[3] The first German patent was granted on 1 July 1877 for a "method for producing a red ultramarine colour", invented by Johannes Zeltner.

In 1905, the Patent Office moved into premises designed by the architects Solf and Wichards on the corner of Gitschiner Straße and Lindenstraße in Kreuzberg, with a characteristic 243-metre front on the elevated highway.

Almost as soon as they came into power, the Nazis moved to throw the Jews out of the German Patent Offices, with only a few exceptions for those who had served at the front during World War I or who had lost a parent or son in fighting.

One of Adolf Hitler’s chauffeurs, Anton Loibl, invented the idea of attaching small pieces of glass to the pedals of bicycles, that would reflect the lights of approaching cars.

Loibl’s sailed through, and in 1938 Heinrich Himmler used his supreme authority as head of the German police to pass a new traffic law.

This required all German bicycles to be equipped with Loibl’s reflective pedal… in 1938 alone, the SS received a tidy 77,740 reichsmarks from the bicycle pedal proceeds.”[9] In the last months of the war, many of the technical records of the German Patent Office were widely dispersed throughout Germany to preserve them from the Allied firebombing of Berlin.

The technical library of 300,000 volumes and the records of the secret patents were moved to Heringen, near Kassel, and 3,000 valuable reference books were sent through Czechoslovakia to Bavaria.

The Patent Office building in Berlin was about one-third destroyed by a heavy bombing attack on 5 February 1945.

However, the files of the secret applications and patents had been burned upon orders of the German government shortly before the arrival of the US troops… The technical library has been moved from the potash mine in Heringen and is again available to the public.

[12] Article II of this Act on 31 August 1951 set aside all Allied Control Council Law but in fact this occurred only on 12 September 1990 with the "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany".

[22] In 1984, the DPMA opened an "inventor's gallery", as "an incentive for all innovative forces to express themselves more, and a signal to the insurance companies to promote them long term."

It was enlarged in 1987 and again in 1999 and now covers 17 German inventors:[23] Béla Barényi, Gerd Binnig, Ludwig Bölkow, Walter Bruch, Jürgen Dethloff, Artur Fischer, Rudolf Hell, Heinz Lindenmeier, Hermann Oberth, Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain, Oskar-Erich Peter, Hans-Jürgen Quadbeck-Seeger, Ernst Ruska, Hans Sauer, Felix Wankel, Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, Konrad Zuse