February 23, 2026 • 39 mins
Melitta Bentz invented the coffee filter in 1908 and changed coffee culture forever. Through the decades and after reckoning with its relationship with the Third Reich, the company she founded in her Dresden apartment endures today.
Research:
- “The Weimar Republic 1918-1929 - EdexcelChanges in society, 1924–29.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z9y64j6/revision/8#:~:text=Hourly%20wages%20rose%20in%20real,crisis%2C%20such%20as%20the%20hyperinflation
- DEUTSCHES REICH REICHSPATENTAMТ PATENTSCHRIFT. “Melitta-Werke Akt.-Ges. in Minden, Westf. Filterpapiereinsatz für Kaffeeaufbrühfilter u. dgl.” https://www.dpma.de/docs/dpma/veroeffentlichungen/de653796a_melitta1937.pdf
- German Patent and Trademark Office. “The invention of the coffee filters.” https://www.dpma.de/english/our_office/publications/ingeniouswomen/110jahrekaffeefilter/index.html
- “The History of Leipziger Messe.” https://www.leipziger-messe.de/en/company/portrait/history/
- KOSSACK, KRISTAN. “Betriebsalltag und Unternehmensentwicklung eines NS-Musterbetriebs im Spiegel seiner Werkzeitung.” Westfälische Zeitschrift 155. 2005. http://www.westfaelische-zeitschrift.lwl.org
- “Melitta Bentz - the woman who invented the coffee filter.” Europeana. https://www.europeana.eu/en/stories/melitta-bentz-the-woman-who-invented-the-coffee-filter
- “Melitta Bentz KG - coffee filter.” Deutsches-Kunststoff Museum. https://www.deutsches-kunststoff-museum.de/sammlung/virtuelles-museum/k-2002-00982/
- Morris, Jonathan. “Coffee: A Global History.” Reaktion Books. 2019.
- Moses, Claire. “Overlooked No More: Melitta Bentz, Who Invented the Coffee Filter.” New York Times. Sept. 5, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/obituaries/melitta-bentz-overlooked.html
- “Our History.” Melitta Group. https://www.melitta-group.com/en/unternehmen/unsere-geschichte
- Wierling, Dorothee. “Coffee.” International Encyclopedia of the First World War. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/coffee/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
So recently we did our episode on drug use during
World War Two, which talked a lot about Nazis and
their drug use, and I thought, hey, you know, just
in the interest of being kind to Germany, a place
we are traveling later this year for the show, Oh yeah,
wouldn't it be great to do a nice episode on
German history?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Ha ha.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I tried so hard, but.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
It didn't work out one hundred percent that way. And
I apologize. If you are a coffee hound like I am.
We're going to talk about that a lot on Friday.
You probably have benefited from the ideas of the woman
that we're going to talk about today and her early
twentieth century invention. Malita Benz's store is usually framed in
(01:01):
this sort of quaint way about a housewife who ended
up a captain of industry because she loved coffee so much. Listen,
that's not entirely wrong, but the company that she founded
also has a very dark spot in its history when
it comes to Nazi Germany. I promise you I didn't
know this until I was so far in it that
I couldn't really backpedal out of it and start a
(01:22):
new episode. So today we are going to talk about
this very formative moment in coffee culture history. We are
going to talk about some ugly wartime collaboration, and you
know kind of where that company is today, Germany.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I like you heaps.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I'm sorry, but we're going to start as usual at
the beginning. Amili Augusta Melita Liebscher was born on January
thirty first, eighteen seventy three, in Dresden, Germany. Her father,
Carl Liebscher, had a bookstore, and her mother, Brigitte Reinhardt,
also helped out at that bookstore when she was not
keeping house. Melita's grandparents also had a business of their own.
(02:04):
They ran a brewery, and so she had this multi
generational set of examples of family members owning their own businesses.
We really don't know anything else, though, about Melita's childhood
besides those very basics. We do know that when she
was in her twenties, Melita met a man named Johannes
Emil Hugo Bentz who went by Hugo, he worked in retail,
(02:27):
and they got married. They went on to have three children,
two sons named Villi and Horst, and a daughter named Herta,
and the story goes that Melita, like many people, liked
to start her day with a cup of coffee, but
according to an interview that her son Horse gave in
the late nineteen forties, Melita got frustrated with the coffee
(02:48):
grounds that made it into the cup and interrupted the
otherwise pleasurable beverage. The flavor was also inconsistent from cup
to cup because of that, and it could also leave
a bitter app after taste because as the grounds got
into it and sat in it, they continued to steep
and they eventually turned bitter. And she also was not
the biggest fan of cleaning the coffee pot and kind
(03:10):
of having to chase after all of those grounds the
one that she used. The coffee pot that she used
has been described as a copper pot in some accounts
and as a porcelain percolator in others, but it could
have been any number of designs that were in use
at the time. So one style that was popular in
Germany at the time in the early nineteen hundreds is
(03:33):
sometimes called a flip burner. It had a vessel for
water at the base and that was placed directly on
the stove, and then on top of that was usually
a mirror vessel, and that had a section in between
the two parts that held the coffee grounds. When the
water started to boil, you flipped the whole thing over
so that the boiling water passed over the coffee grounds
(03:54):
in that central compartment and it passed into the mirror vessel.
That part all so had a poor spout, so when
your coffee had all passed through the grounds, you could
pour it out from that bottom section. Now bottom, since
you had flipped it over. The central holding section for
the grounds had a slim gap around this connecting point
(04:15):
between the two parts, so that the coffee could slowly
flow into the side that you poured from, and that
kept most of the grounds from jumping into the coffee,
but not all of them. Some were still sure to
get through. Another common style of coffee maker that was
used in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds involved
(04:35):
a pot that had a long straw like usually metal
tube that ran from the center of a small basin
at the top of the pot down into the water
reservoir below, and these could be metal or porcelain, and
they were placed directly on the stove, and when the
pot was heated, that heated water would move up the
tube and spill into that small basin, which is where
(04:57):
the grounds were placed. And like the flip burner, this
basin also usually had a narrow gap around it that
allowed the coffee to then drip back into the main pot,
but it had the exact same problem of grounds always
going with it, at least some of them. Other methods
that were in use at the time included the basic
of just boiling water with loose grounds in it and
(05:18):
then letting those grounds settle to the bottom of the
pot before pouring, or using a cloth bag kind of
like a tea bag to hold the grounds in the
boiling water, but that meant that the weave of that
fabric had to be loose enough to let water flow easily.
The kind of paper that we used today for tea
bags didn't exist yet or wasn't common. That also meant
(05:39):
that grounds could slip through. It is unclear if Melita
was using one of the pots we have described here
or something else, but whatever she was using was definitely
letting grounds get into her cup of coffee. I gotta
say that is unpleasant when you have a nice cup
of coffee and then you take that last mouthful and
get a mouthful of ground. Uh.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
I don't like that.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
It's not my favorite.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
No.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So she said to have.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Tried a few different solutions to this problem, and none
of her early attempts fully work. Her coffee would still
have some grounds in it. Some of her solutions involved
punching holes into the basin where the grounds went, but
the holes, if they were big enough for the coffee
to get through, they were also big enough for some
of the grounds to slip through. Then one morning, she's
(06:29):
described as having just a bolt of inspiration. According to
pretty much all of the accounts of this, she tore
a page of blotting paper out of her son's notebook
and cut that in a circle, and then placed that
over the holes in the basin where the grounds went.
