The last decades (1914–1945)
After the outbreak of World War I, in 1915 the factory, along with most of the staff (roughly 2000 workers in 1914), was evacuated to Kremenchug by tsarist authorities. There the equipment of the factory was captured by the Reds in the course of the Russian Civil War and only a small part was brought back to Warsaw after the Polish-Soviet War and the Peace of Riga. The factory in Warsaw was nevertheless rebuilt and continued to prosper as one of principal industrial centres of the country. Between 1921 and 1931 the factory was modernised and further expanded, extending the line of products by addition of internal combustion engines. The Lilpop factory produced train engines, railway and tramway cars, bus bodies, lorry undercarriages (in cooperation with Hanomag), water turbines, industrial washing machines, rotodynamic pumps and many other products.
In 1925 Lilpop factory introduced the Lilpop C electric tram, a reverse-engineered and slightly improved version of the ageing Typ A tram by a German consortium including Van der Zyper & Charlier, Siemens-Schuckert, MAN and Falkenried companies. While based on a tram introduced 20 years before, the C type (bought in small numbers by the city of Warsaw) became the first in a long line of modern trams based on it, starting with Lilpop I (1927), Lilpop II and Lilpop LRL (1929), Lilpop G (1932) and Lilpop III (1939). The trams were in use in Łódź until 1973, some were also bought by other cities.
In 1936 Lilpop also entered the automotive industry. In the early 1930s the state-owned Państwowe Zakłady Inżynieryjne (PZInż) holding had a virtual state-imposed monopoly on assembling cars. The monopoly was lifted in 1936 and Lilpop immediately signed a contract with General Motors and Opel to assemble cars in their Warsaw and Lublin factories. The decision to lift the monopoly led to entire leadership of PZInż resigning their positions.
Car production at Lilpop started less than a year later, with a large portfolio of locally assembled cars. Among them were passenger cars of several brands: Buick (41 and 90), Chevrolet (Master, Imperial, and Sedan Taxi), Opel (P4, Kadett, and Olimpia). In addition, the company offered a number of utility cars and lorries, including Chevrolet's 112 van, 121, 131 and 157 truck, and 183 bus. Between the world wars, Poland was primarily an agricultural country, with an underdeveloped road network and high luxury taxes on cars. Because of that the overall volume of production remained low, with roughly 7000 cars and lorries assembled in Poland during 1938-1939. Most of these were assembled by Lilpop.
In 1938 the factory had 3900 workers. The same year the management started construction of a new car factory in Lublin that was to be completed in 1940 and was to take over the automotive part of the production. However, the war started before it could be completed.
During World War II the factory was taken over by Germany and assigned to Reichswerke Hermann Göring and continued the production, this time for the Wehrmacht. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out in 1944, the machinery was dismantled and sent to Germany, along with most of the workers. Perhaps the single best-known car produced by LRL was a Chevrolet 157 3-ton truck named Kubuś, converted to an improvised armoured personnel carrier during the uprising. After the uprising the factory was levelled with explosives by German troops, along with rest of the city. Only the office buildings survived the war.
