Widok Experiences of Polish Forced Laborers from Łódź Employed for Telefunken in Ulm in Years 1944–1945 with Consideration of Medical Care
czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl

(Mirror.)

Polish capitulation in September 1939 brought for people in Łódź significant changes. On 9 November 1939, the city was annexed into the new Greater German Reich. […] Businesses and buildings of Polish and Jewish owners were expropriated with the aim of providing them to companies under [Fascist] management.²¹ The city was meant to become an industrial base for the war economy.

One of the first administrative decisions of the [Fascist] occupation administration was the introduction of labor conscription for all Polish nationals, initially from ages 16 to 60, then from age 14 and lastly from age 10. Several important [Fascist] companies — among these Krupp, BMW, Askania, and Telefunken — took advantage of this opportunity and located their production plants in Łódź.²²

[…]

In 1941 Telefunken relocated part of its production lines to Łódź. The city was chosen for several reasons: the distance from areas exposed to aerial bombardment and short lines of product delivery to military units at the eastern front. However, one of the most important reasons was the availability of an appropriate workforce.²⁴ In Łódź, the company intended to produce vacuum tubes used in military communication.

For this kind of production, precision and sleight of hand were of great importance; therefore, mostly young workers, especially girls were preferred. Already in 1942, Telefunken employed more than 2,000 workers in its two production plants in Łódź. Whereas the management and engineer positions in the plants were occupied by Germans, the foremen and office positions were staffed by ethnic Germans (“Volksdeutsche”) from Łódź.

However, the majority of the production workers were girls of ages 12 to 16. They were recruited for work partly under coercion, but partly, due to the labor conscription, to “volunteer” to work for Telefunken. This allowed them to remain at home and be exempted from forced relocation for work in [the Third Reich].

[…]

The first transports of the workers from Łódź arrived in late summer 1944. It was planned that the new Telefunken plant will be located in the fortress Wilhelmsburg, which was supposed to provide protection from aerial attacks. Because at the moment of arrival of first transports with girls from Łódź the industrial park of the factory had not yet been completed, the girls were delegated for work for the local farmers.

One of the female workers recalls the moments, when the farmers chose “suitable” personnel: “Because the factory was not finished yet, we had to work for the local farmers. […] At one day, all Polish girls were forced to the city square. Interested farmers taxed them very carefully. Some even assessed their teeth! Every [farmer] tried to choose the strongest women. Nobody asked about agreement. They took us like a livestock to their farms.”²⁹ With the completion of production facilities in November 1944, the girls re‐commenced work for Telefunken.

Living and work conditions

The living conditions in Ulm were characterized by unsuitable accommodation in the camps, scarcity of food, harassment, and punishment. From the point of view of the company management, the full productivity of the plant was in the foreground. “Human material,” as the management reports and documents repeatedly state, could be “used for consumption”.³⁰ As the heads of Telefunken were under the greatest production pressure, they ensured only a minimum of living conditions that guaranteed survival.

Telefunken‐laborers in Ulm were accommodated in two main locations.³¹ First was the fortress of Wilhelmsburg, directly at the production site. In the southern part of the fortress were sleeping quarters for 600 to 800 workers as well administration offices, kitchen, canteen, and storage facilities. Production areas were underground in the basement.

The northern part of the fortress still housed barracks for the [Wehrmacht], which posed an additional risk for the forced laborers of becoming an object of unintentional bombardment. Another 600 girls from Łódź were located in the “Kepler‐Mittelschule”, a school building located in the northern part of the city.

Both quarters were unsuitable for accommodation of a larger number of persons. From the beginning of the war, the city administration in Ulm grappled with the problem of providing living places for the increasing number of forced laborers. The sudden transfer of more than a thousand additional persons in the final phase of the war only aggravated these difficulties. Therefore, both the Wilhelmsburg and the Kepler‐School had only a provisional character and lacked basic sanitary facilities. They were dark, cold, and leaky. Lack of water was especially severe.

This situation is vivid in the recollection of former forced laborers: “Rooms were cold. There was no electricity. It was dark, even during the day, because the windows had no glass, just paper. There was no water. Toilets were closed. The lack of water was very difficult. For the first time we understood what real thirst means. […] We couldn’t even wash our hands. The administration didn’t care that there were no toilets. We had to go to the attic.”³²

Due to the lack of living spaces, the girls had to live in cramped small rooms. For sleeping, only military bunk beds were provided. The rooms were scarcely equipped — a few double beds, a table, several stools, and closets. There were no stoves or other heating. Beds were equipped with sacks filled with sawdust. To cover themselves during sleep, each girl received two blankets.

The living conditions considerably deteriorated in the winter. On 17 December 1944, Ulm was the target of the severest aerial attack during the war. A number of city buildings were destroyed, among others the Kepler‐School.

Although no girls from Łódź lost their lives in the resulting fire, they had to be relocated to the Wilhelmsburg. It meant that the quarters had to be even more densely populated and girls had to share beds: “The beds were the same as the beds in the concentration camps. Bunk beds. We had to sleep in a bed in pairs. Beddings and blankets were always dirty.”³³

It also led to the further deterioration of sanitation in the camp: “The worst were hygiene conditions. We couldn’t wash properly. It just wasn’t possible in a room where there were a lot of people and only a small bowl of water. And so many women.”³⁴

(Emphasis added. Click here for more.)

In order to discipline the girls and motivate them for work, a system of daily terror was introduced. The camp’s superintendent, Captain Thalhofer, was particularly brutal in his treatment. He punished the girls indiscriminately, often abused them, and beat them or let his subordinates hit the victims.³⁵ Other guards followed this example.

