In labour camps, most inmates were used for slave labour.
There was a policy of ‘death through work’. Even though this work
may have been useful for the German war effort, their lives were expendable
as far as the Nazis were concerned. When they could no longer perform useful
work, they would be taken to the gas chambers after one of the many ‘selections’
that took place.
As well as the maintenance work, road building and quarrying that the prisoners
were made to do for the SS, many large German companies made use of their labour.
Frequently the inmates were marched out of the camps, through towns to private
factories. Some of the industries were vast, such as the multimillion pound
consortium IG Farben, which established a rubber works near Auschwitz.
