Eastern Industry

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The SS -Wirtschaftsunternehmen Ostindustrie GmbH (OSTI) was founded in March 1943 by the head of the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) Oswald Pohl in order to set up his own SS armaments factories in the General Government and to take over existing private companies in which Jewish prisoners produce profitably should. Although the economic exploitation of around 10,000 forced laborers in eight factories made a profit, the OSTI was dissolved just eight months later. Regardless of economic issues, the genocide continued and the Jewish slave laborers employed were killed.

situation

At the turn of 1941/42 it was foreseeable that the war would last longer. There was an urgent need for workers for the armaments industry. The labor input of captured Russian soldiers could not be sufficient because of the mass deaths. Foreign workers were recruited or abducted in order to keep production going. Despite the tense situation, the SS began building extermination camps at the same time and deployed Jewish forced laborers under such adverse living conditions that they were emaciated within a few weeks and their deployment amounted to extermination through work .

On July 19, 1942, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger to “resettle [ie deport to extermination camps] of the entire Jewish population of the Generalgouvernement by December 31, 1942.”; only a few collection camps should remain. According to the Höfle telegram, this order resulted in the murder of 1,274,166 Jews.

Planning

In October 1942, Himmler ordered SS armaments factories to be set up as "KL-Großbetriebe in the east of the Generalgouvernement" and added the statement to this order: "However, there too, one day, according to the Fuehrer's wish, the Jews should disappear". The relocation of private companies that produced in the Warsaw ghetto with hired Jewish slave labor was slow. In January 1943, Himmler had contracts signed with the owners of the two largest ghetto companies to relocate the companies " Walther C. Többens " and "Schultz & Co GmbH" to the Poniatowa and Trawniki camps in the Lublin district . The ghetto residents were to be deported, with the exception of ten thousand forced laborers in a planned Warsaw concentration camp , who would then tear down all buildings in the residential area and the evacuated factories.

These guidelines were not fully implemented because Jewish resistance members resisted the deportations that were about to begin in January 1943 and the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto began in April .

Foundation of the OSTI

On March 12, 1943, Georg Lörner , managing director of the SS business group Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe GmbH (DWB), and Oswald Pohl signed a partnership agreement to found “Ostindustrie GmbH (OSTI)” with a share capital of 100,000 RM . On April 30, 1943, OSTI was entered in the commercial register in Berlin . SS and police leaders Odilo Globocnik and Max Horn from the WVHA were appointed as managing directors . According to Horns, the OSTI was supposed to use Jewish forced laborers to set up and operate production facilities that were important for the war and armaments, and to utilize the “movable Jewish assets” that arose from the “Jewish resettlement”.

Economic activity

First, the OSTI made demands for money on private companies that had taken over machines and equipment from Jewish property. In some cases, SS agencies refused to hand over the Jewish assets they had collected. An orderly withdrawal of the ghetto factories from Warsaw was impossible because of the uprising. The planned construction of our own plants was delayed.

Even before a formal partnership agreement was signed, the OSTI had acquired a glassworks in Wolomin from Jewish property . The profitable production facility (Plant I) employed up to 645 Polish civil workers, who were not replaced by Jewish forced laborers even later.

The Dorohucza camp was run as Plant II , in which several hundred Jewish forced laborers cut peat and installed a peat coking plant. On the site of a former airfield near the Majdanek concentration camp , a brush factory and basketry were set up as Plant III; up to 1,800 Jewish slave laborers were employed there. Plant IV consisted of plants in Radom and Bliżyn with up to 5600 forced laborers. Most of them were busy producing and repairing uniforms and footwear. There was also a joinery, brush production, cardboard box production, a quarry and peat extraction. In Lublin , Plant V was to be an “ironworks”, which was to build up its own armaments production for the needs of the Air Force with metalworking and electrotechnical workshops . In August 1943, the OSTI was given two more production sites in Lublin, a brickworks including cement works and tile factory (Plant VII) and an orthopedic workshop (Plant VIII). The workshops of the Schultz & Co company relocated to Trawniki were only taken over in September.

In the autumn of 1943, "Ostindustrie GmbH" was just a torso of non-interlinked companies that had not yet reached their planned productivity.

liquidation

With the massacre on 3rd / 4th November 1943, the “ Aktion Erntefest ”, the OSTI was deprived of its working basis. After the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, the Jews of the Białystok ghetto also resisted in August 1943 ; that same month there was a rebellion in the Treblinka extermination camp and in October prisoners in the Sobibor extermination camp attempted to escape. This development seems to have prompted Himmler to give up the hoped-for economic and power-political gain through SS armaments factories and to immediately carry out the murder of the Jewish slave laborers, which was postponed for this purpose.

In the course of the “Aktion Erntefest” the workers of the OSTI-Werke II, III, V, VI and VII were murdered. On November 23, 1943, Oswald Pohl ordered the liquidation of "Ostindustrie GmbH", which dragged on until spring 1944. Some workshops were continued as satellite camps of the Majdanek concentration camp , others were transferred to the German equipment works or the civil administration.

Interpretations

The history of the OSTI shows an inconsistent approach and conflicts of interest between the civil administration, SS police command, Wehrmacht offices and armaments factories. A collapse of the company was already set in at the end of 1942 by Himmler's goal of eliminating all Jews in the Generalgouvernement.

There was an irreconcilable conflict between the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and the WVHA. While representatives of the WVHA wanted to take advantage of the labor of the Jewish victims, the "final solution fanatics" of the Reich Security Main Office saw their "destruction work" endangered by the plans of the WVHA. In the case of "Ostindustrie GmbH", the extermination of the Jews took precedence over the ruthless exploitation of the prisoners' labor.

See also

literature

  • Jan Erik Schulte : Forced Labor and Extermination. The economic empire of the SS. Oswald Pohl and the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt 1933–1945. Paderborn 2001, ISBN 3-506-78245-2 .
  • Jan Erik Schulte: Forced Labor for the SS Jews in the Ostindustrie GmbH. In: Norbert Frei et al. (Ed.): Exploitation, destruction, public. New Studies on National Socialist Camp Policy. Saur, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-598-24033-3 , ( representations and sources on the history of Auschwitz 4), pp. 43–74.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jan Erik Schulte: Forced labor for the SS In: Norbert Frei et al. (Ed.): Exploitation, destruction, public. Munich 2000, p. 72.
  2. ↑ Quoted from Jan Erik Schulte: Forced labor for the SS p. 45 with note 10.
  3. ↑ Quoted from Jan Erik Schulte: Forced Labor for the SS, p. 48 with note 34.
  4. ^ Andreas Mix: Warsaw main camp . In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 8: Riga, Warsaw, Vaivara, Kaunas, Płaszów, Kulmhof / Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka. CH Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57237-1 , p. 94.
  5. ↑ Jan Erik Schulte: Forced Labor for the SS p. 57.
  6. ↑ Jan Erik Schulte: Forced Labor for the SS P. 69/70.
  7. ↑ Jan Erik Schulte: Forced Labor for the SS p. 74.
  8. ↑ Heinz Höhne : The Order under the Skull - The History of the SS , Augsburg 1998, ISBN 3-89350-549-0 , p. 357f