The van was built in a new factory on the site of the former plant of the Framo (car) company in Karl-Marx-Stadt, the old factory having been crated up and shipped to the Soviet Union as part of a larger war reparations package in the late 1940s. The business had subsequently been nationalized by the GDR government. Karl-Marx-Stadt, named in 1953, recovered its former name, Chemnitz, only in 1990, following German reunification. Altogether 175,740 B1000s and 1,961 B1000/1s were built.