgebirge und Kalter Krieg. Ausgewählte Beiträge des RADIZ-Workshops vom 10. und 11. Oktober 1997 in Schlema, RADIZ-Information 16/98, RADIZ e. V., Schlema.
The uranium mines in the Erzgebirge, in the south-eastern provinces of Thüringen and Sachsen were the sites of a number of NKVD mining camps employing forced labor. Wismut AG was the Soviet company that ran the uranium mines. Stalin gave greatest priority to this mining project in his competition with the United States to produce nuclear weapons.Ulrich Merten,"The Gulag in East Germany:Soviet Special Camps 1945-1950", Teneo Press/Cambria Press, 2018, p.224 On April 4, 1946, the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union decided to place the uranium mining under the control of the NKVD. Regular mining operation for uranium started in the summer of 1946. Lavrentii Beria, Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs, chief of the NKVD, who was directly responsible for the Soviet atom bomb project, appointed NKVD Major General Mikhail M. Maltsev, a veteran commander of GULAG labor camps in the USSR and recipient of the highest Soviet decorations, to lead this enterprise. He was under the direct command of Colonel General Ivan Serov, head of the NKVD/MVD in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and Beria's deputy.
Maltsev applied GULAG discipline methods in the early days of the Wismut operation, such as withdrawing food rations from miners who did not fulfill their quotas or the use of military tribunals for those workers accused of alleged sabotage. But unlike the GULAG forced labor camps in Siberia, it was difficult to hide the abuses of labor in the Erzgebirge, a fairly densely settled region of East Germany. To maintain secrecy and security, however, in early 1947, the mining districts became closed military zones, banning even the East German government party, SED, from activities there. Wismut, as it was under the political control of the NKVD, dealt with all important issues between the company and its German employees. The Soviet military employees in Wismut, on the other hand, were under the authority of the Ministry of State Security, Minister Viktor Abakumov, who had frequent conflicts with Serov.Ulrich Merten, p.225
The NKVD maintained a strict security system in the Wismut mines. NKVD/MVD troops guarded not only the mines, but the total Wismut zone of mines as well. having up to 15,000 troops there. These troops were under the command of the NKVD military head of Wismut. There were additional armed military units stationed in the uranium mining districts. Military and NKVD checkpoints were present at all approaches to this zone. The mines were surrounded by wooden fences and watch towers, and access to them was only through a guarded gate. There were also NKVD posts at district or town levels at the fourteen Wismut mines. A special NKVD group, commanded by a Major Malygin, was very important in its work at all the pits and plants of Wismut. He had the task of investigating all cases of espionage and diversion and reported directly to General Serov.Ulrich Merten, p.227
The uranium industry grew in the early years after the war at an extraordinary rate, reaching its highest number of employees in autumn 1950 with over 200,000 workers. Wismut AG became the largest enterprise in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. The initial program of compulsory labor was eventually supplanted by volunteer labor, responding to higher wages and better working and living conditions. Wismut health records indicate that at least 20,000 miners died of or suffered from lung disease "induced by exposure to radiation and dust".Ulrich Merten, p. 242.
At the end of 1953 the company was liquidated and the Soviet-East German stock company Wismut (SDAG Wismut) was newly founded, with the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic each owning 50%. Working and technological standards improved significantly in the following years. Uranium exploration and mining concentrated in the first years after World War II on the old mining areas of the Ore Mountains and adjacent Vogtland mountains. Many uranium occurrences had long been known there and were accessible using the old adits and shafts from the silver and base metal mining of former centuries. In 1950 the giant ore deposit of Ronneburg and the medium-sized Culmitzsch deposit (both in eastern Thuringia) were discovered and in 1965 the Königstein deposit in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. The peak of uranium production by the Wismut company occurred from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, reaching nearly 7,000 tonnes of uranium per year, after which it declined to 3,500 tonnes in the last normal production year, 1989.Chronik der Wismut. CD-ROM. Wismut GmbH, 1999.
Political and economic changes in East Germany and the subsequent reunification of Germany led to the cessation of uranium mining in December 1990. The Federal Republic of Germany assumed ownership of the East German and Soviet stocks of the company and transformed the company into Wismut GmbH in 1991. This new company is responsible for restoring the former mining and milling sites, for which the government approved a total budget of around 6.4 billion euro, but higher costs are anticipated. This activity includes securing/filling underground cavities, covering dumps and tailings, treating mine water and removal/decontamination of the buildings at the mine and milling sites. In 2011 the restoration program was extended to the year 2022.
Mining
Ore Mountains and Vogtland The Ore Mountains (German: Erzgebirge) and Vogtland were the first exploration targets for uranium and host the largest number of deposits mined by Wismut. All deposits in these mountain ranges are hydrothermal vein-style mineralisations in Palaeozoic metasedimentary and igneous rocks and Variscan age granites. Most deposits are situated in the western Ore Mountains and the neighbouring Vogtland region, whereas the central and eastern Ore Mountains contain only a few smaller deposits.
The deposits are related to deep crustal northwest-trending fault structures, with the most important being the Gera-Jáchymov fault zone containing most of the larger deposits, including Jáchymov on the Czech site of the Ore Mountains, Johanngeorgenstadt, Pöhla-Tellerhäuser, Schneeberg-Schlema-Alberoda in the German part of the Ore Mountains, and Ronneburg black shale-type mineralisation in Thuringia. The size of the mineralisations ranges from very small deposits with some hundred kilogrammes of uranium content and a few mineralised veins, up to the giant deposit of Schneeberg-Schlema-Alberoda containing nearly 100,000 tonnes of uranium and about 2,000 mineralised veins. There are three major vein types carrying uranium: uranium-quartz-calcite veins (270 million years old), dolomite-uranium veins (Triassic age) and BiCoNi-Ag-U veins (Tertiary age). Only the first type is a primary mineralisation, while the latter two carry remobilised pitchblende from the older vein types. The BiCoNi-Ag-U mineralisation had been mined since the 15th century for its content of silver, bismuth, cobalt and nickel. The heavy black mineral often occurring in these veins was useless to the miners of former times and was named 'Pechblende' (pitchblende) because of its color. This word is still used for the most important uranium mineral ore in all veins types, but coffinite deposits also occur. In the oxidation zones of the deposits there is a wide range of secondary uranium minerals. The distribution of uranium minerals in the veins varies considerably with the highest concentration of uranium in places where they crosscut reducing host lithologies like carbon-rich schist and skarn. The width of the veins ranges from a few centimeters to several meters, with an average ore grade of 0.1% of uranium. Lenses of massive pitchblende occur locally with a width of over 1 m. The most important deposits are described below.
Schneeberg-Schlema-Alberoda (Objects 02/03/09; mining division Aue)
This ore field was the largest deposit in the Ore Mountains. It is situated about 20 km south of Zwickau in the western Ore Mountains. Schneeberg was an important mining center since the 15th century, producing silver, cobalt, nickel and bismuth, and the town of Oberschlema was known for its strongest naturally occurring radioactive waters at the beginning of the 20th century. A radium health center was established in the town in 1914.
After the Second World War, Soviet scientists started exploring the old mining areas for uranium, and mining commenced in 1946 even before SAG Wismut was established in 1947. Schneeberg at the southern end of the deposit became Object 03 and Oberschlema Object 02. Subsequently, the blind (no mineralisation reaches the surface) northern part of the ore field (Niederschlema-Alberoda) was discovered and mining started there in 1949. Object 09 was established to mine the Niederschlema-Alberoda part of the ore field.