File:Lederfabrik Sohre 010 Hans-Dieter Hahn.jpg

English: Hanspeter Hahn from Tharandt-Hartha near Freital visited the demolition of the Freital leather works on 29 August 2019. He remembered that cowhides and pigskins were processed. „In the last years before the communist regime collapsed in 1989, we got more pigskins than cow-hides. Our factory had good superintendents and our products were saleable. We produced leather for different purposes, among them for army-boots and leather jackets. Neat’s leather for briefcases was exported to the Netherlands. Some leather was bartered for those briefcases and thus they came back to the factory. The management gave them as a present to meritorious workers at the ‚Day of the Republic’ “. Hahn was charged with pigmenting the tanned leather with a spray machine in the western part of the building. „After spraying, the lacquer was pressed in with a roller. Before the spray machine was introduced, workwomen had to lay the lacquer by hand onto the leather. The remainders of the lacquer were incinerated by firefighters of the works fire brigade on a waste rock deposit of a coal mine in the west of Freital. They were not discharged in the sewage system.

The water for the factory was taken out of the river Weisseritz and conducted by a mill race to the plant. The lockkeeper at the sluice-gate had to clean the grid as well, and thus ensured a constant flow of water. A part of the water was pumped into two big reservoirs on top of the western part of the building. The plant had no settling basin. The wastewater was discharged into the public sewage system, which was operated by the regional district. The sewage was purified in the Dresden-Kaditz plant, which worked poorly, especially in the final years of the heavily under-invested German Democratic Republic. After 1985 the plant was only botched up and did not obtain a scheduled, long-range maintenance. Left-over chemicals were stored in the basement in leaking and corroding containers and oozed deeply into the soil. In 1990 the son of the dispossessed Karl Sohre visited the factory and called both business and buildings ‘incurable’”. 25 years later the mayor of Freital, Uwe Rumberg, came to the similar judgment that it is impossible to faith-heal this building. “In the eastern premises were the offices. In an adjacent room in the third floor was an area measuring machine for leather which was sold in square centimetres. Near her was an embossing machine for pressing patterns onto the leather.

From the bureaus one could easily overlook the pigskin store in the southeast of the building. Still in the southeast neighboured was the tannery. In a small building was a kitchen-like installation. Bark of oak and fir was cooked in water as solvent for the tanning agents. Side by side to the kitchen were the tan-pits. Here the hides were soaked with the tanning liquids in increasing degrees of concentration. Tanning with tanbark took plenty of time, whereas tanning with chrome salt, another tanning agent, was much quicker. Chrome tanning took place within the western part of the main building. The hides were treated with a chrome salt solution in rotating tuns, which the workers called ‘Goliath-tuns’, inspired by their size. Many of the workmen lived in two or three streets south of the manufactory with old and decaying little houses, which were pulled down shortly after the communist government of the GDR was overthrown.”