AUGSBURG (MICHELWERKE)

“Sometime during 1944 around five hundred Hungarian Jewish women came to Augsburg, where they were housed and put to work in the collection camps of the Michelwerke (Industriehof) Keller & Knappich. The appearance of these people, who were clothed in a kind of sack and shorn of their hair, was terrible.”1 This is the wording of a not-quite-error-free report by the Augsburg police directorate from the period after the war. It makes reference to the Michelwerke subcamp of the Dachau concentration camp, within which all 500 women were housed in the North Building (Nordbau) and not at Keller & Knappich. However, some of these Jewish women worked at this firm. The Michelwerke women’s camp existed in the Kriegs-haber district of Augsburg from September 7, 1944, through April 1945.2 The 500 women arrived in Augsburg in freight cars on September 7 from Hungary as well as from Hungarian areas of Slovakia at that time, the Carpatho-Ukraine and Transylvania. Their path of suffering had...