Especially contacts between male and female workers provided opportunities for physical abuse: “Three girls visited us in our [male] barracks. They did not even sit down, when suddenly German female supervisor came in and started shouting. She was accompanied by two armed guards. She had a pistol in her hand. She started to curse in German. She used the wors[t] words to describe the girls. […] And with the hand with the pistol, she started to beat the girls in the head and face. She was spiting on them, she pulled their hair, she was kicking the girls. After few minutes, she sent the girls with guards back to their barracks. And she told us that next time, we will be also beaten by the guards.”³⁶

Severe living conditions were aggravated by a lack of appropriate food. The laborers were provided only minimal rations for survival and effective work. The daily diet consisted of products with insufficient nutritional value for physical work and retaining health.

Memories of the surviving girls still retain the always accompanying hunger: “And this disgusting food. […] In the morning 2 slices of bread, at noon cabbage soup. Cabbage turnip and potatoes — we mostly ate that. […] In the evening we got black cereal coffee and boiled potatoes with some margarine. That’s all.”³⁷ Recollections of other forced laborers support this testimony: “The diet: beets, jam from red beets, soup from snails, porridge with worms. So just hunger and no hope of improvement.”³⁸

The workers received no milk or other dairy products, also no fresh fruits or vegetables. Meat was a seldom addition to the meals. Mostly, girls supplemented their diet with products that they stole from the storages and surrounding fields or received from the guards or Ulm citizens. These were prepared in secret and shared among co‐workers living in the same room.

[…]

The municipal medical officer, Dr. Eduard Schefold (1880–1958), who was responsible for the provision of medical care in the camp, lacked empathy for the fate of the girls and did not try to improve the conditions in which they lived.⁴³ Among his greatest concerns were unwelcomed pregnancies among the girls. He denied Polish girls the right to reproduction and complained that, due to lack of space, abortions among Polish workers could not be conducted, which led to a situation women unrestrainedly having babies.⁴⁴

If it was no longer possible to prevent childbirth, pregnant women were sent to so‐called “maternity hospitals.” In Ulm, such an institution was also used as an abortion facility. In the “maternity hospital,” Polish toddlers were deliberately exposed to such catastrophic living conditions that the majority of them died within the first few months of their lives.⁴⁵

Sick girls were rarely admitted to hospitals. In most cases, they had to stay in the barracks for the duration of their illness. There were no isolated barracks for the sick, and even the simplest medication or wound dressing was difficult to find. This led in some cases to fatal consequences: “My roommate, who had a cold, later developed tuberculosis. She was with us from December to April […] but no doctor was there. When the Americans arrived, we took her to the hospital. Afterwards we wanted to visit her, but she has already died.”⁴⁶

[…]

The investigation of the fate of Polish female forced laborers from Łódź working for Telefunken in Ulm shows a system that aimed at the total exploitation of the workers towards ever increasing efficiency and lowering costs of production. Such exploitation was symptomatic for the last years of the war, during which the life and health of the foreign workforce was systematically ignored. Atrocious living and working conditions contributed to deteriorating health, outbreak of epidemics, and deaths.

Click here for events that happened today (August 19).

1923: Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto, one of Benito Mussolini’s educators, perished.
1934: The German referendum that year approved Adolf Schicklgruber’s appointment as head of state with the title of Führer.
1941: As Joseph Goebbels met with his Chancellor, the Axis captured Gomel and Kherson. Likewise, the Third Reich and the Kingdom of Romania signed the Tiraspol Agreement, rendering the region of Transnistria under control of the latter.
1942: The Axis successfully repelled Operation Jubilee: the amphibious Allied assault on Dieppe, France. Additionally, the Axis exterminated scores of Mountain Jewish families who remained in Menzhinskoe by machine gun fire, and it liquidated a workers’ ghetto in Kovel. Axis police teams also conducted house‐to‐house searches in the Kaunas ghetto.
1943: Axis defenses along the Mius River succumbed to a breach near Stalino (now Donetsk), Ukraine, and Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Oberstgeneral Hans Jeschonnek suicided. Less importantly, the Wehrmachtbericht daily radio report mentioned Paul von Kleist.
1944: Paris, France rose against Axis occupation with the help of Allied troops. Axis troops in the Falaise pocket in France received orders to break out, and Field Marshal Günther von Kluge committed suicide by taking cyanide near Metz, France after being relieved of his command and recalled to Berlin.
1945: Tōkyō told its troops that surrendering under the terms of a ceasefire would not be considered a loss of honour under the bushidō, which demanded fighting to the death. Thousands resultingly began laying down their arms as the Soviets landed on Maoka to deal with more Axis holdouts. (Coincidentally, the Kuomintang lost against the Communists in the Battle of Yongjiazhen as the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, took power in Hanoi, Vietnam.) On the other hand, Malayan nationalist leader and Axis collaborator Ibrahim Yaacob (who, despite his name, seems to have been a gentile) and his family escaped Malaya for Java. Hiroshi Nemoto also became the commanding officer of the Axis’s North China Area Army while still retaining his command over the Japanese Mongolian Garrison Army. At Mui Wo, Lantau Island, Hong Kong, Axis commander Lieutenant Chozaburo Matsumoto ordered several civilians nearby to be tied to stakes and beaten in retaliation for a Chinese assault. When company commander Lieutenant Yasuo Kishi returned to duty later that day, he ordered the arrest and beheading of village elders Tsang Sau and Lam Fook. Later in the evening, Matsumoto ordered further arrests.