Until the final day

Types of forced labour

"We should have been producing radio valves there. But by then every- thing was pretty much over. From time to time, some inspector would visit the factory and then the supervisors would have to run around frantically trying to make it seem as if everyone was working hard."

Types of forced labour

In the late summer of 1944 it was decided to develop further projects for relocation around Porta Westfalica. The prisoners were also forced to bear most of the work which involved heavy physical construction there. The SS would then settle the cost of the prisoners’ labour with the construction or production company in question. At the same time, the first facilities for armament production entered phases for installation and manufacturing. Prisoner work detachments were also deployed for this purpose by the SS and the factories.

The Lerbeck and Hausberge satellite camps were built specifically for the forced labour of prisoners in a Klöckner front repair plant and the Philips and Valvo radio valve production in the upper tunnel of the Jakobsberg. In Lerbeck, the prisoners had to construct the test stations for the aeroplane engines and later also carry out the physically demanding maintenance work. The forced labour of the women from the Hausberge satellite camp involved specialised manual work in the metal and electronics industry. They had often been doing similar work at their previous places of imprisonment.

The chances of survival for many prisoners in German concentration camps and thus also in the camps at Porta Westfalica all depended on the type of forced labour they had to undergo in the final year of the war. The more complex the work and the more time was spent on basic training for the prisoners, the more likely it was that the industry and the SS had an interest in preserving the labour of these prisoners.

In the very last weeks, there was an increasing shortage of raw materials and spare parts in the underground armaments factories that were already in production. Despite this, the prisoner work detachments had to continue to undergo their forced labour until the very last day before the Porta Westfalica satellite camps were cleared.