Last time I checked, the Reeperbahn, if you're referring to the internationally famous red light district, was in Hamburg.
Oh, and on the subject of slave labour in Nazi Germany, a few notes from Airey Neave's
Nuremberg (ISBN 0 340 18128 1) are apposite here. From page 38, we have:
We had very little time to complete our task. In spite of the efforts of Alfried [Krupp]and his faithful staff, another ton of documents was discovered in the main administration building. It was impossible to process them at Hohe Bochum and they were sent by truck to the British War Crimes Executive at Bad Oeynhausen. Many of these documents found their way into the record of Alfried's trial at Nuremberg two years afterwards.
Gustav Krupp was always on the side of the Establishment. In a report to Philimore I wrote:
"Within a few weeks of Hitler's appointment as Chancellor, Krupp appears to have asked for and obtained interviews with him. From then on he appears as a supporter of the Führer."
I described his attitude as one of "flagrant opportunism".
Gustav was quite frank about it. I found the draft of a speech in 1936:
"We all know the reason for this gratifying rise in profits. The prosperity of our firm is inseparably bound up with the fate of our Fatherland ... it is a great satisfaction to the firm and all associated with it that we have a share in contributing to the re-arming of our people."
Later on, from the bottom of page 38 onwards, we have the following:
I thought of all those dead, nameless soldiers and workers on both sides for whom the Krupp family seemed to feel no responsibility. They had grieved for two of their sons killed in action, by my researches showed no sympathy for those beyond the Nazi pale. Gustav was anti-Semitic. Alfried, his successor, pursued the Nazi "extermination through work" policy, recruiting labour from the concentration camps. He expressly approved of the liquidation of "Jews, foreign saboteurs, anti-Nazi Germans, gypsies and anti-social elements". But he maintained that before they died, they should contribute something to the Fatherland.
Casson was the first to uncover the true horror of the Krupp slave labour programme in which others tried at Nuremberg were implicated. Evidence against Albert Speer, the architect of mass enslavement, showed that no less than 4,795,000 foreign workers were torn from their homes and forced to work for Hitler.
Alfried Krupp employed about 70,000 of these workers, a small proportion of the total, but they were treated with organised brutality. He used slave labour from Auschwitz in his own automatic weapons plant in sight of the crematoria and gaschambers. He had a howitzer plant in Silesia manned by Jews from the same concentration camp which he named the Bertawerk after his mother.
There are those who seek to excuse the Krupps. They claim that the Nazis forced them to employ foreign women and children under pain of arrest. This is quite untrue. Industrialists in Germany were given the choice of not employing foreign workers. Even Hitler was surprised that a company like Krupp should insist on doing so. A brief study of the Nuremberg documents confirms this.
Foreign workers in the Krupp factories were diseased and underfed. They did not achieve maximum production. "Naturally", said Alfried in an affidavit of July 1947, "we could not obtain from them the output of a normal German worker". He knew quite well that they were starving. He coldly told the tribunal, "The fact that complaints were frequently made on account of insufficient food for foreign workers ... is well remembered by me."
His employment of Jewish women and children in a camp at Humboldtstrasse near the works shows Alfried at his most inhuman. Shipments of Czech, Rumanian, and Hungarian Jewesses from Auschwitz, were penned in at night by SS guards and barbed wire. They marched to the factory in wooden clogs, to carry out work far beyond the capabilities of their failing strength. Their legs, that last winter of the war, were blue with cold and scarred by frostbite. They lived on a slice of bread and a bowl of watery soup. It was proved at Alfried's trial that they were horse-whipped by an SS man who struck at their eyes. A woman was blinded and at least one whipped to death.
Alfried's trial lasted from August 16th, 1947 until July 31st, 1948. The prosecution introduced 1,400 written exhibits and over 200 witnesses gave evidence. With his fellow directors he was tried on the same counts of the indictment relating to war crimes and crimes against humanity as the major war criminals, and sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment of which he served only five.
Later on, on page 40, we have:
Early in September Casson had arrested Fritz von Bülow, Krupp's chief slave driver, a stout man of fifty and lodged him in Essen gaol. He has been described as 'cultivated and sensitive'. Perhaps he was, but we did not see him in that light. He had invited the Krupp plant police "to enumerate especially difficult and dirty tasks" for foreigners.
From 1943 von Bülow supervised a large number of concentration and penal camps for foreign labour. He was assisted by a man called Nohles, the Gestapo chief, who committed suicide during Alfried's trial. Casson, who arrested Hans Kupke, the Oberlagerführer (camp commandant), who was interrogated about the deaths of many small children separated from their mothers.
