Retracing Path of Wartime Slave Laborers

An unmarked gravel path winds through new-growth forest on the fringe of this Bavarian town to a hidden vista of maniacal delusion: a massive concrete bunker where in 1945 the doomed Third Reich was plotting to rescue the lost cause of world domination.

What remains of the concrete shield that was to stretch the length of five football fields and hide massive underground production of the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter now stands in remote and silent tribute to 4,000 prisoners worked to death in the last brutal months before the Nazis were defeated.

“We slept on the ground with a little bit of straw and one blanket for four men. We worked 12 to 15 hours a day with virtually nothing to eat, and the SS men and German criminals who guarded us were always driving us to work harder,” recalls Vernon L. Rusheen, a retired Woodland Hills printer and Holocaust survivor.

Rusheen’s wretched odyssey of survival included three months as a slave laborer at Muehldorf, where he carried lumber to the huge construction site, propelled by some instinct to plod on through the unendurable, “just like an animal, thinking about nothing.”

Like many of the estimated 240,000 people still living who toiled for the German war machine as an alternative to execution, Rusheen has followed the thrust and parry of negotiations concerning a compensation agreement for these survivors with a mixture of disgust and resignation.

A final accord to distribute $5 billion among the victims of German industries’ worst abuses--like the Muehldorf camp, run by the long-since-bankrupt Polensky & Zoellner construction works--had been expected to crown a summit between President Clinton and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder this week.

But German demands that the U.S. outlaw future Holocaust compensation claims as the price of an agreement have thwarted the negotiations between German representative Otto Lambsdorff and U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart E. Eizenstat. Washington can give no such ironclad promises about what an independent judiciary will do, although it has assured Berlin that it would advise any court considering a claim to refer the petition to the collective compensation fund.

Not a Question of Money

For the dwindling number of survivors, the persistent roadblocks to legal closure are most troubling because they reflect an inability of their abusers to make amends even 55 years after the war’s end.

“Most survivors are now in their 70s and 80s. They don’t need money anymore--they’ve had to take care of themselves this long and can still do so. What we consider more important is a full and honest disclosure, not just for Jews but for all the victims,” the 75-year-old Rusheen says. Speaking by telephone from his home, he calculated his likely share of the compensation, in any case, would be about 4 cents for each hour he worked under backbreaking conditions.

Deported in 1940 from Berlin to Auschwitz at age 16, Rusheen was the only one in his Jewish family to survive the war’s horrors. Indeed, he was one of only two of the 1,200 prisoners with whom he was shipped to the notorious death camp to survive long enough to make the forced evacuation march westward to Dachau in January 1945.

As Russian troops were encroaching from the east and Allied bombing raids had taken their toll on the Third Reich’s main munitions plants, fanatical efforts to turn around the lost war drove Nazi arms production into hiding and induced the labor-short producers to enslave workers from concentration camps. Those conscripted from the notorious Dachau death camp north of Munich to have their last labor value wrung out at Muehldorf made their first excavations only in October 1944, as bitter winter weather beset these lower reaches of the Bavarian Alps.

Historians and chroniclers of the Holocaust estimate that half of the 8,000 laborers sent to Muehldorf for the aircraft factory project died of exhaustion, disease or starvation during the mere six months the camp was in operation.

Rusheen recalls how exhausted laborers often passed out or lost their balance while pouring concrete for the factory’s protective arches, which rose more than 100 feet--about seven stories--above the excavated assembly level.

“It was forbidden to try to rescue them. They just suffocated in the wet concrete and were left there,” he remembers. “It became a giant grave site, with people buried everywhere.”

Too hurried to waste labor on bearable conditions for their slaves, the Nazi SS overseers of the Muehldorf project simply marched their prisoners to and from a forest encampment two miles away, where the workers slept in crude earthen dugouts.

With only wooden clogs and veritable rags separating their emaciated bodies from the fierce elements, many died of exposure or the typhoid fever that swept the foul camp, which had only a cold-water tap and outdoor latrines for sanitation.

“A life had no value. People were completely exhausted and would just fall down and die,” says historian Erwin Hamberger, who maintains a small exhibit in Muehldorf’s town center about the infamous local role in the Nazi era. “It was all carefully accounted for in the company’s records. So many units of manpower rented and so many lost each month--as if they were talking about electricity costs or supplies of paper.”

Names of 2,342 Confirmed Dead

Another survivor of the Muehldorf horrors, Max Mannheimer of Munich, has fought for and won assurances from the federal and local Bavarian government that what remains of the bunker will be left in peace in the forest and eventually turned into a Holocaust exhibit or documentation center.

“No one knows exactly how many people died there, but we have the names of 2,342,” says Mannheimer, now president of the Dachau Survivors’ Assn., which is spearheading efforts to turn the Muehldorf site into a memorial.

Only one of seven arched sections of the facility is still standing, as the U.S. troops who liberated eastern Bavaria in late April 1945 tried to blow up the appalling monument to Nazi wickedness after the war. Despite 120 tons of TNT dropped down every orifice of the giant cavern, the blasts did little more than create an immovable mass of steel-reinforced rubble that has since become overgrown with shrubs and trees.

“The decision has been made to preserve it, to make it approachable, so people can see what extremes and horrors were in the minds of these people,” historian Hamberger says of the jumble of concrete about a mile through dense forest from the nearest country road.

“The war was lost,” he says. “The Allies were already in Normandy before construction started, yet [the Germans] embarked on this project anyway in hopes they could turn it around. It was grotesque, completely insane.”

Berlin More Willing to Confront Nazi Past

Negotiations about slave-labor compensation, which have been moving in fits and starts for years and purportedly were concluded with a December declaration by Berlin that $5 billion would be earmarked, have helped draw attention to the Muehldorf memorial plans, Hamberger says.

“Money is always a problem, but there has been a tremendous change in atmosphere over the last year or so,” he says of the current leftist government’s greater willingness to confront the Nazi past. “We need to move quickly on this, as the survivors are dying out and many want to make a contribution in the commemoration of this site.”

For those like Rusheen and Mannheimer, leaving a legacy that is a lesson for future generations means more than 4 cents for every hour of their suffering.

“If they ever agree on compensation, some of the money should go for this,” Rusheen says.