The Bethlehem Steel Corporation was an American steel and shipbuilding company that for much of the 20th century was one of the world's largest steel producer and shipbuilding companies. The company's roots trace to 1857 with the establishment of the Bethlehem Iron Company. Bethlehem Steel was formed in 1904 through the merger of the earlier companies, existed through the decline of American steel manufacturing during the 1970s until its final bankruptcy in 2001; the Bethlehem Steel Company became the primary subsidiary company of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1904. The Bethlehem Steel Company is the first Bethlehem Steel while the Bethlehem Steel Corporation is the second Bethlehem Steel. After a decline in the American steel industry and other problems leading to the company's bankruptcy in 2001, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation was dissolved and the remaining assets sold to International Steel Group in 2003; the Bethlehem Steel Corporation and the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation, a Bethlehem Steel Corporation subsidiary, were two of the most powerful symbols of American industrial manufacturing leadership.

Their demise is cited as one of the most prominent examples of the U. S. economy's shift away from industrial manufacturing, its failure to compete with global competition, management's penchant for short-term profits. The Saucona Iron Company was established by Augustus Wolle; the Panic of 1857, a national financial crisis, halted further organization of the company and construction of the works. The organization was completed, the site moved elsewhere in South Bethlehem, the company's name was changed to the Bethlehem Rolling Mill and Iron Company. On June 14, 1860, the board of directors of the fledgling company elected Alfred Hunt president. On May 1, 1861, the company's title was changed again, this time to the Bethlehem Iron Company. Construction of the first blast furnace began on July 1, 1861, it went into operation on January 4, 1863; the first rolling mill was built between the spring of 1861 and the summer of 1863, with the first railroad rails being rolled on September 26. A machine shop, in 1865, another blast furnace, in 1867, were completed.

During its early years, the company produced rails for the expanding railroads and armor plating for the US Navy. Although the company continued to prosper during the early 1880s, its share of the rail market began to decline in the face of competition from growing Pittsburgh and Scranton-based firms such as the Carnegie Steel Company and Lackawanna Steel; the nation's decision to rebuild the United States Navy with steam-driven, steel-hulled warships reshaped Bethlehem Iron Company's destiny. Following the American Civil War, the Navy downsized after the end of hostilities, as national energies were redirected toward settling the West and rebuilding the war-ravaged South. No new ordnance was produced, new technology was neglected. By 1881, international incidents highlighted the poor condition of the U. S. fleet and the need to rebuild it to protect U. S. trade and prestige. In 1883, Secretary of the Navy William E. Chandler and Secretary of the Army Robert Todd Lincoln appointed Lt. William Jaques to the Gun Foundry Board.

Jaques was sent on several fact-finding tours of European armament makers and on one of these trips he formed business ties with the firm of Joseph Whitworth of Manchester, England. He returned to America as Whitworth's agent and, in 1885, was granted an extended furlough to pursue this personal interest. Jaques was aware that the U. S. Navy would soon solicit bids for the production of heavy guns and other products such as armor that would be needed to further expand the fleet. Jaques contacted the Bethlehem Iron Company with a proposal to serve as an intermediary between it and the Whitworth Company, so that Bethlehem could erect a heavy-forging plant to produce ordnance. In 1885, John Fritz, accompanied by Bethlehem Iron Company directors Robert H. Sayre, E. P. Wilbur, William Thurston, Joseph Wharton, met with Jaques in Philadelphia. In early 1886, a contract between Bethlehem Iron and the Whitworth Company had been executed. In spring 1886, Congress passed a naval appropriations bill that authorized the construction of two armored second-class battleships, one protected cruiser, one first-class torpedo boat, the complete rebuilding and modernization of two Civil War-era monitors.

The two second-class battleships would have heavy armor plating. Bethlehem secured both the forging and armor contracts on June 28, 1887. Between 1888 and 1892, the Bethlehem Iron Company completed the first U. S. heavy-forging plant. It was designed by John Fritz with the assistance of Russell Wheeler Davenport, who had entered Bethlehem's employ in 1888. By autumn 1890, Bethlehem Iron was delivering gun forging to the U. S. Navy and was completing facilities to provide armor plating. During the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, a structure, designed to make the world marvel received its giant axle from Bethlehem Iron; the world's first Ferris wheel needed enough steel to assemble a 140-foot tower to support an all-steel wheel, altogether making a 264-foot structure. The iron made in Bethlehem Steel's blast furnaces was responsible for the world's largest single piece of cast iron, made up to that time. In 1898, Frederick Taylor joined Bethlehem Steel as a management consultant in order to solve an expensive machine shop capacity problem.

