Messerschmitt GmbH
| Messerschmitt GmbH
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| legal form | Company with limited liability |
| founding | July 24, 1936 (as Bayerische Flugzeugwerke Regensburg GmbH ) |
| Seat | Regensburg , Germany |
| Number of employees | about 4500 (1939) |
| Branch | Aircraft manufacturer |
The Messerschmitt GmbH in Regensburg was a National Socialist model company and one of the most efficient and productive aircraft factories of the Second World War .
Company history
Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG (BFW), founded in Augsburg in 1926, received extensive (development) contracts from the Nazi authorities in spring 1933 and was renamed Messerschmitt AG after its chief designer Willy Messerschmitt in the summer of 1938 . The location of the Regensburg plant was selected in 1936 under the then BFW supervisory board chairman Theo Croneiss, because the city of Augsburg rejected an expansion of the BFW main plant requested by the Reich Aviation Ministry (RLM) . As a result, the subsidiary Bayerische Flugzeugwerke Regensburg GmbH was founded on July 24, 1936 . The topping-out ceremony for the new plant in Prüfing in the west of Regensburg directly at the then airfield was celebrated on May 8, 1937. The series order for the production of the Messerschmitt Bf 108 "Taifun" was placed in November 1937 .
In the autumn of 1938, the production of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 was relocated from Haunstetten near Augsburg to Regensburg and the following year the local plant with around 4500 employees was managed independently. The company name was finally changed to “Messerschmitt GmbH Regensburg” on November 13, 1940. Despite being classified as an important war enterprise, the Messerschmitt factories, which had joint corporate management, were privately owned from spring 1940, which was an exception in the National Socialist war economic policy. Around 1943 it is said to have been the second largest aircraft factory in Europe, in which a total of over 10,700 Bf 109 fighters were built.
In addition to the Bf 109, Messerschmitt GmbH Regensburg also produced the types Me 210 , Me 323 , Me 163 and Me 262 at the sites in Prüfing and Obertraubling .
During the Second World War, the plants in Regensburg-Prüfing and Obertraubling were repeatedly targeted by American air raids. The first major attack occurred on August 17, 1943 and was part of Operation Double Strike .
To increase production, which was important for the war effort, the Messerschmitt Group cooperated with the SS Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH (DEST) in 1943 and relocated assembly to various concentration camps . In the fall of 1944, over 5,200 prisoners in the Flossenbürg concentration camp and several thousand in the Gusen concentration camp had to do forced labor to manufacture aircraft components. The final assembly of the fighters continued in Regensburg and Obertraubling. In addition to other relocating companies, these two DEST locations became particularly important after the first bombing of the Regensburg plant. As early as 1944 they realized up to 35% of the total production of the Messerschmitt Group.
On the initiative of the Jägerstab , essential parts of the operating facilities and the staff of the “Regensburg manufacturing district” were finally relocated to the “ B8 Bergkristall ” underground relocation facility near St. Georgen an der Gusen , where from the end of 1944 the largest functional Messerschmitt- Plant in a concerted action by the " Upper Bavarian Research Institute " in Oberammergau , the series production of the Me 262 (fuselage and slat) started on a large scale. During this period, the leading gentlemen of the Messerschmitt Group, such as B. Director Karl Linder or General Staff Engineer Roluf Lucht , regularly between Regensburg and St. Georgen.
After the end of the war, in Regensburg as well as in St. Georgen / Gusen only ruins remained of this once extremely efficient and productive aircraft factory, which is often confused with Messerschmitt AG Augsburg. Today's town of Neutraubling was built on the site of the plant in Obertraubling, where numerous expellees settled. The former factory premises inprüfunging, which was far outside the urban area of Regensburg near the Westheimsiedlung before the war , with the remaining hall-like buildings and the name Messerschmittareal were reminiscent of the former factory until around 1980, but today it is completely rebuilt . Some streets named after aviation pioneers are still reminiscent of the earlier aircraft factory. The former administration building, which today houses the commercial vocational school, and part of the paint shop, which is used by Infineon as a dispatch and goods receiving hall today, have been preserved.
In the area of the former Messerschmitt site near Neutraubling, non-detonated aerial bombs from the air raids on the Messerschmitt works have been found time and again .
