About the company
BALLISTOL has been tried and tested since 1904 and remains unrivalled. It is still made today to the original formula. BALLISTOL has been produced in Germany for more than four generations and is sold worldwide. Originally developed as a gun oil for the Imperial Army, it soon became a valued household remedy in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Millions of consumers have experimented with BALLISTOL and found surprising new uses for it, even extending to use on people and animals. In 1874, Friedrich Wilhelm Klever, a lawyer with business interests, founded the 'Chemische Fabrik F.W. KLEVER' in Cologne. He began producing coal-based oils and greases and bought a mine in order to be independent of raw material supplies. Around the turn of the century, the Imperial Army was looking for an all-round oil that would care for and preserve not only the metal parts of the weapons but also the wooden stocks and the leather equipment. At the same time, it had to serve soldiers as a wound oil for injuries, cracks and abrasions. The son of the company founder, Dr Helmut Klever, then a lecturer in chemistry at the Technical University in Karlsruhe, succeeded in 1904 in formulating a special oil, which he named after the word ballistics and the Latin oleum for oil: BALLISTOL. It soon became known as a "miracle oil" with surprising properties and was used in the German Army from 1905 to 1945. BALLISTOL was also scheduled for introduction in the US Army in 1914, but unfortunately this never happened due to the outbreak of the First World War. During the Second World War, the company headquarters in Cologne was completely destroyed and the plant in Krefeld badly damaged. Only the building in Leverkusen came through this period unscathed, and business continued there from 1947 to 1977. After the death of Dr Helmut Klever, the qualified chemist Dr Heinrich Zettler joined the company in 1971 and became managing director in 1973. A local government reform in the city of Leverkusen forced the company to look for a new site, which led to its relocation to Aham in Lower Bavaria in 1977. Since then, BALLISTOL and many other products have been produced there and distributed worldwide. In 1990, Dr Heinrich Zettler took over F.W. KLEVER GmbH. Through his work, the product range was greatly expanded and new target groups were won. In 2006, management passed to his sons Dr Christian and Andreas Zettler, under whose leadership production and sales were expanded further in the years that followed. A dedicated field sales force was built up and other well-known brands were integrated. The company currently employs 70 people and is expanding its storage and production capacities.
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