We reported to the British War Crimes Executive all that we could find. I remember the evidence about the Ukrainian women in the winder of 1944, when there was often two feet of snow on the ground. They were confined in unheated barracks and awakened at four a.m. by jets of icy water. Once the prisoners were up, guards attacked them with solid rubber hoses, lashing at their breasts.
The sources of this information were Krupp employees interviewed at Essen and later at Nuremberg. Some, to their credit, helped the prisoners with food.
On a visit to the main administration building, I looked at a steel box about five feet high with a dividing partition. This was known as the "cage". I noticed two holes in the lid which was secured by heavy bolts. These were the only ventilation. What happened to recalcitrant slaves is best told by General Telford Taylor, American Chief Prosecutor at Alfried's trial in 1947: "Slave workers were crammed in a crouching position and left for periods of hours up to several days. A refinement of torture was to pour water during the winter weather on to the victims through the airholes in the top of the cupboard".
On one occasion three men were forced into the cage, on one the left side and two on the right. Their cries were unbearable to one witness who gave evidence at Nuremberg.
For Alfried Krupp (he snobbishly called himself Krupp von Bohlen) these horrors did not exist. He told the court that incidents of brutality were the result of incompetence by underlings. He knew quite well that the underfed and diseased slaves in his camps were guarded by thugs with Krupp armbands. Von Bülow, another "cultivated and sensitive" snob, witnessed beatings to "improve production". As for the dreadful cage, this was kept in the basement of the main administration building. Alfried's private secretary, Fräulein Ilse Wagner, told the tribunal she could hear the victim's cries as she sat at her desk.
So, basically, big German companies
did have a choice about whether or not to use slave labour, and this was established at Nuremberg during the trial. Moreover, Neave states that there was documentary evidence to confirm not only this, but to confirm that Hitler himself was surprised that Krupp GmbH should have chosen to make use of slave labour in its plants.
For the record, Neave was a central member of the British prosecution team at Nuremberg, and, responsible as he was for the direct processing of the evidence for the prosecution team, he presumably knew what he was talking about when he wrote his account.
More can be found on page 142:
Speer was one of the greatest production managers in history, but, to achieve these incredible results, he was ruthless in his use of human beings. The comic bald-headed Sauckel was only his deputy and Speer the most powerful minister in Germany. He was unorthodox, unconventional and "rode roughshod over the high military gentlemen". He was, I suspect, self-assured and arrogant as well as brilliant. It was certainly not his fault that Germany lost the war.
Speer did not appear to care how foreign workers lived or where they came from, provided they were properly employed. Hungarian Jews offended his Aryan susceptibilities but they were good workers. He did not bother about the international ethics of employing prisoners of war in his factories. We worked concentration camp inmates from seventy-two to a hundred hours a week, remarking unconcernedly at Nuremberg that in some plants under the control of Himmler there were "no limits".
Which points to the fact that a significant user of slave labour was, in fact, the SS. From page 117 & 118, we have:
The most infamous story concerning Funk was evidence of his knowledge that, from 1942, the SS had deposited large quantities of gold teeth, platinum and gold rings, diamonds, watches, earrings, spoons, knives and forks in the Reichsback. "Twelve kilos of pearls" arrived in one consignment. These deposits were used as security for loans to the SS to finance schemes for concentration camp labour. The jewellery came from murdered Jews ordered to hand over their property before they died.
Funk denied knowledge of the contents of these deposits even after the Nuremberg Trial. But earlier, on arrival at Mondorf, he had told Andrus, "I have been a bad man, Colonel, and I want to tell you about it".
Andrus continues:
"Funk then haltingly explained that he had been personally responsible for having Jewish prisoners murdered so that gold could be taken from their teeth without trouble. He had it knocked out of their mouths whilst they were alive, but if they were dead there was less bother".
I looked across at him, feeling ill.
He went on to say that he had given orders in all slave labour camps for the gold to be collected, and also eye-glasses, so that they would be used by Germans. He found that Jewish rabbis' robes contained precious metals in their embroidery, so of course he added these to the gold he was collecting in the Reichsbank for Germany's war effort.
Funk retracted this confession in the witness-box, despite evidence from an SS witness, Oswald Pohl, that he had visited the vaults with him and discussed the contents. in the course of sixteen special interrogations by the prosecution he denied all knowledge of these tragic 'securities'. He was not the only man to tell the truth at the moment of capture, when all seemed lost, and deny it later.
Basically, those companies that used slave labour,, did so in quite a few instances, on the basis of, to use Neave's words above, "flagrant opportunism". In addition, virulently anti-Semitic company bosses established their Party credentials with other leading Nazis, by allowing their firms to become part of the SS "extermination through work" programme, in some cases because they supported this programme ideologically, and Alfried Krupp was one of those who did.
