Bergkristall was a tunnel complex dug into the hill above Sankt Georgen an der Gusen in upper Austria. The codename meant rock crystal. From 1944 it produced fuselages for the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter. The tunnels were dug by prisoners of Mauthausen, working out of the Gusen II satellite camp. Around twenty thousand of them died doing it.
The decision to put fighter production underground came after Allied bombing of the surface plants at Regensburg and Augsburg in 1943 and 1944. Albert Speer’s ministry, working with the SS and with the construction firms Polensky und Zöllner, Karl Fiebinger and others, picked the granite hill above Sankt Georgen because the rock was hard enough to need no concrete lining over much of the works. The first prisoners arrived from Mauthausen in early 1944. By the end of the year the workforce at Gusen II alone was over sixteen thousand men, kept underground for shifts of twelve hours, fed on watery soup and a slice of bread, sleeping in flooded barracks. Mortality at Gusen II was higher than at almost any other camp in the Reich system, including Auschwitz. The hospital block was a place where the dying were laid in piles to make room for the next intake.
The work itself was dangerous and skilled. Prisoners drilled, blasted, hauled rock, laid rail and assembled aircraft sub-sections. The main tunnels eventually ran to fifty kilometres. Production began in late 1944 and continued until the SS abandoned the site in May 1945. Around nine hundred and ninety Me 262 fuselages came out of Bergkristall before the end. Each one was bought with a price the company books did not record.
Messerschmitt AG was the customer. The company sent engineers and foremen to the tunnels. They worked alongside the SS and the civilian managers of the construction firms. They knew exactly who was doing the work and how. The directors signed the contracts and took the payments. After the war Willy Messerschmitt himself was held briefly by the Allies, released, and went back into business. The company became part of MBB, then EADS, then Airbus. The tunnels at Sankt Georgen were sealed and largely forgotten. Most of them are still there. The town has a memorial. The Austrian government for decades preferred not to look.
The mass grave at Gusen holds the men who built the tunnels. The aircraft they built never decided the war. The Me 262 was a remarkable machine but there were never enough of them, the pilots were undertrained, and the fuel was running out. The work was pointless even on the regime’s own terms. The men were worked to death anyway.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards