Founded in 1847 in a Berlin backyard by Werner Siemens (‘von Siemens’ from 1888 onwards) and Johann Georg Halske, the company ‘Telegraphen-Bauanstalt Siemens & Halske’ received its first major order in 1848: the transmission of messages between the Prussian court in Berlin and the National Assembly in Frankfurt am Main using the new pointer telegraph the company had developed. From then on, lucrative orders, technical discoveries and patents resulted in the company’s rapid expansion. Despite substantial losses as a result of the First World War, the company continued to develop into a diversified enterprise under the leadership of the company founder’s son, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, going on to become one of the world’s five leading electrical engineering corporations in the mid-1920s. Siemens took over the former meter works Isaria-Zählerwerke AG at Hofmannstraße 51 in Munich in 1927/28, converting the premises into a production facility for telephone systems.
The corporation profited considerably from government armaments orders from 1933 onwards, increasingly developing electrotechnical and optical equipment for military purposes. Searchlights, binoculars, field telephones and control and communications equipment were manufactured for the Wehrmacht, for example. Siemens was also temporarily involved in aircraft engine construction for the Luftwaffe. By contrast, production for civilian purposes came to an almost complete standstill. Between 1935/36 and 1940/41 the company was able to increase its production of goods ‘vital to the war effort’ by 81%. When Carl Friedrich von Siemens died in 1941, Hermann Göring declared that his name would be “associated with the development of German armaments for all time”.
Since production at Siemens was expanded while members of the core workforce were conscripted to the Wehrmacht during the Second World War, the resulting labor shortages were made up for with the deployment of tens of thousands of forced laborers. The latter included not just numerous enslaved civilian workers but also an increasing number of POWs and inmates from Buchenwald, Flossenbürg and Auschwitz Concentration Camps from 1942 onwards. It was not only in Munich that Siemens maintained its own forced labor camps. The comparatively low share of foreigners among the total workforce at the Siemens plant in Munich in spring 1944 – just 11.7 % – indicates that electrical engineering development work was mainly done here by skilled specialists, since unskilled laborers would have been less suited to this task. Meanwhile, forced laborers accounted for almost two thirds of the workforce at the major Munich armaments factories such as BMW (aircraft engines) and Rathgeber (railroad carriages) by this time.
In response to the air attacks, the corporation relocated numerous production facilities to regions that were less exposed, also setting up a dense network of production sites in the immediate vicinity of concentration camps such as Groß-Rosen and Sachsenhausen. In 1942 a Siemens camp was established directly on the concentration camp grounds in Ravensbrück, where imprisoned women and girls manufactured components for field telephones, measuring devices and submarines. The labor provided by the forced deportees and concentration camp inmates enabled the corporation not only to maintain its rate of production during the war but to actually increase it by the summer of 1944.
When the management of Siemens learned of the Allies’ plan to divide Germany into occupation zones, it moved its headquarters to Munich in February 1945 so as to make sure the corporation survived. By the time the war came to an end, it had resulted in Siemens losing four-fifths of its assets. The production facilities in the Soviet zone of occupation were expropriated and to some extent dismantled and removed, but in the US zone the military government permitted limited activities again at the end of 1945. Siemens’ corporate headquarters have remained in Munich ever since.
In the early 1960s, the Jewish Claims Conference (JCC) was able to assert a claim for compensation payments of around seven million deutschmarks against Siemens for Jewish forced laborers who had been interned in concentration camps. Having re-established itself as a global player, the corporation successfully saw off further legal action for decades. It was not until class action lawsuits were filed by former forced laborers for compensation payments in the USA in the late 1990s that Siemens responded: in 1998 Siemens AG set up its own ‘Humanitarian Relief Fund for Former Forced Laborers’ and became a founding member of the ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ initiative launched by German industry in 1999. According to Siemens, a total sum of approximately 150 million euros has been paid to compensate former forced laborers since 1962.
