AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

Wooden barracks on...

A sub-camp at the Donnersmarck mill in Zabrze (German: Hindenburg), belonging to Vereinigte Oberschlesische Hüttenwerke AG. At the beginning of August 1944 a first transport of about 350 women prisoners, most of them Polish Jews, arrived from Birkenau at the sub-camp that had been built there. They were quartered in wooden barracks surrounded by electrified barbed wire with four guard towers. About 70 Czech Jewish men arrived in October and were quartered in a separate barracks. SS-Unterscharführer Adolf Taube was the director. A dozen or so Wehrmacht soldiers helped the SS guard the sub-camp. The women prisoners worked producing artillery ammunition and grenades, as well as welding bomb carts. The men were employed as janitors. In January 1945, the prisoners were evacuated on foot to Gliwice, from where the women were transported by rail to Gross-Rosen and further into the depths of Germany, and the men to Buchenwald

Source: Auschwitz from A to Z. An Illustrated History