Probably no other country on earth has ever been as dependent on a single fossil fuel as the GDR was on its domestic lignite. In the 1980s, this raw material provided more than 80 percent of the country’s primary energy. In 1987, 310.89 million tons of raw brown coal were extracted, accounting for 29 percent of global production. Resource extraction took place largely in fully mechanised, large-scale, opencast mines, which devastated between 1,100 (1951) and 3,700 hectares (1986/88) of land annually. To extract the coal, the GDR required mining equipment, which it manufactured itself, primarily in Köthen, Lauchhammer, Leipzig, Magdeburg and Zeitz.

Bucket-chain excavators are a type of conveying machine; strictly speaking, they are trough-chain conveyors, a subcategory of continuous conveyors, since the conveying process can run without interruption. To this day, they are used in numerous kinds of opencast mining (surface mining), such as gravel pits, but also in ore mining, because they provide a significantly higher degree of mechanisation and thus greater cost-effectiveness than in underground mining. This is the main reason why Germany ceased hard coal production as early as 2018, but is not expected to phase out lignite mining until 2038.

The DHM model was most likely built by apprentices as a graduation project to demonstrate the excavator at trade fairs. Thanks to its several motors and a control panel, it is fully functional. To prevent the numerous motors – each of the six tracks, for example, has its own small electric motor – from operating in different directions, their controls were linked together on the control panel. The control panel itself is cube-shaped with a ca. 50 cm edge length. Two small figurines were even placed inside the control stations. The presentation of opencast mining technology at trade fairs was aimed primarily at exporters rather than at domestic customers. The machines for the domestic lignite industry was procured centrally within the framework of the planned economy, according to state priorities. The mining operators had little influence on the selection process. Overall, the GDR became a world leader in excavator manufacturing under the umbrella of the VEB Schwermaschinenbaukombinat TAKRAF (the acronym stands for Tagebau-Ausrüstung, Krane and Förderanlagen – opencast equipment, cranes and conveyors). In the process, the GDR became the world’s leading exporter of opencast mining equipment. Today, TAKRAF GmbH still manufactures machines in Lauchhammer and Leipzig. Maschinenfabrik Magdeburg-Buckau GmbH, however, did not survive the structural upheaval and was liquidated on 1 January 1995, before finally being struck off the commercial register on 16 August 1996. This brought to an end, after 130 years, to the history of the long-established site in Magdeburg, of which around 90 years were spent manufacturing large-scale opencast mining equipment. However, Förderanlagen Magdeburg (FAM), a company that manufactures conveyor systems for the mining industry, continues to operate to this day. The model of the ER 700, however, had already found its way into the East German Museum für Deutsche Geschichte (MfDG) while the company was still in the GDR. Following the transfer of the GDR museum to the DHM after 1990, the excavator found its way into our collection and thus into the exhibition “Nature and German History”.