Enterprise desert

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Company "Desert" was the code name for a project of the Nazi regime to extract fuel from oil shale as part of the Geilenberg program .

overview

Towards the end of World War II , the German wartime economy needed mineral oils more urgently than any other raw material. From the end of 1943 the German leadership was forced to open up new oil wells. The Soviet oil fields conquered by the Wehrmacht were lost after the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943. The war important Romanian crude oil sources in the area of Ploieşti were threatened by the advance of the Red Army and by the Allied air raids on Ploieşti (after the Allied landing in Italy , the operational radius of the Allied air fleets changed due to the acquisition of Italian bases). In May 1944, the great Allied air offensive began, with the partial aim of bombing the energy supply centers to have a decisive impact on oil production in Germany and to severely decimate gasoline stocks. The USAAF and the Royal Air Force carried out 22 air strikes on the Leunawerke as well as air strikes on Böhlen near Leipzig and Pölitz near Stettin . More and more motorized units were no longer fully operational due to a lack of fuel. In May 1944, 156,000 tons of aviation fuel were produced; in July it was only 29,000 tons.

The partial conversion of the vehicles to wood gasifiers did not provide a satisfactory solution. Because of their poor efficiency, the wood gasification systems were only suitable for cars and trucks, but not for motorcycles or combat vehicles such as tanks and rifle vehicles. The already known process of extracting fuel from Lias oil shale should bring relief . With the processes known at the time, only very small amounts of shale oil were to be expected, which could be used in diesel engines with glow heads . However, the German Reich found itself in a very precarious war economic emergency, so that inefficient production processes were also used.

Test facilities

In order to secure the endangered fuel supply, the Nazi regime planned to extract mineral oil for tanks and combat aircraft from the oil shale of the Lias epsilon . The oil shale deposit on the edge of the Swabian Alb extends close to the surface over a length of about 150 kilometers. Because of its abundance of fossils of the shell " Posidonomya bronni " ( Bositra buchii ) it is also called Posidonia schist . Its mining and use have a long history in the western Alb area.

To test industrial oil extraction, three test facilities with three different processes were set up:

  • In September 1942 the "LIAS-Ölschiefer-Forschungsgesellschaft mbH" was founded. She began building a plant in Frommern in the spring of 1943 . It used a smoldering process developed at the University of Stuttgart and tested for the first time in Metzingen in the so-called Swiss oven , making it the most advanced process. The Frommern concentration camp was established on March 1, 1944; first mentioned in the directory of the International Tracing Service on May 22, 1944.
  • It was followed on July 30, 1943 by the "Coal Recyclable Association of Großdeutsche Schachtbau GmbH", a group company of the " AG Reichswerke" Hermann Göring " ", and the " Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG" founded "Coal-Oil Union von Busse KG" (KÖU) based in Berlin. On the outskirts of Schörzingen they built an underground plant to test the process and the device for underground smoldering and gasifying of combustible materials. The oil shale was mined underground here and immediately heated and carbonized. From mid-January 1944, 200 to 300 concentration camp prisoners were to be used in forced labor for the construction. The transport of prisoners was delayed until February 1944. The Schörzingen concentration camp was mentioned for the first time in writing in an annex to the "protective custody camp report" of the Natzweiler concentration camp on February 29, 1944. It is not mentioned in the previous report of January 31, 1944.
  • On September 20, 1943, the Reich Office for Economic Development (RWA) founded the "Deutsche Ölschiefer-Forschungsgesellschaft mbH" (DÖLF) to operate a test facility in Schömberg and to test the new Meilerschweling process. It was to be used later in the plants below. The Schömberg concentration camp , also known as the “Bahnhofs KZ” because it was built near the train station across from the DÖLF experimental facility on Wellendinger Strasse, was the first of the seven desert camps. The first prisoners arrived on December 16, 1943.

Company "desert"

Despite the unsatisfactory results of the attempts to extract oil from oil shale, Albert Speer , Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production , ordered the " Geilenberg Program ", named after Edmund Geilenberg , Commissioner General for the Immediate Measures at the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production , in July In 1944 the use of the oil shale deposit on the edge of the Swabian Alb began.

