The Leipzig Armaments Manufacturer Hugo-Schneider-Aktiengesellschaft (HASAG)
HASAG was founded in 1863 in the east of Leipzig, specialising in the manufacture of kerosene lamps and burners. The company grew steadily and by the end of the 19th century had acquired a large site to the north-east of Leipzig, where it built a modern production facility. During the First World War, HASAG switched to the production of armaments, including infantry ammunition for the German army.
Restructuring of the company according to Nazi ideas
When the Nazis came to power, HASAG was ideologically and economically restructured. The company’s supervisory board was “Aryanised”, meaning that all Jews were dismissed. In order to continue to do good business, it was important to cultivate close relations with the new rulers. In 1935, Paul Budin, a committed Nazi, became general director of HASAG, and under his leadership the production of armaments became the company's core business. In addition to ammunition, grenades and mines, the company designed and produced portable anti-tank rocket launchers known as Panzerfäuste.
Saxony's biggest armaments factory during the Second World War
In addition to its headquarters in Leipzig, HASAG maintained several branches throughout the German Reich. In 1939, it also took over a number of former Polish armaments companies, initially administering them on behalf of the Wehrmacht and finally acquiring them on favourable terms in 1943. In 1944 alone, HASAG produced more than five million Panzerfäuste. Production on this scale was only possible through the use and exploitation of tens of thousands of forced labourers.
Systematic exploitation of forced labourers
HASAG began the mass use of foreign forced labourers early on. With the outbreak of war in 1939, civilian forced labourers and prisoners of war were conscripted for production and housed in HASAG barracks directly adjacent to the factory site.
Between 1940 and 1945, at least ten thousand civilian forced labourers, prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners from twenty different countries had to work at the main factory in Leipzig. To the north of the factory site was the HASAG Leipzig satellite concentration camp, a branch of Buchenwald, where more than five thousand female concentration camp prisoners were interned. During 1944, HASAG established satellite concentration camps at six other production sites.
Forced labour for HASAG in occupied Poland
As early as 1942, the company ran its own forced labour camps for Jewish men, women and children, recruited directly from the ghettos set up by the German occupiers, at several production sites in the Radom district of occupied Poland. The more than 20,000 Jews were used in the production of armaments, where they had to handle toxic chemical substances without any protection. Thousands died in these camps from the disastrous conditions or were murdered.
At the other HASAG sites, too, forced labourers had to perform extremely hard and harmful physical labour in twelve-hour day and night shifts, six days a week, in the production of grenades, ammunition, mines and Panzerfäuste. Most suffered from malnutrition, inadequate medical care and violence at the hands of their German guards. In total, some 45,000 men, women and children were used as forced labourers in the HASAG munitions factories in the German Reich and occupied Poland. More than almost any other private company, the group profited from the exploitation of tens of thousands of Jews and other concentration camp prisoners.
The end of the war and expropriation
HASAG continued production in Leipzig until shortly before the end of the war. On 18 April 1945, the Allies reached Leipzig and liberated thousands of forced labourers from the camps. After the end of the war, the Leipzig factory continued to produce household goods for a time, while at the same time the dismantling of the factory site began. After being expropriated in 1946, HASAG was finally struck off the commercial register in the summer of 1948.
Very few of those responsible for the use of forced labour at HASAG were prosecuted after the war. It is still not known what happened to the former managing director, Paul Budin. Hardly anything remains of the former HASAG production facilities and forced labour camps in Leipzig.
Since 2001, a memorial has been erected on the former site of the company to commemorate the history and fate of the former forced labourers.
