For as long as the Cold War lasted, Gladbeck was very important to management in Berlin.
Firstly, maintenance workers based in Gladbeck could get to West German customers with urgent requirements far more quickly and without all the time-consuming bureaucracy involved with getting people from East to West Germany.
Secondly, Gladbeck was like a supply depot for almost everything bought by BORSIG in West Berlin. Anything bought for the Allied sectors had to be through GDR territory to get there, and this called for huge administrative efforts: every single delivery had to be accompanied by documentation, and sometimes there were hundreds of shipping slips to be written every week. Grundt, a logistics company from Berlin, set up a branch office in Gladbeck just for BORSIG transports to Berlin.
This complicated political situation had other effects, too: there was a safe in a bank in Gladbeck with microfilm copies of all of the BORSIG drawings, calculations, and other intellectual property, just in case West Berlin were to be blockaded again and the central BORSIG site cut off in the East. After the fall of the Wall, however, Gladbeck lost a great deal of this strategic importance.
To this day, the Gladbeck site is the headquarters of BORSIG Process Heat Exchanger GmbH - pressure vessels and heat exchanger productionring and industrial services, BORSIG Membrane Technology GmbH, BORSIG ZM Compression GmbH, BORSIG ValveTech GmbH and BORSIG Service GmbH and thus an important pillar of the BORSIG Group.
