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Slave Labor in the Concentration camp
"On the way to work and on the way back the people dragged themselves along, stumbled, and now and then one of them fell. During work movements became unsteady, many lost grip of their tools - in our group such things were punished with a blow of the rifle butt. Others fell from the scaffolding, carrying sleepers they stumbled over the rails and fell under the wheels of the trains"
(Ladislaus Ervin-Deutsch: Night Shift in Work camp III in Kaufering, Dachauer Hefte 2)
Besides maintaining the camp, in the pre-war years the prisoners were forced to work in various companies owned by the SS, in road works, in gravel pits, and the cultivation of the moor. In the war years the prisoner labor force became increasingly important for the German armaments industry. From 1942 a widespread network of subsidiary camps and outside work details was formed, in which well over 30,000 prisoners worked almost exclusively in German armament production.
As Allied air raids increasingly endangered German aircraft production, the Nazis decided to relocate the production of important weapons, aircraft and rockets into giant subterranean factories. For this purpose, two large camp complexes were founded as subsidiary camps to Dachau: Kaufering and Mühldorf.
At Mühldorf and, above all, in the eleven camps making up the Kaufering complex near Landsberg am Lech, more than 30,000 prisoners lived and worked in murderous conditions. These prisoners were mainly Jews from Hungary, Poland and Lithuania.