Forced laborer at Messerschmitt
Without the use and exploitation of forced laborers from several concentration camps, production on this scale would have been impossible. Numerous concentration camp prisoners were also killed or injured in the bombing of the production facilities.
In ancient Engelberg Tunnel in Leonberg concentration camp prisoners had about three thousand a satellite camp of Leonberg Natzweiler-Struthof from spring 1944 until the war for the defense contractor Messerschmitt wings for jet aircraft Me produce 262nd
More than 5,000 concentration camp prisoners from the Flossenbürg concentration camp were used to produce the Bf 109 fighter aircraft.
In the Obertraubling production facility, which was built at the end of 1940 , two so-called Russian camps were set up for around 2,750 forced laborers. By April 23, 1945, the Bf 109 and Me 262 were completed and flown in or delivered there.
In Augsburg there was a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp with 1,500 to 2,000 forced laborers for aircraft production.
Around 2,000 prisoners from KL Gusen I in the Mauthausen concentration camp system produced 25 hulls and 25 pairs of wings for the Bf 109 as well as parts for the Me 262 on the assembly line. At the end of 1944, the use of 4,000 concentration camp prisoners and 400 civilian workers was planned for this production.
In the tunnels of the underground production facilities of B8 Bergkristall , 6,000 concentration camp prisoners from the Gusen II concentration camp were temporarily deployed during construction and up to 8,500 prisoners in the large-scale production for "Rumpfwerk 262", which began in October 1944.
Around 500 concentration camp prisoners were used as slave labor in the Plattling subcamp in the construction of a test airport. In February 1944, construction began on the airport, where the newly developed models from Heinkel and Messerschmitt were to take off on test flights. The forced laborers were housed in a building in the middle of the city that was run as a satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. The building later served as a school. The cellar rooms in which the prisoners' cells were located still contain signs of what happened at that time.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Helmut Halter: Stadt unterm Hakenkreuz , Universitätsverlag Regensburg 1994, p. 314.
- ↑ Halter, Die Stadt unterm Hakenkreuz , 1994, p. 328
- ^ Rudolf A. Haunschmied , Jan-Ruth Mills, Siegi Witzany-Durda: St. Georgen-Gusen-Mauthausen - Concentration Camp Mauthausen Reconsidered . BoD, Norderstedt 2008, ISBN 978-3-8334-7440-8 . P. 107ff
- ↑ The bombs are secretly defused in Neutraubling . In: wochenblatt.de . October 3, 2014. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
- ↑ Robert Werner: inventory -Messerschmitt and Regensburg . In: regensburg-digital.de . August 28, 2015. Retrieved October 28, 2015.
- ^ KZ Gedenkstätteninitiative Leonberg eV . Kz-gedenkstaette-leonberg.de. Retrieved July 13, 2010.
- ↑ Ulrich Fritz: Plattling In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (Ed.): Flossenbürg. The Flossenbürg Concentration Camp and its satellite camps , Beck Munich, 2007, pp. 220–223.
- ↑ Michael A. Levitin: The town of Plattling (online at Tikkun.org) (accessed April 2012)
literature
- Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 4: Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück. CH Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-52964-X .
- Helmut Halter: City under the Swastika , University Press Regensburg 1994.
- Reinhard Hanausch, a. a. (Ed.): Survival through art - forced labor in the Gusen concentration camp for the Messerschmitt factory in Regensburg , Dr. Peter Morsbach Verlag, Regensburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-937527-52-9
- Peter Schmoll : Messerschmitt giants and the Regensburg-Obertraubling Air Base , MZ-Buchverlag Regensburg, 2002.
- Peter Schmoll: The Messerschmitt Works in World War II. The aircraft production of Messerschmitt GmbH Regensburg from 1938 to 1945 , MZ-Verlag Regensburg, 2004, ISBN 3-931904-38-5 .
- Peter Schmoll: Regensburg - The catastrophe of August 17, 1943 , MZ Buchverlag, Regenstauf 2018, ISBN 978-3-86646-369-1 .
Web links
- Robert Werner: Regensburg and Gusen - forced labor for the armaments giant Messerschmitt (research report in regensburg-digital from December 17, 2012)