M202B

The M 202 belongs to a side of the company that rarely reaches the marque histories: the stationary and marine engine business run first out of Mannheim and later from the Berlin-Marienfelde works, whose products were sold to sawmills, waterworks, ships and small power plants rather than to drivers. It is a two-cylinder of roughly 6.5 liters, rated for continuous output rather than peak — surviving plates quote 48 PS at 1,200 rpm, another 55 — started on glow plugs and, in later installations, wired for 24 volts.

Dating one is awkward. A spare-parts list for the M 202 was issued in 1939 with Mannheim named as the plant; operating manuals for the B version were still in circulation in the early 1960s, by which time they carried Marienfelde. Machines like this were bought to do one job for decades and then be forgotten, which is roughly what happened: one M 202 B was recovered in 2005 from the crawl space beneath a Black Forest sawmill, where it had driven a 50 kVA synchronous generator through a clutch and a flat belt, and it restarted after two turns of the crankshaft.