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This concern, Germany’s largest manufacturer and marketer of tobacco products, was founded in 1910 by Bernhard Reemtsma, a tobacco merchant in the city of Erfurt. In the wake of the Great War the firm introduced mechanisation to the manufacture of cigarettes and concentrated on the mass market at home and abroad. In 1923 the headquarters of the firm were transferred to Hamburg-Altona and under the leadership of the son of the founder, Philipp F. Reemtsma the firm aggressively expanded its production and marketing base through the acquisition of competing cigarette firms – in the five year period between 1924 and 1929 the firm purchased and absorbed the factories of Manoli (Berlin), Büssum (in the Netherlands), Josetti (Berlin), Jasmati (Dresden), Batschari (Baden-Baden), Delta (Dresden), Garbáty (Berlin), Constantin (Hannover) and Yenidze (Dresden). In 1935 it acquired its largest competitor, Haus Neuerberg, through an exchange of shares.

By the middle 1930s the firm had secured more than sixty percent of the German domestic cigarette market and was active in the European and Levantine export markets. To bolster its position it had reached strategic partnerships with both the Lorillard Tobacco Company of the United States and the British American Tobacco Company of Great Britain, and had taken a significant shareholding in the firm of Heyligenstaedt und Compagnie Werkzeug Maschinenfabrik GmbH, of Gießen, which, among other things, was Germany’s leading manufacturer of cigarette-making machinery.

While the history of match-making in Austria dates to the middle of the Nineteenth Century this enterprise was the creation of Daniel and Simon Fürths, owners of a match factory in Schüttenhofen in Bohemia. In 1903 the brothers brought about the amalgamation of several existing match factories then operating in the Hapsburg lands, including factories located in Strakonitz (Bohemia), Stainz–Stallhof, Deutschlandsberg and Linz. In 1914 the firm acquired the Voith factory in Sankt Pölten.

Following the Great War the factories at Schüttenhofen and Strakonitz were separated and placed under the control of a Czechoslovakian firm in which the Fürths retained a quarter-share interest.

The history of the firm traces itself to 1813, when the merchant Nicolaus Wilkens opened a tobacco business in the city of Bremen, rapidly followed by a tobacco factory in Burgdamm bei Bremen, where cigarettes were manufactured. He was joined in the business by Heinrich Johannes in 1837, at which time the firm was known as Wilkens und Johannes. In 1878 the heirs of the original partners were bought out by Martin Brinkmann, who operated the business under his own name. The firm continued to prosper and by 1900 had acquired tobacco and cigarette factories in Treffurt and Heidelberg; in 1910 it built a new factory at Woltmershausen. The firm was converted into a corporation in 1929, when its present corporate style was adopted. At the time it was one of Europe’s largest tobacco combines.

In the last decade the firm has concentrated on the manufacture and sale of cigarettes both in the home market and for export.

Theodor Grimm established in 1849 a factory in Nordhausen a factory for the production of tobacco products – cigars, pipe tobacco, chewing tobacco and snuff. It rapidly came to specialise in the manufacture of chewing tobacco. In 1858 Grimm entered into partnership with Adolf Triepel to expand his business. In the years prior to the Great War the firm grew to employ more than 1,800 workers, and became one of the largest manufacturers of chewing tobacco in Europe. The Nordhausen factory alone was capable of manufacturing more than sixty-five million packages of chewing tobacco annually.

In 1930 a branch factory was established in Unterrieden an der Werra, in northern Hesse.

This tobacco firm was founded in 1871 by the entrepreneur Jules Schaller in Straßburg, and marketed its products under the names Roth-Händle and Reval. In 1920 the factory relocated to Lahr in the Schwarzwald. By the 1930s the firm had come under the control of the Adler and Oppenheimer families, owners of the well known leathergoods manufacturer Adler und Oppenheimer. Its products feature dark tobacco and are devoid of flavor additives, with the result that its brands are marketed as "all natural" products.