In 1994, the HADES project was officially approved to be part of the GSI scientific program. The High Acceptance Di-Electron Spectrometer is a detector system providing unprecedented combined data on dilepton and hadronic final states in nuclear reactions in the few GeV energy regime. This capability allows for a broad physics program including the study of virtual photon emission, the spectroscopy of baryon resonances, near-threshold strangeness production and the investigation of bulk properties and particle flow in relativistic heavy-ion reactions. For understanding such complex collisions the underlying processes have been studied in elementary π- + p, p + p, d + p and π-, p + A reactions. After 25 years a personal review of the physics results obtained with HADES and an outlook on future perspectives will be given.
At the Nachkolloquium: short film Art Cocktail for HADES Collaboration by Olga Pechenova.