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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.
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.
===Volkswagen's Child Victims===
One of the most egregious [[crime]]s committed at the Volkswagen Works was the treatment of the [[children]] of “Eastern workers” who labored at the complex. Some [[female]] civilian forced laborers arrived [[pregnant]] upon deployment. German administrators began to open the first so-called “nursery facilities” [Ausländerkinderpflegestätten] for the children of foreign laborers.
Such installations ostensibly provided a place where female “Eastern workers” could give [[birth]] and where they and their [[infant]]s might receive postnatal care. The notion that Germany’s Ausländerkinderpflegestätten were infant care facilities, however, was pure [[fiction]]. These establishments existed only to ensure that pregnant laborers returned to their work sites as quickly as possible, unencumbered by their newborns. Labor officials were not interested in the fate of the children. Death rates at most of these establishments were extremely high. Infants perished of [[starvation]], lack of [[medical]] care, and neglect.
In February 1943, Volkswagen executives opened such a facility on site, first in the barracks of its so-called Eastern Camp (Ostlager). Medical supervision of the maternity ward and “children’s home” became the responsibility of the factory [[physician]] and overseer of Volkswagen’s medical facilities, Dr. Hans Körbel. In time, children were sent to a similar home in the nearby town of Rühen, where mortality was close to one hundred percent. It is thought that 365 infants and toddlers, the children of female “Eastern workers” who labored at Volkswagen, died at Rühen. In 1946, British occupation officials sentenced Dr. Körbel to death for criminal neglect in the “Rühen Baby Farm Case,” executing him in 1947.<ref>[https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/volkswagen-1 The “People’s Car” and the Nazi State], ''Holocaust Encyclopedia'', [[United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]]. encyclopedia.ushmm.org</ref>
==References==
==References==