Blotting paper is not as common today as it was
(06:49):
in nineteen oh six, so in case you don't know,
it's this thin, porous paper that people would put in
between the pages of a notebook when writing with something
like a fountain peg. The blotting paper would absorb the
extra ink and just keep it from smearing. So when
Melida poured hot water over the coffee grounds with blotting
(07:09):
paper covering the holes in her pot, the coffee filtered
through the paper into the cup, and then none of
the ground's went along with it. Then she found she
could just pull out that blotting paper and toss it
and the grounds into the trash altogether, and that made
a significant reduction in clean up time. Once Melita had
tested this method herself a few times, she expanded her
(07:32):
test to include her friends. She started hosting small afternoon
gatherings with her friends where she would have them over
and serve them coffee that she had brewed using her
new method. She wanted to see if they agreed that
her preparation resulted in a smoother blend and an overall
better drinking experience, and they apparently did agree, because Melita
(07:52):
decided to patent her invention, which she submitted under the
title coffee filter with a domed underside, recessed by and
inclined flow holes. I will say that is a translation
from the original German, So whether or not it feels
as you know, sort of lacking in poetry in the
German I don't know. But her patent was granted by
(08:14):
the Imperial Patent Office on June twentieth, nineteen oh eight,
and it was included in the patent bulletin the patent
Bloat that the IPO published the following month. This was
a pretty significant moment because Melita Bentz became one of
the first women in Germany to hold a patent. The
Melita pour over apparatus that was patented was really similar
(08:35):
to ones you can still get today. It was metal
and shaped a lot like a mug, but also designed
to sit on top of the coffee cup or mug
that you would drink out of. It stood about nine
centimeters or three and a half inches tall, and it
had a rounded base that fit inside of the rim
of a standard cup. The models she worked on after
(08:55):
that first one had a saucer like base of about
eleven point biter five centimeters or four and a half
inches wide. They had a lip on the underside that
kept it centered in a drinking cup. There were actually
two components that had holes punched in them. The base
of this cup like reservoir had a lot of small holes,
(09:16):
and then there was another metal topper which had several
dozen holes that sat snugly into the top and had
a small tab style handle for easy removal. A photo
of this original version is on the German Patent and
Trademark Office website. The filter papers that she packaged to
(09:36):
use with her metal apparatus were just discs of round
blotting paper. These were just the exact diameter and in
circumference of the interior of the main reservoir. So the
paper was placed inside the reservoir over the holes, and
then the ground coffee and the hot water were added.
The top, which had holes to allow steam to escape,
(09:57):
was placed overall of that. The coffee dripped through the
apparatus in the cup and then voila pour over coffee.
So for clarity, the nomenclature for all of this as
it's discussed historically is a little different from the way
that people talk about coffee supplies today. While you or
I might mention, you know, going to the store to
pick up a pack of coffee filters, and we would
(10:20):
mean the papers. Melita's metal invention was called the filter
in a lot of documentation, and the disposable part was
called filter paper. This gets even more complicated because this
nomenclature changed over time, not always necessarily purposefully, it seems,
with discussion and even advertising of the Melita products, and
(10:43):
sometimes both parts of the equation, both the metal thing
and the disposable paper parts were called the filter even
when referring to those two things separately. We're going to
always try to be really specific about which is which
as we go to avoid confusion.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
But just know there is amba like word usage that
goes on historically here. Before we go.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Any further, we will take a quick sponsor break.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Patent in hand.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Melita and her husband started their new business right out
of their home. It started out with the name of
the business being m Bentz, but the products were made
under the label of simply Melita. When the company began,
the capital in its ledger was a mere seventy two fennings,
and a fenning was one one hundredth of a mark,
(11:40):
similar to how a penny is one one hundredth of
a dollar, so they had very little cash involved in
this startup. They had fifty of the metal filters made
and one hundred cartons of the filter paper, and they
started to sell these to their neighbors. Their sons Villian Horst,
delivered orders around the neighborhood with a little hand cart.
Hugo Boh, who recall worked in retail, made use of
(12:02):
his experience in that field and he went around to
local shops and he got them to not only carry
the filters, but to also let him set up displays
in the windows that would show potential customers how the
filter and the filter paper worked to make what the
benches called perfect coffee enjoyment.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
They really needed these.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Displays because otherwise people had no idea how this new
product was supposed to work. In nineteen oh nine, Melita
and Hugo took their coffee filtering system to the Leipzig
Trade Fair. This is a huge moment for their new business.
The Leipzig Trade Fair was and still is a big deal,
and it's historically significant in regard to European commerce. So
(12:43):
here's a brief story. This trade fair traces its roots
all the way back to eleven sixty five, when Leipzig
was granted the rights to operate as a town and
have a market. That was granted by the Margrave of
Meissen at the time, Auto the scond so known as
Otto the Rich. But Leipzig really got a boost during
(13:04):
the reign of King Maximilian the First and the beginning
of the sixteenth century. The trade fair became a more
official event rather than just the town's market. It turned
into a place for both consumers and businesses to find
things for personal use and for resale. In the nineteenth century,
this started to look more like a trade fair the
(13:26):
way you might think of one in modern terms, with
a lot of hopeful wholesalers bringing presentations and samples to
show prospective retailers so that they can place orders for
full runs of the product. This continued to grow in
this way until nineteen forty two, when it stopped completely
until the end of World War Two. Then after the war,
(13:48):
the trade fair got started again and it continued to grow,
including through major events like the reunification of Germany. Yeah,
this is still a big event. I think they do
two shows a year now showing the metal filter and
papers that Melita had invented. At the fair enabled this
small cottage company to get the attention of retailers that
(14:08):
ran housewares shops and general stores all around Germany. No
longer were they selling only to their neighbors directly or
in local shops. Retailers from all over the country wanted
to carry these metal filters, which were priced at one
point twenty five marks, so it was not clear to
me in the research if that is the wholesale price
(14:29):
or not. Several different sources about Melita Bentz's life mentioned
that specific number of one point twenty five marks, so
presumably that is what she was bringing in from each sale,
but I can't say that confidently. In the year that
followed that first trade show, Melita sold one two hundred
and fifty of her metal filters, and things just kept
(14:50):
climbing from there. They not only gained popularity, they also
gained accolades. In nineteen eleven, Melita took the filters to
the International Hygiene Exposition. This was a medicine and public
health expo that Dresden hosted, and the Benzes took a
range of inventions with them, not just the coffee filter system.
(15:11):
In addition to the standard filter, there was a miniature
version for small cups, a version for tea, and a
device called an uber cook for hooter. Holly and I
each went on little adventures figuring out exactly what this
product did and what it was for, because that term
is used today for things that are boilover preventers. But
(15:32):
Holly also found a translation that described it as preventing
over cooking. It looked kind of like a big old
chimney that would go on top of the pot. Their
range of products won them a gold and a silver metal. Yeah,
it reminded me a little bit of like a Moroccan tagene,
but also could stop water from boiling over.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
We don't know.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
There's the only picture that we found of it just
shows it. Does it show it in relation to like
a pot or anything.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, So we don't know.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
We don't really know how that whole thing functioned.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Yeah, I found an ad for a different, similar looking
product that described it as as preventing your milk and
your chocolate from boiling over. So I can imagine it
working a lot of ways. Mysteries mysteries. Melita and Hugo
continually sought new ways to promote their business, including hiring
(16:28):
young women to do demos in stores and store windows
to show people how this filter system worked and that
worked like a charm. By nineteen fourteen, the dedicated room
in their apartment was simply not working anymore. It was
just too small to handle what they needed, so Melita
and Hugo opened a factory in Dresden that was in
a former locksmith shop. They also hired their first non
(16:52):
relative full time employees, although Villi and Horst continued to
work for their parents. As the company grew, seemed like
Melita Coffee was on an endless growth trajectory until World
War One started in nineteen fourteen, because at that point
both Hugo and Villi were conscripted into the German Army
and had to leave Dresden to go fight. Up to
(17:16):
that point, Hugo had been helping with the business, but
he still had his regular job. Everything the family made
with the coffee filters was extra income, but with her
husband at war, Melita became the sole breadwinner. She had
help from her from her brother Paul Leiebscher, and Melita
was the driving force of the company. She made the
(17:38):
decision to expand the line, which sounds like a growth move,
but this was more about survival because coffee had really
been impacted by the war. In the decade or so
leading up to World War One, coffee had gone from
being more of a luxury item to being more commonly
consumed throughout Germany and the rest of Europe, kind of
(17:59):
spreading out the socioeconomic hierarchy.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Kind of everybody started drinking coffee, and.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
This was a time when Brazil was exporting an estimated
seventy five percent of all of the coffee that was
drunk throughout the world. They were exporting the beans, obviously,
not the coffee itself, but trade across the Atlantic was
disrupted when World War One began. The coffee that remained
in Germany was all purchased by the German government. Britain
(18:27):
put laws into place that forbid any trade with central powers,
so that included the German Empire, Austria, Hungary, the Ottoman Empire,
and Bulgaria, and the British also had a naval blockade
in place that prevented direct shipping to those countries from
anyone else. So this meant that any coffee commerce into
Germany had to pass through neutral countries like Sweden, which
(18:51):
they took advantage of and they mean deals with those countries.
