Kramer

The history of Kramer

Kramer built tractors for nearly fifty years and then stopped, because it had accidentally become a construction machinery firm.

The brothers Emil, Hans and Karl Kramer founded the Maschinenfabrik Gebrüder Kramer in 1925 at Gutmadingen on the Danube, and showed their first small tractor with a 4 hp petrol engine the same year. It was developed further, presented successfully at an agricultural show in 1928, and then went into series production, with 8 hp engines as well.

A four-wheel mower sold as a small tractor, the A 31, arrived in the early 1930s. The GL series followed in 1933 with economical Güldner engines, and large-series assembly-line production began in 1934. The K 18 of 1936 was the model that set the direction, and its name — Allesschaffer, the do-it-all — was later given to others. Ten thousand Kramer tractors had been delivered by 1940. The war cut diesel tractor production and then stopped it in 1942, replaced by the K 25 with a wood-gas generator; production restarted at the end of 1945 with the pre-war K 12 and K 18.

Part of production moved to Überlingen on Lake Constance in 1952. By 1957 the range ran to nine tractor types, built at both Gutmadingen and Überlingen, and the first letter of a tractor's chassis number tells you which works it came from. Industrial and construction machinery started in 1957/58. In 1959 the head office moved to Überlingen, and the KS 510 became the first German wheel loader with four-wheel drive.

By the late 1960s the construction machinery mattered more to the business than the tractors did, and when the 14 series introduced in 1970 sold poorly the decision followed: standard tractor production ended in 1973 so the firm could concentrate on construction equipment. A good 100,000 Kramer tractors of all types had been built by then. One more followed in 1974 — the all-wheel-drive system tractor 1014, a two-way trac for working forwards and in reverse, for agriculture and forestry — and it ran until July 1980. The Gutmadingen works was given up afterwards.

As a pure construction machinery maker Kramer did well, particularly with all-wheel steering on compact wheel loaders. Since 2007 Kramer-Werke GmbH and the KramerAllrad brand have belonged to the listed Wacker Neuson group, and production and the head office moved from Überlingen to Pfullendorf in 2008.

It came back to agriculture sideways. From 2005 Kramer built telehandlers that were sold as Wacker Neuson or KramerAllrad depending on the market — and worldwide, for farming, under the Claas name as the Scorpion range. That arrangement ended in 2017, after which John Deere and Kramer looked to a joint distribution arrangement for agricultural loaders.

Written from Traktorenlexikon: Kramer, Wikibooks, CC BY-SA 4.0 · retrieved 2026-09-14. Our words, not the source's.