Volkswagen was a creation of the Nazi state. Hitler announced the Kraft durch Freude Wagen in 1937; the plant at Fallersleben, later renamed Wolfsburg, was funded through the German Labour Front using deductions from workers’ wages. Ferdinand Porsche ran the project. By September 1939, when war began, the factory had built almost no civilian cars. It was converted to military production and, from 1942 onwards, ran increasingly on forced labour. By 1944 around two thirds of the workforce were unfree.
The workforce
The forced workers at Volkswagenwerk came from several sources: Soviet civilians seized in round-ups in occupied territory, Polish forced workers, Italian Military Internees following Italy’s September 1943 surrender, French and Belgian conscripts under the Service du Travail Obligatoire, and concentration camp prisoners assigned from Neuengamme. The plant operated several satellite camps of its own. Porsche signed the requisitions for prisoner labour from Neuengamme personally. Surviving correspondence shows plant managers complaining that particular consignments from the camp were too weak to be useful and requesting stronger replacements.
Conditions for the forced workers varied by category. Soviet civilians and concentration camp prisoners faced the worst treatment: inadequate food, minimal shelter, no medical care, and exposure to the same industrial accidents as workers with no recourse to compensation or treatment. Italian Military Internees, who had a notional prisoner of war status, were treated somewhat better, though they too were coerced into work they had not agreed to.
The children’s home at Ruhen
Among the most documented aspects of the Volkswagen forced labour programme is the fate of children born to female workers. The company ran a home at Rühen, later a second facility at Laagberg and then Rabenroda, where infants of forced labourers were taken from their mothers. The official purpose was childcare. The actual function was the disposal of infants whose mothers were required for work. Hundreds of children died at these facilities. They are buried in the small cemetery at Rühen. The deaths were recorded in company files as resulting from feeding weakness and infection. The mothers had been worked through their pregnancies and were unable to breastfeed adequately; the infants were given inadequate substitute feeding and died.
After the war
The British occupation authorities restarted civilian production of the Beetle at Wolfsburg in 1945 and appointed a British officer, Major Ivan Hirst, to manage the plant. Heinrich Nordhoff, who had worked in the German automotive industry under the Reich, became managing director in 1948 and ran Volkswagen until 1968. Series production of the civilian car had not in fact begun until 27 December 1945, under British military trusteeship; by the end of that year 1,785 cars had been built, delivered to the occupying forces and the postal service. The 336,000 Germans who had paid into the wartime savings scheme never received a car. The postwar economic recovery was built substantially on the continuity of management and workforce from the wartime operation.
For several decades the company said little about its wartime record. The first serious internal reckoning came when Volkswagen commissioned the historians Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger to write a full history of the wartime plant. Their book Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich, published in 1996, ran to more than a thousand pages. Volkswagen accepted the findings publicly and paid into the Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft compensation fund, established in 1998 under pressure from American class action suits. The fund paid small sums to surviving forced labourers; by the time payments were made, most of those who had worked at Wolfsburg during the war were dead.
The company funded a permanent memorial at the Wolfsburg plant and a place of remembrance at the Rühen cemetery. Grieger, who had become the company’s in-house historian after the Mommsen commission, was forced out in 2016 after criticising an exhibition that minimised the use of forced labour at Volkswagen’s Brazilian subsidiary during the military dictatorship period.
See also
Sources
- Hans Mommsen and Manfred Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich, ECON Verlag, 1996
- Andrea Eckhardt and Manfred Grieger, Volkswagen Chronik, Volkswagen AG, 2008
- Neil Gregor, Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich, Yale University Press, 1998 (comparative context)
- Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft Foundation, Annual Reports, EVZ, 2000-2007
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Forced Labor, encyclopedia.ushmm.org