But once Britain realized that Germany was buying coffee through
those neutral countries, it actually started to pressure those governments
to end those business relationships, and it worked so eventually
Germany established what was called the War Committee for Coffee,
Tea and Substitutes to manage the limited supply they were
(19:14):
able to get their hands on, and that organization routed
most of the coffee to the military, which meant that
most civilian citizens had no access to coffee. So even
if the Melita Company had continued to make their metal filters,
people couldn't drink coffee, so there was no demand for them. Also,
no demand for the paper filters to use with them.
(19:38):
Paper was also in short supply, so making the filters
would have seemed both pointless and wasteful. Instead, the Melita
Company started to manufacture paper cartons to create a new
revenue stream. People still needed boxes, and this did manage
to sustain the family until the end of the war
when Hugo and Villi returned home. Once they did, really
(20:00):
became co owner of the business and the name switched
from m Bentz to Bence and sun ohg as coffee
became part of daily life in Germany again.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
After the war ended.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
The Benzes based a new hurdle, and that was imitators,
because people really liked this method of making coffee, and
as the market started to see more and more companies
pop up selling both metal filters and filter papers. The
Melina Company protected its identity on shelves by designing packaging
that would be easy for consumers to recognize as theirs
(20:36):
and they could tout it as the original and this
was the beginning of the company signature red and green packaging.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Which is still in use today.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
As the US was experiencing the economic crash of nineteen
twenty nine, which impacted the whole globe over the next
several decades, the Melita Company was expanding again. Demand had
grown consistently since they opened their Dresden factory and it
was time to move to a new facility. They moved
a substantial distance to the smaller town of Menden, which
(21:07):
is more than four hundred kilometers or about two hundred
and fifty miles northeast of Dresden. This was a massive undertaking,
but the Benches had found a former chocolate factory that
was really a perfect fit for what they needed. Additionally,
the city of Menden was eager to bring in new
industry and offered tax incentives to businesses that moved there,
(21:31):
all of the factory machinery had to be taken apart
and loaded onto train cars along with all the existing inventory,
and then everything had to be moved and reassembled once
it got to its destination. But the Benches couldn't afford
to shut down their entire operation for very long, so
this entire thing was done in four days. At the
(21:53):
end of that time they were up and running in
the new factory space. Fifty five of their employees moved
to Menden to stay there with the company. Melita headquarters
is still in Mindon today, and as their business grew,
the Benzes made decisions about the workforce and their factory
that were in some ways progressive, at least as we
(22:14):
perceived them, but they were also part of a nationwide
trend in the post World War One by Marb Republic.
The standard of living for workers improved in general in
the country during this time, although unemployment rates rose significantly,
and during this time benefits were introduced like unemployment insurance,
pension plans, and sick leave. At the Melida factory, workers
(22:37):
got a five day work week as well as thirty
days of leave a year, and the benches also gave
out Christmas bonuses to employees each year. Over time, there
were additional benefits added to the employee benefits package. They
started receiving anniversary bonuses and their own health insurance, and
the company retained a doctor and a dentist that employees
(22:59):
could see for free. In nineteen thirty eight, the Melita
Aid Fund was created as a mutual aid initiative for employees.
This all sounds great, but there is some spin doctoring
going on when this is discussed, because that fund and
some of those other benefits were implemented at a time
when some deeply problematic things were happening at the factory.
We're going to talk a little bit more about that
(23:20):
in a few moments. Melita Benz herself is often described
as being invested in the welfare of her employees and
wanting to promote the idea of quality of life throughout
the company. This is often attributed to her own background
of having been a mother and a housewife who then
became a businesswoman, meaning she recognized the need for balance
(23:41):
in her own life and tried to foster the same
in a workforce with a growing number of women. It
remains a little unclear to me how much of this
is an idealized characterization. Twenty four years after Melita Bentz
patented her invention, at the age of fifty nine, she
retired from the day to day running of the company
(24:01):
she had founded. Her husband, Hugo retired as well. The
company's ownership was transferred entirely to their sons in nineteen
thirty two. That was the same year that their younger son,
Horsebnz became co owner and the company's name was once
again changed to Melita Work. The Benz sons ran the
(24:22):
business from that point forward, although Melita was still involved
in the culture of the company. In nineteen thirty five,
the company redesigned their filtering system. Instead of metal filters,
they created porcelain ones that were all one piece, instead
of having a drip reservoir with a filter cup on
top of it. The design of the porcelain filter was
(24:44):
still such that it sits on top of a coffee cup,
though it functioned in exactly the same way, and it
actually looks almost just like a coffee cup, except that
the reservoir inside is an inverted conical shape, and to
fit that shape, the company produced and patent a new
paper filter. You probably know what these look like These
are the exact style of paper conical filter that many
(25:07):
drip coffee makers use today, and a lot of companies
produce porcelain and ceramic and even plastic filters in the
exact same style as this Malina redesigned from the nineteen thirties,
including the Melita Company. This type of single serving ceramic
filter has historically been more common in Europe than in
the US, but you can absolutely find them in the US.
(25:31):
As pour over coffee has grown in popularity, many coffee
connoisseurs agree with Melita Bentz that this is the superior
way to make coffee. The patent for that new filter
form was granted in December nineteen thirty seven, and the
ad campaign that went with it touted Melita Filters every
type of coffee. Filtered coffee tastes better. Under the leadership
(25:54):
of Villianhorst, the company also expanded out of beverages and
started to make sandwich paper as well.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Coming up, we.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Will get into the Melita Company's collaboration with the Third Reich,
but before we do, we will pause to hear from
the sponsors that keep stuffy missed in history class.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Going The Second World.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
War also impacted the trajectory of the Melita factory as Melita,
without its namesake and her husband at the Helm, became
what was known as a national socialist model company, meaning
it stopped production of its filters and other products to
make supplies for the Wehrmacht, the Third Reichs military. As
(26:43):
early as nineteen thirty six, the company had started publishing
a newsletter for employees which contained a lot of Nazi propaganda.
Its earliest issue touted that the new publication would be
a quote faithful companion on our march into the future,
on our path to the new great and Beautiful Germany
of Adolf Hitler. Nazi Germany had requested that all companies
(27:05):
with more than five hundred employees produce internal newspapers like this.
Beginning in nineteen forty, Milita produced cookwaar like pots and
pans for the military, and then in nineteen forty one
manufacture shifted to things like ammunition belts. That same year,
the company was awarded what was called the Golden Flag
of the German Labor Front. This was an award that
(27:28):
companies had to elect to be considered for, so the
Malina Company opted in. This meant that for the year
following that award, the company's employees might enjoy some special
perks and benefits, but it would also be even more
closely overseen by the Nazi regime, and the company's production
goals were set higher.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
According to a paper.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
That analyzed the available company newsletters from this time, the company,
at the direction of the Third Reich, through the model
company system, offered team building activities and incentives to work hard,
like potential vacation trips, and they also set up a workshow.
