European countries. On 8 May 1945, the last day of the war, the Lange headquarter and main production building was almost completely destroyed in a Soviet air raid. The Glashütte watch companies were nationalized in 1948. At the time, Lange was working on a new movement: Caliber 28, a wristwatch format of the caliber 48. It went into production in 1949 as the last movement developed by A. Lange & Söhne. Watches from this period were signed “Lange VEB” (Volkseigener Betrieb - publicly owned enterprise). When the seized watch companies were merged in 1951 to form VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe, the Lange name disappeared from the dials. Recent development On 7 December 1990, following German reunification, Walter Lange and Günter Blümlein, a watch industry executive, restored the company as Lange Uhren GmbH, with the assistance of several Swiss watch manufacturers, including IWC and Jaeger-LeCoultre. It was re-established on the exact date 145 years after Walter's great-grandfather Ferdinand Adolph Lange founded the original company. The new company re-registered A. Lange & Söhne as its trademark, and was again based in Glashütte. It presented its first range of wristwatches in 1994. Since 2000, A. Lange & Söhne has been a member of the Richemont group, and only manufactured around five thousand watches every year. In 2017, Walter Lange died at age 92. Pronunciation and spelling A. Lange & Söhne is approximately pronounced "ah LAHNG-eh unt ZUR-neh" (by an English speaker who doesn't pronounce their R's). Where the Umlaut "ö" is not available, it is rendered as a digraph by German convention ("Soehne"), but often as "Sohne" internationally (even though that would imply a different pronunciation in German). Motto and slogan One of A. Lange & Söhne's company slogans is "State-of-the-art Tradition". In addition, a notable personal motto of Walter Lange is "Never Stand Still". Watch manufacturing All A. Lange & Söhne watches contain mechanical rather than quartz movements, and, with the exception of a very few special edition watches and the Odysseus model, Lange watch cases are made of yellow gold, rose gold, white gold, or platinum. Lange's movements are developed, produced, and assembled by Lange itself. In addition to time-only watches, both manually wound and automatic, Lange is known for its complicated watches, including chronographs and split-seconds chronographs, and perpetual calendars. Design and finishing The design philosophy of A. Lange & Söhne was established in 1990 when the company was re-established, and