61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

Table 7: Proportion of foreign workers in the Swiss subsidiary companies
investigated and seen as «important to the war effort» in March/April 1943
Company Total Foreign Share
workforce workers in (%)
AG d. Eisen- u. Stahlwerke (Georg Fischer),
Singen
2 127 704 33,1
Vereinigte Aluminium-Giessereien, Villingen 349 118 33,8
Aluminium-Walzwerke Singen (AWS) 2 256 664 29,4
Brown, Boveri & Cie. (BBC), Mannheim 5 714 1 693 29,6
Aluminium GmbH Rheinfelden 1 658 622 37,5
Lonza-Werke Waldshut 1 496 623 41,6
Comparative figure: Total of workers in the
upper Rhine armaments
inspection district (Baden and Alsace)
158 690 26 876 16,9
Sources: BA-MA, RW 20-5/39, information for Georg Fischer, Vereinigte Aluminium-Giessereien,
AWS, BBC and the upper Rhine armaments inspection district taken from a list of the Freiburg and
Mannheim armaments command, situation as at 30 April 1943; GLA, 237/24389; information for the
other companies taken from a letter from Schopfheim Chamber of Commerce to the Baden Ministry of
Finance and Economic Affairs, 10 March 1943.
One thing is sure: companies did not have to be coerced into taking forced
labourers. On the contrary, the dramatic shortage of labour meant that
companies − including Swiss subsidiaries − made active efforts to take on some
of the forced labourers. It is true that a few businesses rejected the «Eastern
workers» allocated to them on the grounds of «health problems and skills
shortages, and because of their young age», but in most such cases there were
no substitutes. The companies therefore had to accept the workers allocated to
them whether they liked it or not, even if, as in the case of BBC, the forced
labourers were seen as only a «somewhat doubtful replacement» 17 for the
specialist workers who had been called up to serve in the Wehrmacht.
This «process of habituation» and «workforce opportunism» also allowed
concentration camp inmates to be used as workers. Within the companies
studied in more detail by the ICE however, this appears not to have been the
case, with the exception of BBC. It is true that we do not know of any concentration
camp inmates being employed in the main BBC works in Mannheim
and Heidelberg, unlike Daimler-Benz, but there is evidence of the use of slave
workers in at least one case and it is highly likely that they were used for another
project: the BBC subsidiary Stotz-Kontakt employed prisoners from the
Buchenwald concentration camp over several months, and it is also highly likely
that concentration camp inmates were used during the construction of the
power station built by BBC for the IG Farben plant in Auschwitz.
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