Some cool machining supplier images:
DDR ALTIN Ghost Sign. Altenburg, Germany. Jun 1993
Image by sludgegulper
It seems that VEB has already been written out from Textima. So perhaps it wasn’t a ghost sign at the time. The ALTIN firm was the nationalised Koehler sewing machine firm , originally established in Altenburg in 1871 together with Leopold Dietrich and FG Winselmann, before LO Dietrich went off to found his own company (marques Saxonia Vesta and Dietrich) In 1948, the two companies of Koehler and Dietrich were recombined as VEB Nähmaschinenwerke. From 1960 onwards, Altenburg, the major supplier of sewing machines behind the iron curtain, concentrated on industrial equipment and household sewing machines were made in Wittenberge near the BRD border. After 1990, a GmbH was formed to continue manufacturing Industrial sewing machines, but in the 21st century the industry had all but vanished.