Siemens, the Berlin-based electrical engineering and electronics group, was one of the largest German industrial firms of the war and one of the largest users of forced and slave labour. The company employed around 80,000 forced and slave labourers across its plants between 1940 and 1945. Siemens components were embedded in essentially every electromechanical part of the German war economy: aircraft electrical systems, U-boat instruments, V-2 guidance systems, telephone and telegraph networks, and the camp infrastructure of the SS itself. Siemens manufactured electrical components for the gas chamber and crematoria installations at Auschwitz-Birkenau and at Mauthausen.
The Bobrek sub-camp
The Siemens-Schuckertwerke sub-camp at Bobrek, two kilometres from Auschwitz, opened in autumn 1943 and operated until January 1945. Around 250 prisoners worked at the camp on Siemens electrical components, principally aircraft instrument parts and telephone exchange components. The Bobrek prisoners were better fed than the average Auschwitz prisoner; Siemens needed them able to perform precise assembly work, and the better treatment was in the company’s commercial interest. The camp survived the January 1945 evacuation with most of its prisoners alive; the death toll was modest by Auschwitz standards. The case has been used by Siemens defenders to argue that the company’s slave-labour record was less harsh than its competitors. The argument holds at Bobrek. It does not hold at Ravensbrück.
The Ravensbrück sub-camp
Siemens operated a substantial sub-camp at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp from 1942, where around 2,300 women prisoners worked on Siemens electrical components in three shifts. The work included winding electrical coils, assembling telephone relays, fitting the precision moving parts of aircraft instruments, and assembling the gyroscopes and rate-of-turn indicators for V-2 missile guidance systems. The Siemens management at Ravensbrück had specifically requested women workers because of their finger dexterity for the precise winding work; the SS supplied them.
The death toll at the Ravensbrück Siemens camp was substantially higher than at Bobrek. The women were exhausted by the dual demands of the twelve-hour factory shifts and survival in the wider Ravensbrück system. Many were transferred to the Ravensbrück gas chamber when they became too weak to work; the gas chamber, installed at Ravensbrück in early 1945, killed around 5,000 to 6,000 women in its three months of operation, and Siemens women workers formed a substantial fraction of the victims. The Ravensbrück Siemens camp ran until April 1945. The survivors were liberated by Soviet forces in late April 1945.
The Auschwitz electrical infrastructure
Siemens supplied substantial elements of the electrical infrastructure of the Auschwitz camp complex: the camp lighting, the perimeter fencing’s electrification, the watchtower communications, and the electric ventilation systems for the gas chambers and crematoria. The contracts and commercial correspondence survive in part. The Topf and Sons firm at Erfurt supplied the crematorium ovens themselves; Siemens supplied the electrical components that powered them. The supply of components for crematorium operation, in the absence of any alternative legitimate use for industrial-scale corpse incineration equipment, is one of the documented cases where the company’s management would have been on notice that the equipment was being used for mass killing. The Siemens internal records on the contracts have been examined by the company’s commissioned historians; the records establish that the contracts were known at senior management level.
The post-war record
Siemens survived the war heavily damaged but recovered quickly through the late 1940s and 1950s. The senior wartime Siemens management was preserved into the post-war period; none of the wartime board members were tried at Nuremberg, and the company’s post-war chairman Hermann von Siemens (a great-grandson of the founder Werner von Siemens) had been the wartime chairman. He was briefly held by the US Army in 1945 to 1946 but not charged.
Siemens commissioned a full academic history of its wartime conduct from Wilfried Feldenkirchen, published in 1995 and 2000, which documented the slave-labour use and the wartime contracts. The company contributed to the German industry compensation fund of 2000, paying around DM 200 million. A subsequent and unrelated controversy in 2001, when Siemens applied to register the trademark Zyklon for a new range of household appliances, drew international protest; the application was withdrawn.
What it was
Siemens is the case of the major German industrial firm whose products were embedded throughout the German war economy and the camp infrastructure of the SS, and whose wartime operations included direct supply of electrical components for gas chamber and crematorium use. The Bobrek case is the company’s preferred presentation, the better-treated prisoners producing aircraft instruments. The Ravensbrück case is the harder one, the women working twelve-hour shifts and being gassed when they became too weak to continue. Both cases were Siemens. The post-war recovery of the firm was complete; the corporate acknowledgment of the wartime record came around fifty years after the events.
Sources
- Wilfried Feldenkirchen, Siemens 1918-1945, Piper, 1995
- Carola Sachse, Der Hausarbeitstag, Wallstein, 2002
- Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Hamburger Edition, 1999
- Bernhard Strebel, Das KZ Ravensbrück, Schöningh, 2003
- Siemens corporate archive, Munich
- USHMM: Siemens