…but not off topic.

In Frankfurt (which STILL doesn’t have a DP…) the other day and was taken by strips of fabric on the phalanx of plane trees lining the banks of the Main river.

It’s an action to commemorate the victims of forced labour at the Adlerwerke 70 years ago.

The Adlerwerke was a major manufacturer of bicycles, cars, motorbikes and typewriters located in Frankfurt and – like so many large engineering firms – employed slave labour during world war II.

In the case of the Adlerwerke, there were 1600 deportees, mostly from Poland and mostly incarcerated following the Warsaw ghetto uprising who were housed in appalling conditions on the factory grounds, working 84 hours a week.

Only 50 appear to have survived.

And of course, no-one from Adlerwerke was prosecuted – the director being awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany a few years later. (This just makes my brain hurt…)

There are 1200 bands of concentration camp uniform fabric, each bearing a name or number and they’ll be there for the 7 months that the prisoners had to endure their purgatory.

Started in March and they’re still there…

Good article here from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – Google Translate it.

02 Jun This entry was published on 2 June, 2015 at 08:00. It’s filed under DNQM (DEFINITELY not quite Mainz), History and tagged Adlerwerke, frankfurt. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.