This literally translates to factory share or work share, but
it has also been translated in a truer definition as
(28:13):
a work troop. It was like a little battalion that
was pushing Nazi ideology within the company. The employees that
were chosen to be in this group were responsible for
keeping everyone in line, and employees that were not in
the group were instructed to obey them.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
I will do a.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Brief caveat here. On this paper that I'm referencing is
written in German. I translated it through a couple of
different translators and had a friend that speaks German look
at the pieces that I was interested in. So just
FYI know that just in the interest of transparency. I
did not read this in English, but an issue of
the company paper from nineteen thirty eight also mentioned a
(28:52):
work women's group that was organized under the guiding principle
that quote, we work women want to fight and be
brave because we have only one will to serve our fewer.
So these are the same years that the company started
the mutual aid fund. At the same time, there were
other initiatives to assist the workers who needed help, like
(29:13):
the employees helped set up a company vegetable farm so
food could go to the workers who needed it. It's
not really clear how they assessed the idea of need
like who needed this enough to get it? But it
does seem as though all of it was really about
promoting the idea that all workers had to be loyal
(29:33):
to the company and its alignment with the German government.
During the same time these programs were being touted, the
editorials and the company paper warned employees not to shop
at Jewish owned businesses, listing all of the ones that
were blacklisted. It also included a lot of really horrifying
antisemitic commentary, including about children, and all of this was
(29:58):
done in accordance with guideline from the Nazi government, and
the result was that Melita continued to grow economically in
Nazi Germany. This doesn't seem to be a case where
company leadership was trying to save a flailing company by
cooperating with the Nazi government. According to that paper that
we're talking about here, written by German historian Kristen Cossack
(30:21):
in two thousand and five, Horst Bence had joined the
SS in nineteen thirty three, and he was largely in
charge of this newsletter, and many of the benefits that
the company was instituting in the late nineteen thirties seemed
to have been a way to make up for some
very low pay That was also part of the way
that Nazi Germany was running factories. Simultaneously, there were threats
(30:43):
of punishment, including taking away benefits if workers underperformed Kassack
notes quote the examined newspapers showed that most of Malita's
social benefits were initiated by the new Nazi social policy
or the model company competition. To be clear, the Melida
Company is not at all the only company that still
(31:05):
exists today and cooperated with the Nazi government.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
The list is so long and it.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Includes companies like Audi, Siemens, BMW, Bayer, Coca Cola, Kodak, IBM, really.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
On and on and on.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Those are just examples. If you are thinking why didn't
they mention whatever, it's because there are many, many more.
We would be here for an hour if we started. Yeah,
that would be the whole podcast. Like those other companies.
After World War Two, the Melida Company faced the Reckoning
with its collaboration of the with the Nazi government. Over
(31:41):
the years, the company has acknowledged its part and at
one point also prepared a report on it stating, quote,
the role of the company during the Nazi era, as
well as the proximity of the company management to the
regime of the time, was presented in a scientific critical
manner and published in the content text of an extensive
company chronicle. So that is not a document that is
(32:05):
readily available on their website at this point. You have
to email the company to get a copy of it.
And it's something that Holly found out about too late
to make a request for it to be part of
this episode today. Yeah, it's in like a weird place
that I think is kind of a not actively maintained
part of their company site. Oh yeah, Like I think
(32:26):
I got to it through one of those backdoor things
where you do a search for a very specific term
and it turns up a link and you're like, where
is this in this Yeah, and that's where I found it.
So I don't even know if that request would work anymore.
But per the company's website quote, in two thousand, the
Malita Group joined the Foundation Initiative of the German Economy
(32:48):
for the Compensation of Forced Laborers. So in case you
did not know, a lot of companies used forced labor
in the later years of the war, people that were
prisoners of war. Some were very, very horrible, and it
was literally enslaved labor. I mean, it's all horrible. It
is unclear based on what information is readily available, if
(33:10):
that was the case at Malita. It seems likely given
their participation in that reparations foundation, but we don't have details.
That same page on the Malita site that mentions their
participation in this foundation states clearly their stance today, which
is quote, the Malita Group is actively committed to democratic
values and principles such as equal opportunities and freedom of expression.
(33:34):
Respect for human rights is a matter of course The
company rejects racism in any form and is clearly in
favor of equal rights for all people. Hugo Benz died
in nineteen forty six. Melita Benz died four years later
on June twenty ninth, nineteen fifty, at the age of
seventy seven. Their descendants have continued to be active in
(33:56):
the running of the company, and the company has grown
a lot. Today Melita has offices and production facilities around
the world, and today what used to be called the filter,
meaning the permanent device, they call a pourover. That's in
line with what people call that nowadays, the paper single
(34:17):
use item is now called the filter. They also sell
both of these things as well as coffee. It's estimated
that they manufacture more than fifty million coffee filters every day,
and a portrait of Melita Bentz, who started it all
in request for the perfect cup of coffee without a
big mouthful of grounds in it, still hangs in the
(34:38):
company headquarters. I have a listener mail and it is
nice and easy breezy because it's about cross stitch. I
love all the embroidery emails we've gotten. They make me
so happy in my dark little heart. People love embroidery.
I also fished a bunch of them out of spam
this morning.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
For some reason.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
I don't know why embroidery in particular went to the
junk folder, but it was all embroidery email. There's some
algorithms somewhere that's like, nobody emails as much about embroidery.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
This has to be garbage.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
No listen, bring it on, keep them coming. This from
our listener, Heather, who writes Hello, I just finished your
recent episode about the history of embroidery and found it
so interesting. As I have been an avid cross stitcher
for the last few years, I have found such a
supportive community of fellow stitchers online and it's really improved
my mental health. I think you're correct in that the
(35:30):
surge in popularity of granny hobbies has everything to do
with political unrest. It really has helped me cope with
the state of the world.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Lately.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Attached or some photos of my recently finished to enjoy.
Heather makes beautiful, beautiful cross stitch gorgeous pieces. Some of
these are just the loveliest. One looks almost like a
haunted house, a little very beautiful Victorian house. That is
surrounded by autumnal colored flowers. It has dark birds on it.
(36:01):
I don't think they're ravens are crows because they have
a little red on their back, but I could be wrong.
There are some spiders. My favorite. It's just absolutely beautiful.
There is another that is book themed and is also
as cute as they come. It says book sweet Books,
and it has kiddies on it. It has what looks
(36:21):
like a cup of coffee or tea. So Jermaine to
today's episode, as well as a couple others that she
has sent, one that reads coffee because murder is wrong. Okay, listen,
that's correct. I love it, Heather, Thank you so much
for sharing these with me. They make me so happy
(36:42):
in my heart. And I love knowing that everybody agrees
that having I think you don't have to embroider.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Listen.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
The thing that she hit on that I think is
very important is that I feel like having any kind
of little creative hobby, whether you're super into it and
you do really, you know, big projects with a lot
of intensive work, or if it's just a little thing
where you buy like basic little kits of some kind,
whether that's embroidery or something else, just to give your
(37:12):
brain a little creative outlet when you are, you know,
in your wind down at night or as a break
during the day. I think it's so good for everybody's
mental health to engage in some kind of little creative
If you don't want to buy stuff, write yourself a
little poem, play with haikus, whatever it takes to keep
your mind soothed, happy, also energized. I find very energizing
(37:35):
to do creative things. I hope you're all doing it,
because we all need to take care of ourselves. There
are also so many affordable kits nowadays that have just
enough to do one.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
Of a project.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
A friend of mine got an assortment of them, you know,
kind of going through the clearance rack before having a
little party with everybody coming over, and we all sat
around and watched TV and did little crafts.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Super good.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
The best I love a craft party like a crafting bee,
is it will fix some stuff in you. I say,
there is nothing better than sitting down with friends and
just making stuff and laughing. And you know, whether you're
eating something delicious or having cocktails or coffee or whatever
you'd like, it's just good for the soul. So I
(38:21):
hope everybody is finding stuff like that for themselves during
this time. It's also a good thing. If you're a doer,
you're a if you're a natural social leader, you know,
don't be shy about starting initiatives like that at home.
