By May 1944, the number of “Eastern workers” at the complex had swelled to more than 4,800 individuals, half of them women. Overall, the Volkswagen plant contained four concentration camps and eight forced-labor camps.Ĭivilian forced laborers supplied the remaining sum of the complex’s workforce. The official relationship between the Nazi concentration camps and Volkswagen was cemented when the Fallersleben facility officially became a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp. In addition, 650 Jewish women were transferred to assemble military munitions. One VW plant engineer traveled to Auschwitz and selected 300 skilled metalworkers from the massive transports of Hungarian Jews in 1944. The company actively sought out forced labor from the concentration camp system. Forced laborers eventually made up approximately 60% of the workforce at the City of the Kdf-Car. A first concentration camp on the site, Arbeitsdorf, was established on factory property in April 1942. The factory employed a variety of categories of workers, including German employees and migrant workers, but also prisoners of war, concentration camp inmates ( including Jews ), and in increasingly large numbers Soviet and Polish civilian foreign forced laborers known as “Ostarbeiter”. ![]() Indeed, Volkswagen was among the first companies to take advantage of the forced labor of Soviet prisoners of war. In search of labor, the massive complex at Fallersleben quickly began to deploy forced labor. From its inception, it had never had a sufficient workforce. The war posed a serious obstacle for Volkswagen, as the plant had been designed for the production of civilian vehicles. In the end, the vast majority of Germans who completed their savings books never received their long-awaited People’s Cars, as Volkswagen went into military production. In reality, the plant had only just started small-scale production of what would become the Volkswagen Beetle when the company halted civilian production with the onset of World War II. The Führer himself was present, predicting that this Volkswagen, initially known as the Kraft-durch-Freude-Wagen, or KdF-Wagen, would be “a symbol of the National Socialist people's community." The Volkswagen plant eventually became a massive complex known as the “ City of the Kdf-Car” and was expected to produce at least 1.5 million cars annually. On May 26, 1938, Nazi dignitaries gathered near Fallersleben in northern Germany to lay the foundation stone for the Volkswagen Works. ![]() The design for a “People’s Car” was undertaken by the famed engi neer Ferdinand Porsche, who based it on a model he pioneered in 1931. Cars were, he said, “mankind's most marvelous means of transport." In 1934, Hitler suggested a basic, fuel-efficient vehicle that could transport two adults and three children and whose engine would be powerful enough to traverse Germany’s new Autobahnen. ![]() ![]() In a country where car production still focused primarily on luxury models and where only one German in fifty owned an automobile, the car would cost just 999 German Reichsmark, while the program offered a savings plan to make such a vehicle affordable.Īdolf Hitler’s admiration for technology in general and for automobiles in particular fueled this effort. In 1942, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels described the future of Germany as that of "a happy people in a country full of blossoming beauty, traversed by the silver ribbons of wide roads, which are open to the modest car for the small man." Mirroring this aim, the Nazi “Strength through Joy” ( Kraft durch Freude, or KdF) organization, which sought to highlight the advantages of National Socialism through leisure and travel, chose as one of its major efforts to promote a “People’s Car” ( Volkswagen ) for the German public. Jews were deprived of the right to drive automobiles after Kristallnacht in 1938.Ĭar ownership and travel were intended to be another part of the Nazi vision of the Volksgemeinschaft (People’s Community). Mirroring the regime’s antisemitic policies, t he German General Automobile Club ADAC ( Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club e.V., or ADAC) expelled Jewish members in 1933. Like many other industries, automobile manufacturing in Germany was strongly influenced by the Nazi regime.
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