The German Reich drove under the code name companies "desert" in the shortest possible time the construction of ten oil shale plants in Württemberg and Hohenzollern lands ahead and planned to leave the oil shale win over an area of around 110 square kilometers exclusively by concentration camp prisoners. Several competing organizations, ministries, specially founded research institutes and companies were involved in the large-scale project, for example the " IG-Farben " in Leuna , the "Deutsche Ölschieferforschungs-Gesellschaft" (DÖLF) in Berlin and Schömberg , the "Coal Öl-Union "in Schörzingen , the" LIAS-Forschungsgesellschaft mbH "in Frommern , the" Deutsche Schieferöl GmbH "in Erzingen - an SS-owned company - the Organization Todt (OT), the SS and the Deutsche Bergwerks- und Hüttenbaugesellschaft ( DBHG) - a subsidiary of the Reichswerke Hermann Göring .

The SS had seven subcamps of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp built on the Zollernalb , along the Tübingen – Aulendorf railway line and the Balingen-Rottweil branch line, for the extraction of oil shale and the extraction of oil by concentration camp prisoners. The camps were between Hechingen and Rottweil , along the north eaves of the Swabian Alb. The oil shale works were built outside the concentration camps, where the oil shale layer, the lias epsilon of the Swiss Jura, was as close as possible to the surface of the earth. The factories and warehouses were run by the SS themselves. For the "Desert" company, the SS provided a total of over 10,000 prisoners in seven concentration camps, who were exploited as workers in the oil shale works and of whom at least 3,480 died. The SS received between four and six Reichsmarks “daily rent” per prisoner and working day . The concentration camp prisoners were not only supposed to do forced labor in the actual quarries for oil extraction, they also had to build the entire infrastructure.

The ten oil extraction plants built between September 1944 and April 1945 in a fixed construction period of two to four months were:

The high expectations of the Nazi regime were not fulfilled: only in four out of ten oil shale plants could production start poorly by the end of the war. Their wartime economic benefit can be viewed as very little. The mill smelting process used was ineffective and the low bitumen content (around five percent of the oil shale) meant that the yield was very low: 35 tons of oil shale had to be smoldered to produce one tonne of mineral oil. The mineral oil was so inferior that it could only be burned in special engines. By the end of the war, around 1,500 tons of mineral oil had been extracted.

post war period

After the war, the French occupying power took over the LIAS factory in Frommern. She hoped for a profitable production of shale oil and ordered the completion. However, the low oil yield did not cover the costs; the refining plant that had been built was shut down and the Lias dissolved on November 8, 1949.

The Eckerwald memorial in Schörzingen has been a reminder of the "Desert" company since 1989 .

The oil extraction process used by the ten desert plants

First of all, the Lias oil shale was mined manually by the concentration camp inmates using a shovel and bucket. Then, depending on the location, the excavated rock was removed by light rail or cable cars. The extraction of the oil took place using the kiln process : First, the rock is piled up, covered with combustible materials and then covered with a layer of earth. The heavy oil bound in the rock evaporates through carbonisation and is condensed in distillation plants . The quantities obtained are extremely small and the oil is of very poor quality.

See also

literature

  • Michael Grandt: “ Enterprise desert. Hitler's last hope. The NS Oil Shale Program on the Swabian Alb ” , 2002, Silberburg-Verlag Tübingen, ISBN 978-3-87407-508-4 .
  • Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 6: Natzweiler, Groß-Rosen, Stutthof. CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-52966-5 .
  • Michael Walther: Shale oil project and company “Desert” - polycratic competence chaos or flexible network? . In: Zeitschrift für Hohenzollerische Geschichte, Vol. 53/54, 2017/2018, pp. 295–373.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ March of Life ( Memento of the original from June 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 1.7 MB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tos.info
  2. ↑ See Holoch (1978)
  3. ↑ See Rudi Holoch: The Schörzingen camp in the “Desert Group” . In: Herwart Vorländer (Ed.): National Socialist Concentration Camps in the Service of Total Warfare. Seven Wuerttemberg external commandos of the Natzweiler / Alsace concentration camp . Stuttgart 1978. p. 232.
  4. ↑ Oil shale after 1945 ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.planet-schule.de