Taylor and Mauns

Siegfried Rädel was a German politician, a member of the Communist Party of Germany and a resistance fighter against the Nazi régime. Rädel was born in Saxony. At the age of 20, in 1913, Rädel became a soldier. With his Pioneer Battalion, he lived through four years of World War I on the front lines and was wounded twice. In 1919, his colleagues elected him as the chairman of the plant council at the rayon works in Pirna; as of 1921, he was leader of the KPD faction. He became a member of the KPD central committee, from 1924 to 1933, a member of the Reichstag. With some interruptions, he was for many years either a candidate or a member of the KPD central committee. Rädel's commitment to the relief efforts for those affected by floodwaters in the Gottleuba and Müglitz valleys between 1927 and 1932 is well known, as is his commitment to dam construction aimed at controlling the floods. However, such a system of dams was not realized until much between 1958 and 1974 – retention basins in Buschbach, Friedrichswalde-Ottendorf and Glashütte, the Gottleuba dam.

Rädel's endeavours to organize social initiatives and organizations led in 1927 to the founding of the Work Community of Social-Political Organizations on a national scale. The ARSO, with Rädel as publisher, published the magazine Proletarische Sozialpolitik beginning in May 1928. Rädel was among the German delegates at the World Peace Congress in August 1928 in Amsterdam. After Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seized power in 1933, Rädel had to go into exile, he went to Prague, the Soviet Union, Zürich. The Party began proceedings against him for "factional activities", but this ended with a simple reprimand; the Swiss police arrested him in late 1936 along with his partner, Maria Weiterer, with whom he had lived and worked since 1927. In France, where he found himself after being expelled from Switzerland, the Secretariat of the KPD Central Committee, which at that time was based in Paris, transferred to Rädel the leadership of the Communist emigrant organization. Rädel took part in attempts to build up an antifascist people's front while in France.

At the KPD's "Bern Conference" in Draveil near Paris, he was chosen to be one of the 17 members of the Central Committee. Among his circle of German émigré friends were Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Rudolf Leonhard, Leonhard Frank and Paul Merker. Extensive work in publicity was undertaken against fascist German aggression politics. However, with the German-Soviet non-aggression pact came the arrest and detention in 1940 of every German Communist émigré in France, including Rädel, delivered to Le Vernet concentration camp. In 1942, Rädel was handed over to the Gestapo by the Vichy régime. In a high treason trial, he was sentenced by the Volksgerichtshof to death on 25 February 1943, shortly before his 50th birthday, executed on 10 May 1943 in the infamous "murder garage" at Brandenburg Prison; the rayon plant in Pirna was named after Rädel. With reunification, his name disappeared, in the end, the rayon plant was shut down and demolished. However, a street in downtown Pirna is still named after him.

Speech for Siegfried Rädel, given on 13 March 1993 in Pirna on the occasion of his 100th birthday

Falkensee is a town in the Havelland district, Germany. It is the most populated municipality of its district and it is situated at the western border of Berlin; the commune Falkensee was formed in 1923 by the merger of Falkenhagen and Seegefeld, composing the common name from Falkenhagen and Seegefeld. During World War II, the Demag-Panzerwerke subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was located here. At its height, 2,500 people were used as slave labour; the municipality shared its borders with the former West Berlin, so during the period 1961-1990 it was separated from it by the Berlin Wall. As a suburban municipality directly neighbouring Berlin, Falkensee grew with Berlin itself. After the 2nd World War, Falkensee's population shrunk due to the isolated position "behind" West Berlin, seen from the GDR capital. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Falkensee's population continues to grow. Area in each year, since 2011 based on Census from 2011 Detailed data sources are to be found in the Wikimedia Commons.

May 1990-October 2007: Jürgen Bigalke since November 2007: Heiko Müller Heiko Müller was reelected in October 2015 with 51,3 % of the votes. Falkensee has a railway station on the Berlin-Hamburg railway. Local trains and Regional Express trains stop here at the two outer platforms, both located on siding tracks, so that long distance trains linking Hamburg and Berlin can bypass on the two middle tracks. Two local stopping trains linking Nauen with Berlin call at Falkensee, one going via the Northern Ringbahn to the tunnel level of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the other taking the Berlin Stadtbahn cross-city railway, terminating at the Berlin Schönefeld Airport The northern side of the Falkensee railway station is the location of the central hub of the Falkensee bus network, provides a covered stand for hundreds of bicycles. Before the previous war, Falkensee was a stop on the suburban line from Nauen via Jungfernheide to the Berlin Lehrter Bahnhof station, the Berlin terminus of the Berlin-Hamburg railway.

From August 1951 to the end of the 1950s, the Falkensee - Spandau and Spandau - Jungfernheide tracks were electrified with the Third Rail of the Berlin S-Bahn, allowing direct rail service from East Berlin to Falkensee, part of the GDR then. This link was severed by the Berlin Wall in 1961. From on, until the reconstruction of the Berlin railway network in 1990, Falkensee could be reached from East Berlin only by the long detour via the Berlin outer ring. Louis Adlon, hotelier Hannjo Hasse, DEFA - actor Carlos Rasch, science fiction - author Klaus Bednarz, journalist Ingo Voge, bobsledder Media related to Falkensee at Wikimedia Commons Official website