Forced labourers in the Reich’s factories were not uniformly passive. Across the concentration camp system and the network of civilian forced labour sites, prisoners and conscripted workers sabotaged production where they could: slowing work, damaging components, spoiling materials. The evidence is real and specific. So were the consequences.
The clearest evidence comes from Mittelwerk in the Kohnstein, where the V-2 missile was assembled by prisoners of Mittelbau-Dora. French, Polish, Soviet and Czech prisoners loosened solder joints, mis-wired guidance systems, urinated into electrical components, scratched relay contacts and dropped tools into casings. The German engineers noticed. The early V-2 launches at Peenemünde and from Dutch and Belgian sites failed at a far higher rate than the design predicted. By late 1944 the SS had decided the failures were the work of the prisoners. Public hangings began inside the tunnels. The bodies were left in the galleries for shifts at a time. Around two hundred men were hanged at Mittelwerk for suspected sabotage. Most were Russian, Polish or French.
At Buchenwald the prisoner organisation in the Gustloff-Werke aircraft armaments plant ran a deliberate programme of slow and faulty work. Cas Lemmens, a Dutch communist, has left an account of how parts were made just within tolerance so that they would fail under stress. At the Heinkel works at Oranienburg, a satellite of Sachsenhausen, prisoners assembling He 177 bombers worked the same way. The aircraft had a serious record of engine fires in service. Some of that came from the original design. Some came from the men in the works.
At REIMAHG, the underground Me 262 plant at Kahla, sabotage was so widespread that German foremen complained the airframes coming off the lines were unflyable. At the Bunker Valentin U-boat works at Bremen-Farge, Neuengamme prisoners were caught dropping welding rods into hull seams. At Mauthausen’s Steyr satellite at Melk, ball bearings came out of the lathes minutely off true. At Volkswagen, Italian Military Internees worked slow and broke tools on purpose.
The price was paid in public. Hangings on roll-call squares were standard. At Auschwitz III Monowitz the IG Farben works ran summary executions for suspected sabotage on the camp’s gallows in front of the assembled work parties. At Mittelwerk the SS sometimes hanged six men at a time from a single overhead crane in the main tunnel, lifting the bar to lengthen the dying. The bodies were left up. At Flossenbürg the camp ran a separate execution shed for Messerschmitt and Me 262 sabotage cases.
The October 1944 Sonderkommando uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau was the most spectacular act of resistance inside an industrial setting in the camps. The men who blew up Crematorium IV had built the explosives from gunpowder smuggled out of the Union Werke munitions plant by Jewish women prisoners working there. Róża Robota, Ester Wajcblum, Ala Gertner and Regina Safirsztajn were the women who passed the powder out. They were caught, tortured, and hanged on 6 January 1945. They named no one under torture.
The historiography matters. The early post-war literature, especially in eastern Europe, tended to overstate organised resistance and to fold every act of disobedience into a Communist Party account. The corrective work of the 1980s and 1990s, by Falk Pingel and others, brought the picture back into focus. Most prisoners did not sabotage and did not resist in any organised way. Most could not: they were starving and under watch. The men and women who did take the risk did so knowing the likely consequences, and without expectation of rescue or recognition.
See also
Sources
- Michael Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era, Harvard University Press, 1995
- André Sellier, A History of the Dora Camp, Ivan R. Dee, 2003
- Falk Pingel, Häftlinge unter SS-Herrschaft: Widerstand, Selbstbehauptung und Vernichtung im Konzentrationslager, Hoffmann und Campe, 1978
- Gideon Greif, We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz, Yale University Press, 2005
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Forced Labor, encyclopedia.ushmm.org