They're very good for you among your friend group. Invite
a few people over. You never know what it could
lead to you. If you would like to write to
(38:43):
us and show us your embroidery, please do that. Pet
pictures also still always welcome. Anything else really that you
want to share with us. You can do that at
History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you have not
subscribed to the show and you would like to that
as easy as pie to do, you can do that
on the iheartrate you app or anywhere you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(39:09):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class, A production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Wilson.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
So recently we did our episode on drug use during
World War Two, which talked a lot about Nazis and
their drug use, and I thought, hey, you know, just
in the interest of being kind to Germany, a place
we are traveling later this year for the show, Oh yeah,
wouldn't it be great to do a nice episode on
German history?
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Ha ha.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I tried so hard, but.
Speaker 1 (00:40):
It didn't work out one hundred percent that way. And
I apologize. If you are a coffee hound like I am.
We're going to talk about that a lot on Friday.
You probably have benefited from the ideas of the woman
that we're going to talk about today and her early
twentieth century invention. Malita Benz's store is usually framed in
(01:01):
this sort of quaint way about a housewife who ended
up a captain of industry because she loved coffee so much. Listen,
that's not entirely wrong, but the company that she founded
also has a very dark spot in its history when
it comes to Nazi Germany. I promise you I didn't
know this until I was so far in it that
I couldn't really backpedal out of it and start a
(01:22):
new episode. So today we are going to talk about
this very formative moment in coffee culture history. We are
going to talk about some ugly wartime collaboration, and you
know kind of where that company is today, Germany.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I like you heaps.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I'm sorry, but we're going to start as usual at
the beginning. Amili Augusta Melita Liebscher was born on January
thirty first, eighteen seventy three, in Dresden, Germany. Her father,
Carl Liebscher, had a bookstore, and her mother, Brigitte Reinhardt,
also helped out at that bookstore when she was not
keeping house. Melita's grandparents also had a business of their own.
(02:04):
They ran a brewery, and so she had this multi
generational set of examples of family members owning their own businesses.
We really don't know anything else, though, about Melita's childhood
besides those very basics. We do know that when she
was in her twenties, Melita met a man named Johannes
Emil Hugo Bentz who went by Hugo, he worked in retail,
(02:27):
and they got married. They went on to have three children,
two sons named Villi and Horst, and a daughter named Herta,
and the story goes that Melita, like many people, liked
to start her day with a cup of coffee, but
according to an interview that her son Horse gave in
the late nineteen forties, Melita got frustrated with the coffee
(02:48):
grounds that made it into the cup and interrupted the
otherwise pleasurable beverage. The flavor was also inconsistent from cup
to cup because of that, and it could also leave
a bitter app after taste because as the grounds got
into it and sat in it, they continued to steep
and they eventually turned bitter. And she also was not
the biggest fan of cleaning the coffee pot and kind
(03:10):
of having to chase after all of those grounds the
one that she used. The coffee pot that she used
has been described as a copper pot in some accounts
and as a porcelain percolator in others, but it could
have been any number of designs that were in use
at the time. So one style that was popular in
Germany at the time in the early nineteen hundreds is
(03:33):
sometimes called a flip burner. It had a vessel for
water at the base and that was placed directly on
the stove, and then on top of that was usually
a mirror vessel, and that had a section in between
the two parts that held the coffee grounds. When the
water started to boil, you flipped the whole thing over
so that the boiling water passed over the coffee grounds
(03:54):
in that central compartment and it passed into the mirror vessel.
That part all so had a poor spout, so when
your coffee had all passed through the grounds, you could
pour it out from that bottom section. Now bottom, since
you had flipped it over. The central holding section for
the grounds had a slim gap around this connecting point
(04:15):
between the two parts, so that the coffee could slowly
flow into the side that you poured from, and that
kept most of the grounds from jumping into the coffee,
but not all of them. Some were still sure to
get through. Another common style of coffee maker that was
used in the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds involved
(04:35):
a pot that had a long straw like usually metal
tube that ran from the center of a small basin
at the top of the pot down into the water
reservoir below, and these could be metal or porcelain, and
they were placed directly on the stove, and when the
pot was heated, that heated water would move up the
tube and spill into that small basin, which is where
(04:57):
the grounds were placed. And like the flip burner, this
basin also usually had a narrow gap around it that
allowed the coffee to then drip back into the main pot,
but it had the exact same problem of grounds always
going with it, at least some of them. Other methods
that were in use at the time included the basic
of just boiling water with loose grounds in it and
(05:18):
then letting those grounds settle to the bottom of the
pot before pouring, or using a cloth bag kind of
like a tea bag to hold the grounds in the
boiling water, but that meant that the weave of that
fabric had to be loose enough to let water flow easily.
The kind of paper that we used today for tea
bags didn't exist yet or wasn't common. That also meant
(05:39):
that grounds could slip through. It is unclear if Melita
was using one of the pots we have described here
or something else, but whatever she was using was definitely
letting grounds get into her cup of coffee. I gotta
say that is unpleasant when you have a nice cup
of coffee and then you take that last mouthful and
get a mouthful of ground. Uh.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
I don't like that.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
It's not my favorite.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
No.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So she said to have.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Tried a few different solutions to this problem, and none
of her early attempts fully work. Her coffee would still
have some grounds in it. Some of her solutions involved
punching holes into the basin where the grounds went, but
the holes, if they were big enough for the coffee
to get through, they were also big enough for some
of the grounds to slip through. Then one morning, she's
(06:29):
described as having just a bolt of inspiration. According to
pretty much all of the accounts of this, she tore
a page of blotting paper out of her son's notebook
and cut that in a circle, and then placed that
over the holes in the basin where the grounds went.
Blotting paper is not as common today as it was
(06:49):
in nineteen oh six, so in case you don't know,
it's this thin, porous paper that people would put in
between the pages of a notebook when writing with something
like a fountain peg. The blotting paper would absorb the
extra ink and just keep it from smearing. So when
Melida poured hot water over the coffee grounds with blotting
(07:09):
paper covering the holes in her pot, the coffee filtered
through the paper into the cup, and then none of
the ground's went along with it. Then she found she
could just pull out that blotting paper and toss it
and the grounds into the trash altogether, and that made
a significant reduction in clean up time. Once Melita had
tested this method herself a few times, she expanded her
(07:32):
test to include her friends. She started hosting small afternoon
gatherings with her friends where she would have them over
and serve them coffee that she had brewed using her
new method. She wanted to see if they agreed that
her preparation resulted in a smoother blend and an overall
better drinking experience, and they apparently did agree, because Melita
(07:52):
decided to patent her invention, which she submitted under the
title coffee filter with a domed underside, recessed by and
inclined flow holes. I will say that is a translation
from the original German, So whether or not it feels
as you know, sort of lacking in poetry in the
German I don't know. But her patent was granted by
(08:14):
the Imperial Patent Office on June twentieth, nineteen oh eight,
and it was included in the patent bulletin the patent
Bloat that the IPO published the following month. This was
a pretty significant moment because Melita Bentz became one of
the first women in Germany to hold a patent. The
Melita pour over apparatus that was patented was really similar
(08:35):
to ones you can still get today. It was metal
and shaped a lot like a mug, but also designed
to sit on top of the coffee cup or mug
that you would drink out of. It stood about nine
centimeters or three and a half inches tall, and it
had a rounded base that fit inside of the rim
of a standard cup. The models she worked on after
(08:55):
that first one had a saucer like base of about
eleven point biter five centimeters or four and a half
inches wide. They had a lip on the underside that
kept it centered in a drinking cup. There were actually
two components that had holes punched in them. The base
of this cup like reservoir had a lot of small holes,
(09:16):
and then there was another metal topper which had several
dozen holes that sat snugly into the top and had
a small tab style handle for easy removal. A photo
of this original version is on the German Patent and
Trademark Office website. The filter papers that she packaged to
(09:36):
use with her metal apparatus were just discs of round
blotting paper. These were just the exact diameter and in
circumference of the interior of the main reservoir. So the
paper was placed inside the reservoir over the holes, and
then the ground coffee and the hot water were added.
