9. Siemens Saw Nothing Evil in Participating in the Nazis’ “Death Through Work” Program
As the Third Reich steadily geared up for war and a rematch to settle German grievances about the results of WWI, demands for weapons, ammunition, and all kinds of war material increased. There was a hitch, however: as German workers were taken from factories and drafted into the military, a labor shortfall began to grow steadily. So German manufacturers like Siemens turned to slave workers. The first pool of forced labor were the native political prisoners in the country’s concentration camps.
The pool of potential slave workers mushroomed when stunning victories and conquests in WWII’s early years brought tens of millions of foreigners under German thumbs. From 1940 onwards, Siemens relied heavily on slave labor from occupied countries, prisoners of war, Jews, Gypsies, and concentration camp inmates. The company saw nothing evil in that. Indeed, Siemens was a chief participant in the Nazis’ “death through work” program, which squeezed labor out of those marked for elimination before they perished. It ran factories inside concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, Flossenburg, Sachsenhausen, and others.