Ural-ZIS
 

I believe that the Soviets pulled down the Brandenburg-am-Havel factory building in 1948, possibly a year later. I gather that equipment was spread around the truck-building factories but not actually used to produce a definitive Blitz clone.

The trains full of Olympia assembly equipment were waved through by the US Army in March 1946 I believe, and that left Russelsheim with the pre-war Olympia equipment. As you know GM re-acquired the Russelsheim Plant in late 1948 from the US commission and they then went into production with a modified Kadett. The post-war War Damage claims by GM included the loss of the Kadett and Blitz equipment to the Soviets and explained what happened.

It is often rather difficult to get the correct information form Russian sources. Even today, many articles and books use to gather the information from old sources from the Soviet era. And there one would hardly find anything about capturing the assembly lines in Germany. To illustrate it, see the two pictures below. The firs shows the car mentioned as KIM-10-50 from 1946 (!). I am not familiar with passenger Opels but the KIM looks very Opel-like to me.

The second picture shows Moskvich 400/407 which is definitely the captured Opel.

Clone?
 

The Moskvich was a duplicate of the Olympia Oly.38, as was the 1939 Renault Juvaquatre, which cost Louis Renault's company plenty when they were sued!

Here is the Opel Kadett [in English, of course meaning Cadet...which was also a Vauxhall model name, though certain markets used "Opel Cadet"] of 1936-7, the Model 11234:

Then:
 

this is the 1938-on Kadett Model KJ38 (Standard) or K38 (Master/Special) in English market terms..Kadett Normal and Spezial in Deutsch. Compare the Kadett with its Soviet reproduction. However the 1940 Model Kadetts and Olympias that were supposed to go into production in February 1940 (of which I have photos of prototypes) clearly escaped the seizures. Probably because they had been fire-damaged by the USAAF as my friend mentioned.

The 1939 Model Kadetts went out of production in February 1940, as they had little export value, and little staff car use I suppose but Olympia Oly.38 assembly continued to November. However I gather that the Wehrmacht used both pre-war and wartime Opel cars, and pre-war Blitz trucks so in the end they used whatever they could get their hands on, including those Opels exported to countries later occupied by the Germans.

Very quickly:
The Kim vehicles seem, from my meager resources, to have been made only in the 1940ish time frame. They are described as an indigenous design but have some obvious Opel styling cues.
There was no Opel I have ever seen that looked just exactly like a Kim. Particularly the windscreen although the faired in main headlamps are an Opel trademark.

As to the Renault, I attach a photo here of one such and you can see that it also has strong Opel styling cues. I was not aware, David, that Opel sued Renault. Is there a story out there about this???
Bill

Renault 8 hp
 

The Pressed Steel Company Limited who produced Morris and then in 1938 Vauxhall bodies for the J-type saloons/sedans, had a Budd license, and so did Citroen. However Renault didn't!

One explanation for a possible Soviet copy is that Opels, as well as Buicks and Chevrolets, were assembled and sold by Lilpop Rau i. Loewenstein in Warszawa, as what we would now call "dealer-assemblers" and Lilpop exported cars and trucks around eastern Europe. Indeed a 1939 Chevrolet has turned up in Kazakhstan! Although James D Mooney had gone to Russia in 1929 to try and do a deal (which Ford's succeeded in concluding) I know of no formal license/licence agreement between GM and any Soviet state-owned factories. The Warsaw factory was seized by the Germans and became a Hermann Goering Werke munitions plant. A number of 1939 Chevrolets assembled by Lilpop Rau i. Loewenstein were supplied to the Polish forces, and armoured versions are known.