The top, which had holes to allow steam to escape,
(09:57):
was placed overall of that. The coffee dripped through the
apparatus in the cup and then voila pour over coffee.
So for clarity, the nomenclature for all of this as
it's discussed historically is a little different from the way
that people talk about coffee supplies today. While you or
I might mention, you know, going to the store to
pick up a pack of coffee filters, and we would
(10:20):
mean the papers. Melita's metal invention was called the filter
in a lot of documentation, and the disposable part was
called filter paper. This gets even more complicated because this
nomenclature changed over time, not always necessarily purposefully, it seems,
with discussion and even advertising of the Melita products, and
(10:43):
sometimes both parts of the equation, both the metal thing
and the disposable paper parts were called the filter even
when referring to those two things separately. We're going to
always try to be really specific about which is which
as we go to avoid confusion.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
But just know there is amba like word usage that
goes on historically here. Before we go.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Any further, we will take a quick sponsor break.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Patent in hand.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Melita and her husband started their new business right out
of their home. It started out with the name of
the business being m Bentz, but the products were made
under the label of simply Melita. When the company began,
the capital in its ledger was a mere seventy two fennings,
and a fenning was one one hundredth of a mark,
(11:40):
similar to how a penny is one one hundredth of
a dollar, so they had very little cash involved in
this startup. They had fifty of the metal filters made
and one hundred cartons of the filter paper, and they
started to sell these to their neighbors. Their sons Villian Horst,
delivered orders around the neighborhood with a little hand cart.
Hugo Boh, who recall worked in retail, made use of
(12:02):
his experience in that field and he went around to
local shops and he got them to not only carry
the filters, but to also let him set up displays
in the windows that would show potential customers how the
filter and the filter paper worked to make what the
benches called perfect coffee enjoyment.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
They really needed these.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Displays because otherwise people had no idea how this new
product was supposed to work. In nineteen oh nine, Melita
and Hugo took their coffee filtering system to the Leipzig
Trade Fair. This is a huge moment for their new business.
The Leipzig Trade Fair was and still is a big deal,
and it's historically significant in regard to European commerce. So
(12:43):
here's a brief story. This trade fair traces its roots
all the way back to eleven sixty five, when Leipzig
was granted the rights to operate as a town and
have a market. That was granted by the Margrave of
Meissen at the time, Auto the scond so known as
Otto the Rich. But Leipzig really got a boost during
(13:04):
the reign of King Maximilian the First and the beginning
of the sixteenth century. The trade fair became a more
official event rather than just the town's market. It turned
into a place for both consumers and businesses to find
things for personal use and for resale. In the nineteenth century,
this started to look more like a trade fair the
(13:26):
way you might think of one in modern terms, with
a lot of hopeful wholesalers bringing presentations and samples to
show prospective retailers so that they can place orders for
full runs of the product. This continued to grow in
this way until nineteen forty two, when it stopped completely
until the end of World War Two. Then after the war,
(13:48):
the trade fair got started again and it continued to grow,
including through major events like the reunification of Germany. Yeah,
this is still a big event. I think they do
two shows a year now showing the metal filter and
papers that Melita had invented. At the fair enabled this
small cottage company to get the attention of retailers that
(14:08):
ran housewares shops and general stores all around Germany. No
longer were they selling only to their neighbors directly or
in local shops. Retailers from all over the country wanted
to carry these metal filters, which were priced at one
point twenty five marks, so it was not clear to
me in the research if that is the wholesale price
(14:29):
or not. Several different sources about Melita Bentz's life mentioned
that specific number of one point twenty five marks, so
presumably that is what she was bringing in from each sale,
but I can't say that confidently. In the year that
followed that first trade show, Melita sold one two hundred
and fifty of her metal filters, and things just kept
(14:50):
climbing from there. They not only gained popularity, they also
gained accolades. In nineteen eleven, Melita took the filters to
the International Hygiene Exposition. This was a medicine and public
health expo that Dresden hosted, and the Benzes took a
range of inventions with them, not just the coffee filter system.
(15:11):
In addition to the standard filter, there was a miniature
version for small cups, a version for tea, and a
device called an uber cook for hooter. Holly and I
each went on little adventures figuring out exactly what this
product did and what it was for, because that term
is used today for things that are boilover preventers. But
(15:32):
Holly also found a translation that described it as preventing
over cooking. It looked kind of like a big old
chimney that would go on top of the pot. Their
range of products won them a gold and a silver metal. Yeah,
it reminded me a little bit of like a Moroccan tagene,
but also could stop water from boiling over.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
We don't know.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
There's the only picture that we found of it just
shows it. Does it show it in relation to like
a pot or anything.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Yeah, So we don't know.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
We don't really know how that whole thing functioned.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Yeah, I found an ad for a different, similar looking
product that described it as as preventing your milk and
your chocolate from boiling over. So I can imagine it
working a lot of ways. Mysteries mysteries. Melita and Hugo
continually sought new ways to promote their business, including hiring
(16:28):
young women to do demos in stores and store windows
to show people how this filter system worked and that
worked like a charm. By nineteen fourteen, the dedicated room
in their apartment was simply not working anymore. It was
just too small to handle what they needed, so Melita
and Hugo opened a factory in Dresden that was in
a former locksmith shop. They also hired their first non
(16:52):
relative full time employees, although Villi and Horst continued to
work for their parents. As the company grew, seemed like
Melita Coffee was on an endless growth trajectory until World
War One started in nineteen fourteen, because at that point
both Hugo and Villi were conscripted into the German Army
and had to leave Dresden to go fight. Up to
(17:16):
that point, Hugo had been helping with the business, but
he still had his regular job. Everything the family made
with the coffee filters was extra income, but with her
husband at war, Melita became the sole breadwinner. She had
help from her from her brother Paul Leiebscher, and Melita
was the driving force of the company. She made the
(17:38):
decision to expand the line, which sounds like a growth move,
but this was more about survival because coffee had really
been impacted by the war. In the decade or so
leading up to World War One, coffee had gone from
being more of a luxury item to being more commonly
consumed throughout Germany and the rest of Europe, kind of
(17:59):
spreading out the socioeconomic hierarchy.
Speaker 3 (18:02):
Kind of everybody started drinking coffee, and.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
This was a time when Brazil was exporting an estimated
seventy five percent of all of the coffee that was
drunk throughout the world. They were exporting the beans, obviously,
not the coffee itself, but trade across the Atlantic was
disrupted when World War One began. The coffee that remained
in Germany was all purchased by the German government. Britain
(18:27):
put laws into place that forbid any trade with central powers,
so that included the German Empire, Austria, Hungary, the Ottoman Empire,
and Bulgaria, and the British also had a naval blockade
in place that prevented direct shipping to those countries from
anyone else. So this meant that any coffee commerce into
Germany had to pass through neutral countries like Sweden, which
(18:51):
they took advantage of and they mean deals with those countries.
