page_title: Luftwaffe
section_title: Forced labor
hierarchical_section_title: Luftwaffe / War crimes and bombing of non-military targets / Forced labor
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. G.8501 A 211
context_page_description: The Luftwaffe was the aerial warfare branch of the Wehrmacht during World War II. Germany's military air arms during World War I, the Luftstreitkräfte of the Imperial Army and the Marine-Fliegerabteilung of the Imperial Navy, had been disbanded in May 1920 as a result of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which stated that Germany was forbidden to have any air force.
  During the interwar period, German pilots were trained secretly in violation of the treaty at Lipetsk Air Base in the Soviet Union. With the rise of the Nazi Party and the repudiation of the Versailles Treaty, the Luftwaffe's existence was publicly acknowledged on 26 February 1935, just over two weeks before open defiance of the Versailles Treaty through German re-armament and conscription would be announced on 16 March. The Condor Legion, a Luftwaffe detachment sent to aid Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, provided the force with a valuable testing ground for new tactics and aircraft. Partially as a result of this combat experience, the Luftwaffe had become one of the most sophisticated, technologically advanced, and battle-experienced air forces in the world when World War II broke out in 1939.
context_section_description: In 1943 and 1944, aircraft production was moved to concentration camps in order to alleviate labor shortages and to protect production from Allied air raids. The two largest aircraft factories in Germany were located at Mauthausen-Gusen and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps. Aircraft parts were also manufactured at Flossenbürg, Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Gross-Rosen, Natzweiler, Herzogenbusch, and Neuengamme. In 1944 and 1945, as many as 90,000 concentration prisoners worked in the aviation industry, and were about one tenth of the concentration camp population over the winter of 1944–45. Partly in response to the Luftwaffe's demand for more forced laborers to increase fighter production, the concentration camp more than doubled between mid-1943 (224,000) and mid-1944 (524,000). Part of this increase was due to the deportation of the Hungarian Jews; the Jägerstab program was used to justify the deportations to the Hungarian government. Of the 437,000 Hungarian Jews deported between May and July 1944, about 320,000 were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz and the remainder forced to work. Only 50,000 survived.
  Almost 1,000 fuselages of the jet fighter Messerschmitt Me 262 were produced at Gusen, a subcamp of Mauthausen and brutal Nazi labor camp, where the average life expectancy was six months. By 1944, one-third of production at the crucial Regensburg plant that produced the Bf 109, the backbone of the Luftwaffe fighter arm, originated in Gusen and Flossenbürg alone. Synthetic oil was produced from shale oil deposits by prisoners of Mittlebau-Dora as part of Operation Desert directed by Edmund Geilenberg in order to make up for the decrease in oil production due to Allied bombing. For oil production, three subcamps were constructed and 15,000 prisoners forced to work in the plant. More than 3,500 people died. Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia was also established for shale oil extraction; about 20,000 prisoners worked there and more than 1,500 died at Vaivara.
  Luftwaffe airfields were frequently maintained using forced labor. Thousands of inmates from five subcamps of Stutthof worked on the airfields. Airfields and bases near several other concentration camps and ghettos were constructed or maintained by prisoners. On the orders of the Luftwaffe, prisoners from Buchenwald and Herzogenbusch were forced to defuse bombs that had fallen around Düsseldorf and Leeuwarden respectively.
  Thousands of Luftwaffe personnel worked as concentration camp guards. Auschwitz included a munitions factory guarded by Luftwaffe soldiers; 2,700 Luftwaffe personnel worked as guards at Buchenwald. Dozens of camps and subcamps were staffed primarily by Luftwaffe soldiers. According to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, it was typical for camps devoted to armaments production to be run by the branch of the Wehrmacht that used the products. In 1944, many Luftwaffe soldiers were transferred to concentration camps to alleviate personnel shortages.
caption: Manufacture of V-1 cruise missiles and V-2 rockets in the Mittelwerk tunnels, resulting in the deaths of more than 12,000 people
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