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Forced Labour Camp Memorial Site at Neuaubing

The mass exploitation of people from all over Europe through forced labour was one of the major crimes of the Nazi regime. Eight barracks of a forced labour camp still exist in the Munich suburb of Neuaubing. There were around 30,000 such camps all over the German Reich. As the last surviving camp complex in southern Germany, this site is a high-ranking piece of historical testimony. The camp belonged to the German Railways (Reichsbahn) Repair Works (RAW) Neuaubing. Since 1945, it has had various functions including housing for railway employees and is now a domicile for tradesmen, artists and educational institutions. In 2011, Munich City Council decided to create a memorial site at the RAW, and in 2015, the city purchased the entire ensemble. An exhibition documenting the living and working conditions endured by the forced labourers will be housed in one of the barracks.

In Barrack 5 of the former Forced Labour Camp Neuaubing, an exhibition of the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism is to be created. Visitors will be able to explore the site with an audio guide for schools even prior to the o

Porta Polonica

Forced Labour in Munich

Around 13 million foreign labourers were compelled to work for the Nazi regime. In Munich they worked for arms companies such as Krauss-Maffei, BMW and Dornier, but they were also employed by many smaller companies and businesses. The state also used forced labour, to build roads for example. More than 120,000 “civilian foreign workers” are recorded as working in the city in 1944. In addition, thousands of prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates were forced to work.

Altogether, 150,000 forced labourers worked in Munich during the war. Most of them were civilians from the Soviet Union (known as Ostarbeiter or Eastern workers), especially from Ukraine. But many also came from Poland. While initially some of them volunteered for work, as the war went on the Germans increasingly brought people from the zones of occupation to Germany by force and on a massive scale.

Without this systematically organised forced labour the Nazi regime would not have been able to wage war for so long. Even today, this mass-scale crime is insufficiently commemorated. Compensation payments were a long time coming and were made only to certain groups.

Conditions at the RAW-Camp Neuaubing

Most of Munich’s forced labourers were housed in collective accommodation at more than 400 sites. Living conditions differed, but almost everywhere the inmates suffered from poor hygiene, harassment, a lack of privacy, hunger and homesickness.

The barracks camp in Ehrenbürgstraße served as accommodation for forced labourers at the RAW Neuaubing from mid-1942 onwards, if not earlier. As far as we know, about 1,000 people were interned there. The majority came from the Soviet Union. Others were from Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Croatia, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. How they were treated depended on their country of origin.

Among the “Ostarbeiter” and Poles there were entire families, including children and grandparents. Some of the camp inmates intermarried and had children. But we also know of fourteen deaths, some of them suicides. Dozens fled the camp when it was bombed by the Allies in spring 1945.