Daimler-Benz, the Stuttgart-based maker of motor vehicles and aero-engines, employed around 40,000 forced and slave labourers across its plants between 1940 and 1945. The company supplied much of the truck and staff-car fleet of the Wehrmacht and the SS, the engines of the German military aircraft industry, and substantial elements of the U-boat propulsion train. Production was distributed across plants at Stuttgart-Untertürkheim, Sindelfingen, Mannheim, Marienfelde in Berlin, and Genshagen south of Berlin, and from 1944 into a network of underground dispersal sites. The company’s wartime expansion was substantially underwritten by slave labour from concentration camp satellite camps including Mannheim-Sandhofen and the Genshagen sub-camps of Sachsenhausen.
The expansion of slave labour
Daimler-Benz had used French and Belgian forced civilian labour from 1940 onwards, Soviet POWs from 1942, and concentration camp slave labour from late 1943 onwards. The transition to concentration camp slave labour reflected the labour shortage produced by the Wehrmacht’s manpower requirements on the Eastern Front and the inadequacy of the existing forced civilian labour pool to fill the gap. The Daimler-Benz board approved each step in the process. The 1944 plant expansions, particularly the underground dispersal facilities, were designed around the assumption of concentration camp slave labour as the principal workforce.
The Mannheim-Sandhofen camp
The Mannheim-Sandhofen camp, a sub-camp of Natzweiler-Struthof, opened in September 1944 on the grounds of the Daimler-Benz Mannheim plant. Around 1,060 Polish prisoners from the Warsaw Uprising were held at the camp and worked twelve-hour shifts at the plant on truck production. The conditions were lethal. Around 100 of the prisoners died at Sandhofen during the camp’s six months of operation; an unknown additional number died on the death march to Dachau in late March 1945. The Daimler-Benz Mannheim management cooperated with the SS in the operation of the camp and provided the floor space, machinery and supervisory personnel.
The Genshagen and Marienfelde sub-camps
The Daimler-Benz aero-engine plant at Genshagen, south of Berlin, ran two SS sub-camps of Sachsenhausen on its premises, holding around 1,200 prisoners at peak. The Daimler-Benz plant at Marienfelde in Berlin similarly ran a Sachsenhausen sub-camp. The work in both cases was on aero-engine production for the Luftwaffe, principally the DB 605 inverted V-12 used in the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the DB 603 used in the Heinkel He 219 night fighter. The conditions were severely lethal but, as with BMW, the company’s requirement for skilled assembly work meant the prisoner death rate at the Daimler plants was lower than at the eastern killing camps. The prisoners who became too weak to work were returned to Sachsenhausen for selection.
The underground dispersal
From summer 1944 the German aviation production was relocated underground to escape the Allied bombing offensive. Daimler-Benz aero-engine production was relocated to the Obrigheim cave system in the Neckar valley, the Mittelbau-Dora related Goldfisch facility at Mosbach, and the Echo facility at Kahla in Thuringia. The conditions at these underground dispersal sites were severely lethal. The Goldfisch facility worked around 5,000 slave labourers, of whom around 1,000 are estimated to have died. The Daimler-Benz management was responsible for the production planning at these sites; the SS provided the labour and the security. The arrangement is documented in the wartime correspondence of Hans Walz, the Daimler-Benz board member responsible for production, who exchanged regular memoranda with SS Brigadeführer Hans Kammler’s office on the underground dispersal programme.
The post-war record
Daimler-Benz survived the war heavily damaged but recovered quickly. The Stuttgart-Untertürkheim plant was rebuilt, the Mercedes-Benz brand was relaunched in 1946, and the company became the foundation of the West German automotive industry of the 1950s and 1960s. The post-war Daimler-Benz management included several figures who had run the wartime slave-labour operations. None of the senior Daimler-Benz wartime managers were tried at Nuremberg or in subsequent West German proceedings. Hans Walz, the production board member, returned to senior corporate positions after a brief denazification process and remained on the Daimler-Benz board until 1956.
The first substantial corporate acknowledgment of the wartime slave-labour record came with the 1986 commissioned history by Hans Pohl, Stephanie Habeth-Allhorn and Beate Brüninghaus, Die Daimler-Benz AG in den Jahren 1933 bis 1945. The book documented the wartime operations in detail and was the model for similar acknowledgments by other major German firms over the following two decades. Daimler-Benz contributed to the German industry compensation fund of 2000.
What it was
Daimler-Benz is the case of the major German manufacturer whose wartime expansion was substantially built on slave labour, whose senior managers were not prosecuted, whose corporate continuity into the post-war period was complete, and whose acknowledgment of the wartime record came around forty years after the events. The pattern is the standard one for the major German industrial firms. The acknowledgment, when it came, was conducted to a high academic standard and produced documentary work of substantial historical value.
See also
Sources
- Hans Pohl et al., Die Daimler-Benz AG in den Jahren 1933 bis 1945, Steiner, 1986
- Neil Gregor, Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich, Yale University Press, 1998
- Mercedes-Benz Group corporate archive: wartime production records
- USHMM: Daimler-Benz