Command spear

The Speer command (also Oranienburg stone processing plant ) was a work command formed from prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg as part of the forced labor deployment of concentration camp prisoners during the Second World War .

history

The command was formed in 1941 and was deployed north of the port of the Oranienburg clinker works belonging to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . In order to put an end to the confusion between these two SS-run business operations, which arose from the fact that both (at least at times) simultaneously dealt with similar tasks - namely the processing of stones - the head of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office ordered (WVHA), Oswald Pohl , 1942, to change the designations Klinkerwerk and Kommando Speer to Großziegelwerk Oranienburg and Steinverarbeitungwerk Oranienburg , which was only accepted to a limited extent in practice.

Until 1942, the Speer command was used to set up and expand a stone processing plant that worked for Albert Speer , the general building inspector for the Reich capital (GBI) . From 1942 it was initially partially converted to the recovery of raw materials from booty, from 1943 onwards. Valuable raw materials for the war economy, such as copper, lead, rubber and gutta-percha, were extracted from old metal cables in particular .

By July 1942, the number of prisoners working in the command had reached over 1,000. By mid-1943, the command grew to over 2,000 and by mid-1944 to over 3,000 prisoners, making it the job at Sachsenhausen concentration camp that employed the largest number of prisoners.

The command consisted mainly of foreign prisoners, including French, Czech and Yugoslavs as well as 50-100 members of the particularly persecuted group of Sinti and Roma .

literature

• Christel Trouvé: Oranienburg (brickworks) and Thomas Irmer: Oranienburg (“Speer command”). In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 3: Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald. CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-52963-1 , p. 104f.

Web links

• Entry on the Speer command at the memorial forum

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wolfgang Sofsky: The order of terror. The concentration camp , Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1997, ISBN 3-596-13427-7 , p. 204; Hermann Kaienburg: Destruction through work , Dietz 1990, ISBN 3-801-25009-1 , p. 251
2. ^ Romani Rose / Walter Weiss: Sinti and Roma in the Third Reich. The program of destruction through labor, Lamuv 1991, ISBN 3-889-77248-X , p. 78.