But once Britain realized that Germany was buying coffee through
those neutral countries, it actually started to pressure those governments
to end those business relationships, and it worked so eventually
Germany established what was called the War Committee for Coffee,
Tea and Substitutes to manage the limited supply they were
(19:14):
able to get their hands on, and that organization routed
most of the coffee to the military, which meant that
most civilian citizens had no access to coffee. So even
if the Melita Company had continued to make their metal filters,
people couldn't drink coffee, so there was no demand for them. Also,
no demand for the paper filters to use with them.
(19:38):
Paper was also in short supply, so making the filters
would have seemed both pointless and wasteful. Instead, the Melita
Company started to manufacture paper cartons to create a new
revenue stream. People still needed boxes, and this did manage
to sustain the family until the end of the war
when Hugo and Villi returned home. Once they did, really
(20:00):
became co owner of the business and the name switched
from m Bentz to Bence and sun ohg as coffee
became part of daily life in Germany again.
Speaker 3 (20:12):
After the war ended.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
The Benzes based a new hurdle, and that was imitators,
because people really liked this method of making coffee, and
as the market started to see more and more companies
pop up selling both metal filters and filter papers. The
Melina Company protected its identity on shelves by designing packaging
that would be easy for consumers to recognize as theirs
(20:36):
and they could tout it as the original and this
was the beginning of the company signature red and green packaging.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Which is still in use today.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
As the US was experiencing the economic crash of nineteen
twenty nine, which impacted the whole globe over the next
several decades, the Melita Company was expanding again. Demand had
grown consistently since they opened their Dresden factory and it
was time to move to a new facility. They moved
a substantial distance to the smaller town of Menden, which
(21:07):
is more than four hundred kilometers or about two hundred
and fifty miles northeast of Dresden. This was a massive undertaking,
but the Benches had found a former chocolate factory that
was really a perfect fit for what they needed. Additionally,
the city of Menden was eager to bring in new
industry and offered tax incentives to businesses that moved there,
(21:31):
all of the factory machinery had to be taken apart
and loaded onto train cars along with all the existing inventory,
and then everything had to be moved and reassembled once
it got to its destination. But the Benches couldn't afford
to shut down their entire operation for very long, so
this entire thing was done in four days. At the
(21:53):
end of that time they were up and running in
the new factory space. Fifty five of their employees moved
to Menden to stay there with the company. Melita headquarters
is still in Mindon today, and as their business grew,
the Benzes made decisions about the workforce and their factory
that were in some ways progressive, at least as we
(22:14):
perceived them, but they were also part of a nationwide
trend in the post World War One by Marb Republic.
The standard of living for workers improved in general in
the country during this time, although unemployment rates rose significantly,
and during this time benefits were introduced like unemployment insurance,
pension plans, and sick leave. At the Melida factory, workers
(22:37):
got a five day work week as well as thirty
days of leave a year, and the benches also gave
out Christmas bonuses to employees each year. Over time, there
were additional benefits added to the employee benefits package. They
started receiving anniversary bonuses and their own health insurance, and
the company retained a doctor and a dentist that employees
(22:59):
could see for free. In nineteen thirty eight, the Melita
Aid Fund was created as a mutual aid initiative for employees.
This all sounds great, but there is some spin doctoring
going on when this is discussed, because that fund and
some of those other benefits were implemented at a time
when some deeply problematic things were happening at the factory.
We're going to talk a little bit more about that
(23:20):
in a few moments. Melita Benz herself is often described
as being invested in the welfare of her employees and
wanting to promote the idea of quality of life throughout
the company. This is often attributed to her own background
of having been a mother and a housewife who then
became a businesswoman, meaning she recognized the need for balance
(23:41):
in her own life and tried to foster the same
in a workforce with a growing number of women. It
remains a little unclear to me how much of this
is an idealized characterization. Twenty four years after Melita Bentz
patented her invention, at the age of fifty nine, she
retired from the day to day running of the company
(24:01):
she had founded. Her husband, Hugo retired as well. The
company's ownership was transferred entirely to their sons in nineteen
thirty two. That was the same year that their younger son,
Horsebnz became co owner and the company's name was once
again changed to Melita Work. The Benz sons ran the
(24:22):
business from that point forward, although Melita was still involved
in the culture of the company. In nineteen thirty five,
the company redesigned their filtering system. Instead of metal filters,
they created porcelain ones that were all one piece, instead
of having a drip reservoir with a filter cup on
top of it. The design of the porcelain filter was
(24:44):
still such that it sits on top of a coffee cup,
though it functioned in exactly the same way, and it
actually looks almost just like a coffee cup, except that
the reservoir inside is an inverted conical shape, and to
fit that shape, the company produced and patent a new
paper filter. You probably know what these look like These
are the exact style of paper conical filter that many
(25:07):
drip coffee makers use today, and a lot of companies
produce porcelain and ceramic and even plastic filters in the
exact same style as this Malina redesigned from the nineteen thirties,
including the Melita Company. This type of single serving ceramic
filter has historically been more common in Europe than in
the US, but you can absolutely find them in the US.
(25:31):
As pour over coffee has grown in popularity, many coffee
connoisseurs agree with Melita Bentz that this is the superior
way to make coffee. The patent for that new filter
form was granted in December nineteen thirty seven, and the
ad campaign that went with it touted Melita Filters every
type of coffee. Filtered coffee tastes better. Under the leadership
(25:54):
of Villianhorst, the company also expanded out of beverages and
started to make sandwich paper as well.
Speaker 3 (26:01):
Coming up, we.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Will get into the Melita Company's collaboration with the Third Reich,
but before we do, we will pause to hear from
the sponsors that keep stuffy missed in history class.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Going The Second World.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
War also impacted the trajectory of the Melita factory as Melita,
without its namesake and her husband at the Helm, became
what was known as a national socialist model company, meaning
it stopped production of its filters and other products to
make supplies for the Wehrmacht, the Third Reichs military. As
(26:43):
early as nineteen thirty six, the company had started publishing
a newsletter for employees which contained a lot of Nazi propaganda.
Its earliest issue touted that the new publication would be
a quote faithful companion on our march into the future,
on our path to the new great and Beautiful Germany
of Adolf Hitler. Nazi Germany had requested that all companies
(27:05):
with more than five hundred employees produce internal newspapers like this.
Beginning in nineteen forty, Milita produced cookwaar like pots and
pans for the military, and then in nineteen forty one
manufacture shifted to things like ammunition belts. That same year,
the company was awarded what was called the Golden Flag
of the German Labor Front. This was an award that
(27:28):
companies had to elect to be considered for, so the
Malina Company opted in. This meant that for the year
following that award, the company's employees might enjoy some special
perks and benefits, but it would also be even more
closely overseen by the Nazi regime, and the company's production
goals were set higher.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
According to a paper.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
That analyzed the available company newsletters from this time, the company,
at the direction of the Third Reich, through the model
company system, offered team building activities and incentives to work hard,
like potential vacation trips, and they also set up a workshow.
This literally translates to factory share or work share, but
it has also been translated in a truer definition as
(28:13):
a work troop. It was like a little battalion that
was pushing Nazi ideology within the company. The employees that
were chosen to be in this group were responsible for
keeping everyone in line, and employees that were not in
the group were instructed to obey them.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
I will do a.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Brief caveat here. On this paper that I'm referencing is
written in German. I translated it through a couple of
different translators and had a friend that speaks German look
at the pieces that I was interested in. So just
FYI know that just in the interest of transparency. I
did not read this in English, but an issue of
the company paper from nineteen thirty eight also mentioned a
(28:52):
work women's group that was organized under the guiding principle
that quote, we work women want to fight and be
brave because we have only one will to serve our fewer.
