A long tradition
The history of the manufacturer most famous as VEB Robur-Werke Zittau is much richer, dating back to 1888, when Karl Gustav Hiller founded a company for the production of textile machines. Two years later, however, the company, located in the Saxon city of Žitava on the German-Czech-Polish border, reoriented itself to the production of bicycles, namely a license from the English company Rover Safety Bicycles. The company first imported them, but gradually began to improve them and from 1894 sell them under its own name, Phänomen-Rover.
As was the case with these companies at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Hiller’s company gradually expanded and expanded the production portfolio to include motorcycles, tricycles and finally cars. The company gradually also produced Granit motorcycles, tricycles and small trucks. The engines were traditionally in-house, air-cooled.
After the Second World War raged, the company, which meanwhile was stuck deep behind the Iron Curtain, could not recover for a long time, and it was only in 1955 that the production of new trucks was ready – Phänoman Granit cars were assembled in Zittau ten years after the end of the war, when the factory has long since been nationalized.
After modifications to the drive, driver’s cabin and other aggregates of the Granit vehicle, the Garant type was created in 1956, of which more than 50,000 examples were produced by 1961 and were also widely exported to Czechoslovakia. The most common variants were a flatbed, a box car, an ambulance, a bus, or a chassis for special superstructures.
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