Bayerische Motoren Werke (BMW) was the Munich aero-engine and motorcycle manufacturer that became, during the war, one of the largest users of concentration camp slave labour in the German aviation industry. BMW operated production sites at Munich-Allach, Eisenach, and several underground dispersal facilities. The company employed around 50,000 forced and slave labourers across its plants between 1940 and 1945. The Munich-Allach plant ran an SS satellite camp of Dachau on its premises, where prisoners worked on aero-engine production. Around 1,800 of the Allach prisoners are estimated to have died of work conditions, hunger and reprisal killings.
The Allach plant
The BMW aero-engine plant at Munich-Allach, north of the city, opened a satellite labour camp on its grounds in March 1943, formally a sub-camp of Dachau. The camp held around 3,000 prisoners at its peak in 1944, working twelve-hour shifts on aero-engine assembly lines producing the BMW 801 fourteen-cylinder radial that powered most German Luftwaffe single-engine fighters and ground-attack aircraft of the period. The prisoners were Polish, Soviet, French, Hungarian Jewish, and other categories. The conditions were lethal but less so than at the eastern killing camps; the BMW management depended on the prisoners being able to perform skilled assembly work, which required a level of nutrition and health above bare subsistence.
The Allach BMW management cooperated with the SS in the disciplinary regime of the camp. Prisoners who fell behind on the assembly line were reported to the SS for punishment. The punishment ranged from ration cuts and physical beatings up to return to Dachau and eventual deportation to the killing camps. The BMW civilian managers were aware of the consequences of their reports.
The wider production network
BMW expanded its production through the war into a network of sites across Bavaria and Thuringia. The Eisenach plant in central Germany used Soviet POW slave labour. From 1944 BMW participated in the dispersal of aviation production into underground sites to escape Allied bombing. The largest BMW underground project was the Mittelbau-Dora related Echo facility at Kahla in Thuringia, where BMW jet engine production for the new Me 262 was relocated. The conditions at the underground dispersal sites were severely lethal; the Mittelbau-Dora system as a whole killed around 20,000 of its 60,000 prisoners.
The Quandt family
The principal BMW shareholder family during the war was, and remains, the Quandt family. Günther Quandt and his son Herbert Quandt held controlling stakes in BMW, in the Accumulatoren-Fabrik AG (later Varta) battery company, and in the Deutsche Waffen- und Munitionsfabriken (DWM) weapons manufacturer. The Quandt family’s wartime conduct was investigated in detail by the documentary Das Schweigen der Quandts (The Silence of the Quandts) of 2007, which prompted the family to commission an independent academic study by historian Joachim Scholtyseck. The Scholtyseck report, published in 2011, concluded that Günther and Herbert Quandt had been actively involved in the wartime slave-labour operations of their companies and had profited substantially. The Quandt family acknowledged the report’s findings and publicly expressed regret, though they declined to make individual reparations beyond the corporate contributions to the 2000 compensation fund.
The Goebbels marriage
One striking biographical detail of the Quandt connection is that Magda Quandt, Günther’s former wife, married Joseph Goebbels in 1931 and remained the Reich propaganda minister’s wife until both committed suicide with their six children in the Berlin bunker on 1 May 1945. Harald Quandt, Magda’s son by Günther and the only Quandt-family stepchild of Goebbels, survived the war and inherited the Quandt industrial holdings jointly with his half-brother Herbert. The detail does not establish corporate culpability but it situates the BMW shareholding family at the centre of the Nazi political establishment.
The post-war
BMW survived the war heavily damaged by Allied bombing, with most of its main plants destroyed. The Munich-Allach plant was occupied by the US Army; the Eisenach plant was in the Soviet zone and lost to the company. The company recovered slowly through the late 1940s and early 1950s, returning to substantial profitability from the late 1950s. The Quandt family acquired control in 1959, saving the company from a near-bankruptcy that had been about to lead to its takeover by Daimler-Benz. The post-war BMW expansion is the foundation of the company’s current global automotive position.
BMW contributed to the 2000 German industry compensation fund for slave labour. The company’s official corporate history acknowledges its wartime use of slave labour and the operation of the Allach satellite camp. The 2011 Scholtyseck report on the Quandt family is the principal academic treatment of the BMW wartime record.
What it was
BMW is the case of the German industrial company whose wartime expansion depended on slave labour, whose owning family was at the centre of the Nazi political establishment, and whose post-war recovery and global success have been built on a corporate continuity with the wartime company. The company has acknowledged the wartime record more fully than several of its competitors. The acknowledgement does not unwind the work that was done; it puts the work on the historical record in a way that allows the company’s present customers and employees to know what they are dealing with.
See also
Sources
- Joachim Scholtyseck, Der Aufstieg der Quandts: Eine deutsche Unternehmerdynastie, Beck, 2011
- Constanze Werner, Kriegswirtschaft und Zwangsarbeit bei BMW, Oldenbourg, 2007
- Das Schweigen der Quandts, NDR documentary, 2007
- BMW Group corporate history archive: wartime operations
- USHMM: BMW