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→Volkswagen and Forced Labor
===Volkswagen and Forced Labor===
===Volkswagen and Forced Labor===
The war posed a serious obstacle for Volkswagen, as the plant had been designed for the production of civilian vehicles. From its inception, it had never had a sufficient workforce. In search of labor, the massive complex at Fallersleben quickly began to deploy [[slavery|forced labor]]. Indeed, Volkswagen was among the first companies to take advantage of the forced labor of [[Soviet]] [[prisoners of war]]. The factory employed [[concentration camp]] inmates (including [[Jews]]), and in increasingly large numbers Soviet and [[Polish]] [[civilian]] [[foreign]] forced laborers known as “Ostarbeiter” [“Eastern workers”]. A first concentration camp on the site, Arbeitsdorf, was established on factory property in April 1942. Forced laborers eventually made up approximately 60% of the workforce.
The war posed a serious obstacle for Volkswagen, as the plant had been designed for the production of civilian vehicles. From its inception, it had never had a sufficient workforce. In search of labor, the massive complex at Fallersleben quickly began to deploy [[slavery|forced labor]]. Indeed, Volkswagen was among the first companies to take advantage of the forced labor of [[Soviet]] [[prisoners of war]]. The factory employed [[concentration camp]] inmates (including [[Jews]]), and in increasingly large numbers Soviet and [[Polish]] [[civilian]] [[foreign]] forced laborers known as “Ostarbeiter” [“Eastern workers”]. A first concentration camp on the site, Arbeitsdorf, was established on factory property in April 1942. Forced laborers eventually made up approximately 60% of the workforce.
The company actively sought out forced labor from the concentration camp system. One VW plant engineer traveled to [[Auschwitz]] and selected 300 skilled metalworkers from the massive transports of [[Hungarian]] Jews in 1944. In addition, 650 Jewish women were transferred to assemble [[military]] [[munition]]s. 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. Overall, the Volkswagen plant contained four concentration camps and eight forced-labor camps.
==References==
==References==