REIMAHG stood for Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the air ministry’s underground project to build Messerschmitt Me 262 fighters in tunnels carved into the Walpersberg, a sandstone hill near Kahla in Thuringia. The codename was vain even by the standards of the regime. The work was done by slaves.
Construction began in April 1944. The Walpersberg already held a small porcelain clay quarry. The plan was to widen the existing galleries and drive new tunnels until the workings could hold a complete aircraft factory, with assembly bays, machine shops, paint lines and a flat top to the hill that could be used as a take-off strip. Around fifteen thousand forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners were brought in. They came from Buchenwald, mostly through the satellite camps Laura and Lehesten and through a network of forced-labour camps run by the Organisation Todt. The conditions were the worst kind of Reich industrial site. The men slept in wet huts, ate almost nothing, worked through ten-hour shifts in dust and noise, and were beaten as a matter of routine. Around two thousand died on the site itself. Many more died after evacuation.
The factory began limited production in early 1945. It built only a few dozen complete Me 262s before American troops reached Kahla in April. Many of the airframes that did come out of the Walpersberg were unflyable. Quality control was non-existent and sabotage by the labourers was widespread. The take-off strip on top of the hill was so short that finished aircraft had to be towed off it by lorry and flown out only after a long downhill run. The whole operation was a monument to the regime’s last-stand fantasies. The dead were real.
REIMAHG was a joint venture in everything but name. Messerschmitt AG provided the engineering. The Reich Air Ministry provided the contracts. The SS provided the prisoners and the discipline. The construction firms Walter Bauer and Carl Brandt did the digging. Civilian engineers and foremen worked alongside SS guards in the tunnels every day. They saw the conditions. They wrote the reports. The directors of the involved companies signed the books.
After the war the tunnels were partly stripped by the Soviets, then sealed. The Walpersberg sits today above the small town of Großeutersdorf. There is a memorial and a small museum, the Walpersberg-Gedenkstätte, opened slowly and against local resistance from the 1990s onwards. The Messerschmitt name passed through MBB into Airbus. Few of the firms involved were ever held to account. The dead are buried in unmarked ground or were scattered along the death-march routes when the camp was emptied in April 1945.
REIMAHG produced almost nothing of military value. It killed thousands of men in the attempt. It is one of the clearest examples of how the German aviation industry, in its last months, treated human life as a consumable input that could be ordered, used and discarded.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards