1945-1964

Business operations were rather restricted due to Berlin being a divided city and only local business transactions could be handled from the Berlin-Britz facility. The real estate in the Soviet occupation zone had been expropriated as community property. The network of service stations outside West Berlin was later absorbed by the German Democratic Republic's state-owned "Minol" oil company.

Only 5 employees were brave enough to risk a new start in West Germany in 1948 when the company headquarters was moved from Berlin to Mülheim. Brenntag was still the personal property of the Stinnes family, and in addition to focusing on chemicals and petroleum products, they purchased several shipping operations. As other major corporations of the time, they focused on acquiring as many of the links in the value-added chain as possible.

Brenntag gradually expanded its warehousing organization and product lines throughout the 1950s by adding extensive lines of solvents, inorganic and organic chemicals, plastics, resins and specialty chemicals, thereby earning a spot for itself in the ranks of nationwide chemical distributors. The German chemical industry was unable to keep up with buyers' demands for many raw materials, which is why imports also became extremely important.

Hugo Stinnes, Jr. and Otto Stinnes and his family divided up the family-owned companies in 1952. Brenntag passed to Otto Stinnes, as did ownership of the Stinnes Bank.

A dramatic chapter in Brenntag's corporate history began on a Sunday evening in October 1963, when Otto Stinnes notified Brenntag's managing directors that the Stinnes Bank would not be opening its doors for business the following morning due to acute liquidity problems.