So these are the same years that the company started
the mutual aid fund. At the same time, there were
other initiatives to assist the workers who needed help, like
(29:13):
the employees helped set up a company vegetable farm so
food could go to the workers who needed it. It's
not really clear how they assessed the idea of need
like who needed this enough to get it? But it
does seem as though all of it was really about
promoting the idea that all workers had to be loyal
(29:33):
to the company and its alignment with the German government.
During the same time these programs were being touted, the
editorials and the company paper warned employees not to shop
at Jewish owned businesses, listing all of the ones that
were blacklisted. It also included a lot of really horrifying
antisemitic commentary, including about children, and all of this was
(29:58):
done in accordance with guideline from the Nazi government, and
the result was that Melita continued to grow economically in
Nazi Germany. This doesn't seem to be a case where
company leadership was trying to save a flailing company by
cooperating with the Nazi government. According to that paper that
we're talking about here, written by German historian Kristen Cossack
(30:21):
in two thousand and five, Horst Bence had joined the
SS in nineteen thirty three, and he was largely in
charge of this newsletter, and many of the benefits that
the company was instituting in the late nineteen thirties seemed
to have been a way to make up for some
very low pay That was also part of the way
that Nazi Germany was running factories. Simultaneously, there were threats
(30:43):
of punishment, including taking away benefits if workers underperformed Kassack
notes quote the examined newspapers showed that most of Malita's
social benefits were initiated by the new Nazi social policy
or the model company competition. To be clear, the Melida
Company is not at all the only company that still
(31:05):
exists today and cooperated with the Nazi government.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
The list is so long and it.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
Includes companies like Audi, Siemens, BMW, Bayer, Coca Cola, Kodak, IBM, really.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
On and on and on.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Those are just examples. If you are thinking why didn't
they mention whatever, it's because there are many, many more.
We would be here for an hour if we started. Yeah,
that would be the whole podcast. Like those other companies.
After World War Two, the Melida Company faced the Reckoning
with its collaboration of the with the Nazi government. Over
(31:41):
the years, the company has acknowledged its part and at
one point also prepared a report on it stating, quote,
the role of the company during the Nazi era, as
well as the proximity of the company management to the
regime of the time, was presented in a scientific critical
manner and published in the content text of an extensive
company chronicle. So that is not a document that is
(32:05):
readily available on their website at this point. You have
to email the company to get a copy of it.
And it's something that Holly found out about too late
to make a request for it to be part of
this episode today. Yeah, it's in like a weird place
that I think is kind of a not actively maintained
part of their company site. Oh yeah, Like I think
(32:26):
I got to it through one of those backdoor things
where you do a search for a very specific term
and it turns up a link and you're like, where
is this in this Yeah, and that's where I found it.
So I don't even know if that request would work anymore.
But per the company's website quote, in two thousand, the
Malita Group joined the Foundation Initiative of the German Economy
(32:48):
for the Compensation of Forced Laborers. So in case you
did not know, a lot of companies used forced labor
in the later years of the war, people that were
prisoners of war. Some were very, very horrible, and it
was literally enslaved labor. I mean, it's all horrible. It
is unclear based on what information is readily available, if
(33:10):
that was the case at Malita. It seems likely given
their participation in that reparations foundation, but we don't have details.
That same page on the Malita site that mentions their
participation in this foundation states clearly their stance today, which
is quote, the Malita Group is actively committed to democratic
values and principles such as equal opportunities and freedom of expression.
(33:34):
Respect for human rights is a matter of course The
company rejects racism in any form and is clearly in
favor of equal rights for all people. Hugo Benz died
in nineteen forty six. Melita Benz died four years later
on June twenty ninth, nineteen fifty, at the age of
seventy seven. Their descendants have continued to be active in
(33:56):
the running of the company, and the company has grown
a lot. Today Melita has offices and production facilities around
the world, and today what used to be called the filter,
meaning the permanent device, they call a pourover. That's in
line with what people call that nowadays, the paper single
(34:17):
use item is now called the filter. They also sell
both of these things as well as coffee. It's estimated
that they manufacture more than fifty million coffee filters every day,
and a portrait of Melita Bentz, who started it all
in request for the perfect cup of coffee without a
big mouthful of grounds in it, still hangs in the
(34:38):
company headquarters. I have a listener mail and it is
nice and easy breezy because it's about cross stitch. I
love all the embroidery emails we've gotten. They make me
so happy in my dark little heart. People love embroidery.
I also fished a bunch of them out of spam
this morning.
Speaker 2 (34:55):
For some reason.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
I don't know why embroidery in particular went to the
junk folder, but it was all embroidery email. There's some
algorithms somewhere that's like, nobody emails as much about embroidery.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
This has to be garbage.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
No listen, bring it on, keep them coming. This from
our listener, Heather, who writes Hello, I just finished your
recent episode about the history of embroidery and found it
so interesting. As I have been an avid cross stitcher
for the last few years, I have found such a
supportive community of fellow stitchers online and it's really improved
my mental health. I think you're correct in that the
(35:30):
surge in popularity of granny hobbies has everything to do
with political unrest. It really has helped me cope with
the state of the world.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Lately.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
Attached or some photos of my recently finished to enjoy.
Heather makes beautiful, beautiful cross stitch gorgeous pieces. Some of
these are just the loveliest. One looks almost like a
haunted house, a little very beautiful Victorian house. That is
surrounded by autumnal colored flowers. It has dark birds on it.
(36:01):
I don't think they're ravens are crows because they have
a little red on their back, but I could be wrong.
There are some spiders. My favorite. It's just absolutely beautiful.
There is another that is book themed and is also
as cute as they come. It says book sweet Books,
and it has kiddies on it. It has what looks
(36:21):
like a cup of coffee or tea. So Jermaine to
today's episode, as well as a couple others that she
has sent, one that reads coffee because murder is wrong. Okay, listen,
that's correct. I love it, Heather, Thank you so much
for sharing these with me. They make me so happy
(36:42):
in my heart. And I love knowing that everybody agrees
that having I think you don't have to embroider.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Listen.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
The thing that she hit on that I think is
very important is that I feel like having any kind
of little creative hobby, whether you're super into it and
you do really, you know, big projects with a lot
of intensive work, or if it's just a little thing
where you buy like basic little kits of some kind,
whether that's embroidery or something else, just to give your
(37:12):
brain a little creative outlet when you are, you know,
in your wind down at night or as a break
during the day. I think it's so good for everybody's
mental health to engage in some kind of little creative
If you don't want to buy stuff, write yourself a
little poem, play with haikus, whatever it takes to keep
your mind soothed, happy, also energized. I find very energizing
(37:35):
to do creative things. I hope you're all doing it,
because we all need to take care of ourselves. There
are also so many affordable kits nowadays that have just
enough to do one.
Speaker 3 (37:45):
Of a project.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
A friend of mine got an assortment of them, you know,
kind of going through the clearance rack before having a
little party with everybody coming over, and we all sat
around and watched TV and did little crafts.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Super good.
Speaker 1 (38:01):
The best I love a craft party like a crafting bee,
is it will fix some stuff in you. I say,
there is nothing better than sitting down with friends and
just making stuff and laughing. And you know, whether you're
eating something delicious or having cocktails or coffee or whatever
you'd like, it's just good for the soul. So I
(38:21):
hope everybody is finding stuff like that for themselves during
this time. It's also a good thing. If you're a doer,
you're a if you're a natural social leader, you know,
don't be shy about starting initiatives like that at home.
They're very good for you among your friend group. Invite
a few people over. You never know what it could
lead to you. If you would like to write to
(38:43):
us and show us your embroidery, please do that. Pet
pictures also still always welcome. Anything else really that you
want to share with us. You can do that at
History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. If you have not
subscribed to the show and you would like to that
as easy as pie to do, you can do that
on the iheartrate you app or anywhere you listen to
your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
(39:09):
a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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