The Thyssen group, the steel and heavy industry conglomerate centred on the Thyssen Stahl AG and the merged Vereinigte Stahlwerke (VSt), was the largest German steel producer of the war and the principal supplier of armour plate, gun barrels, ship hulls and structural steel to the Wehrmacht. The group employed around 75,000 forced and slave labourers across its plants and mines between 1940 and 1945. The Thyssen mining operations in the Ruhr and in Upper Silesia included some of the most lethal slave labour conditions outside the killing camps themselves. The Thyssen family, principally Fritz Thyssen, had an unusual political trajectory: Fritz Thyssen had been an early Nazi backer in the late 1920s and early 1930s, broke with the regime in 1939 over the invasion of Poland, fled to Switzerland, was arrested by Vichy France in 1940 and handed back to Germany, was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps until 1945, and survived the war as one of the German industrialists with a complicated wartime record.
The early Nazi support
Fritz Thyssen’s 1941 memoir I Paid Hitler, written in exile and published in English, set out his account of the financial support the Thyssen family had provided to the early Nazi movement in the 1923-to-1933 period. The memoir is a partial document, written for self-exculpation in wartime, but the broad financial support is independently documented. The Thyssen contribution was one of several major industrial financial backings that the early Nazi Party received, alongside contributions from the Krupp, Flick and Ruhr coal interests.
The wartime production
Thyssen plants produced the armour plate for German tanks (the Tiger, Panther, and the Mark IV), the gun barrels for the Wehrmacht artillery, the U-boat pressure hulls, and a substantial fraction of the structural steel used in the German war economy. The plants operated principally at Duisburg, Dortmund, Hamborn and Hattingen in the Ruhr, and in Upper Silesia. The labour force from 1942 onwards was substantially forced and slave labour: French and Belgian POWs, Soviet POWs, Eastern civilian forced labourers, and from 1943 onwards concentration camp prisoners.
The mines
The Thyssen coal and iron-ore mines in the Ruhr and Upper Silesia ran some of the most lethal slave-labour operations of the war. Soviet POWs working in the Thyssen mines died at very high rates from the combination of inadequate nutrition, lethal underground working conditions, and the systematic violence of the camp regime. The Thyssen senior management was, on the surviving documentary record, fully aware of the conditions and the death rates. Production was the priority; the death rates were treated as a routine cost of doing business with the Reich Labour Service.
Fritz Thyssen’s personal trajectory
Fritz Thyssen broke with the regime in September 1939 over the invasion of Poland, voted against the Reichstag enabling resolution that month, and fled to Switzerland and then to France. The Vichy government arrested him in December 1940 and handed him over to German custody. He was held in the Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps as a prominenter Schutzhäftling (a privileged political prisoner) until his liberation by US forces in May 1945. The detention was unpleasant but did not approach the conditions of the camps’ ordinary inmates. He survived the war and emerged from custody. He was tried by a German denazification tribunal in 1948 and given the lightest possible category of guilt, requiring only a small fine. He died in Buenos Aires in 1951.
The Thyssen wartime production continued under the leadership of cousins and senior salaried managers after Fritz Thyssen’s flight, with the family retaining substantial ownership stakes throughout. The Allied occupation authorities broke up the Vereinigte Stahlwerke in 1949; the Thyssen interests reconstituted as Thyssen AG in the 1950s and resumed the company’s position as one of the largest German industrial firms.
The Tilo Thyssen archive
The opening of the Thyssen wartime archives to academic researchers in the 1980s and 1990s produced substantial documentary work on the company’s wartime operations. Manfred Rasch and others published in the period a series of studies on the Thyssen wartime record. The company contributed to the German industry compensation fund of 2000.
What it was
Thyssen is the case of the German heavy industrial group whose pre-war financial support of the Nazi movement was substantial, whose wartime production of military steel was central to the German war effort, whose slave-labour record in the mines and steel plants killed thousands, and whose principal owner had a personal trajectory complicated enough that he ended the war in a concentration camp himself. The mixed picture does not change the overall record. The Thyssen plants were built on slave labour. The slave labourers died in large numbers. The post-war recovery was complete. The pattern is the standard one for the major German industrial firms.
See also
Sources
- Manfred Rasch and Gerald Feldman (eds), August Thyssen and Hugo Stinnes, Beck, 2007
- Lutz Hachmeister, Schleyer: Eine deutsche Geschichte, Beck, 2004
- Fritz Thyssen, I Paid Hitler, Hodder and Stoughton, 1941
- ThyssenKrupp corporate archive, Duisburg
- USHMM: German industry