The Jews Went to Work? Organization Todt

[Nazgul]

Which leaves you with a chronological gap and is circumstantial evidence of the mass killings, causing a huge reduction in the Jewish population.

This is not a discussion on mass killings but the fact that Jews were used in making munitions. There were 9 camps at the two places mentioned both serviced by the Fplo train schedules. The munitions factories were established later. Fplo 587 Scheduled to depart on September 30, 1942 from the Polish town of Sedziszow, so after the muntions factory was established.

[Nessie]

Which leaves you with a chronological gap and is circumstantial evidence of the mass killings, causing a huge reduction in the Jewish population.

This is not a discussion on mass killings but the fact that Jews were used in making munitions. There were 9 camps at the two places mentioned both serviced by the Fplo train schedules. The munitions factories were established later. Fplo 587 Scheduled to depart on September 30, 1942 from the Polish town of Sedziszow, so after the muntions factory was established.

It is a discussion on whether OT provides evidence of millions of Jews still alive in 1944-5. It clearly does not.

You all ignore the evidence Sanity Check posts, that proves declining populations;

"Hans Frank noted at a meeting of 24 August 1942 that the feeding of 1.2 million Jews would 'fall away' from the autumn while 300,000 would be retained as workers..."

Along with populations that are far lower, that would be expected if millions were not being killed;

"In early 1943 the districts in Latvia reported the following employment of Jews - all documents are on the Arolsen Archives
5.1.43 GebK Mitau employing 289 Jews
10.1.43 GebK Dünaburg employing 454 Jews
10.1.43 GebK Kurland (Libau) employing 841 Jews
10.1.43 GebK Riga, Arbeitseinsatz; Hier: Judeneinsatz: 10,405 Jews [total, 11,999 Jewish workers]"

You cannot square the evidence of falling populations and only a few thousand Jews being used for labour, with the claim that the Nazis were resettling millions in the east and employing them in labour camps.

[SanityCheck]

In 1941, Jews in the GG were basically banned from armaments work.

This is false information. I do not think the word basically is appropriate considering hundreds of thousand Jews were making munitions including bombs. Here are two examples applicable to the GG.
Jewish Labour Camps for munitions at SkarzyskoKamienna. This is one of the camps mentioned on Fplo 587 documents en transt to Treblinka arbeitslagers. The camp belonged to the German
Hasag concern. It was established in August 1942 and was liquidated on
August 1, 1944. Altogether, 25,000--30,000 Jews were brought to Skarzysko-Kamienna. link
According to the German researchers there were 7 Forced Labour Camps for Jews in Czestochowa all working for HASAG making munitions. One closed in 1944 while the other 6 closed in 1945.

No, it's not at all false information, the records of the Armaments Inspectorate of the GG state this quite explicitly *in 1941*. The growing shortage of Polish workers because of impressments for Germany forced a significant change *in 1942*.

Felicja Karaj in her study of Skarzysko-Kamienna makes it quite clear that Jewish workers only began to be sent there in 1942, this was pretty much the case for all of the Distrikt Radom labour camps, and was also true for new plants like the Heinkel factory at Budzyn, which was only established in October 1942.

The numbers classified as working in direct armaments in the GG was still relatively low. Hilberg extracted the key figures for 1943-44 in the first edition of his book. I quoted these in the 2011 HC white paper.

The Reichsführer-SS, however, was unable to force through the mass murder of Jews employed in armaments factories or in directly war-related production. Osti, the major employer at Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki, did not manufacture armaments, and accordingly could not hold on to its workforce when the SS panicked. Nor could the Deutsche Ausrüstungswerke at Janowska justify its continued existence as its output involved light manufacturing only. By contrast, the forced labour camps at the oil refineries of Boryslaw and Drohobycz in the Galicia district , as well as the forced labour camp at Budzyn in the Lublin district which produced aircraft components for Heinkel , were all left untouched by ‘Erntefest’, as were the forced labour camps for heavy industry and armaments in the Radom district. Indeed, the number of Jewish forced labourers employed in what was adjudged ‘direct’ armaments work rose from 22,444 in October 1943 to 27,439 in May 1944, as Jewish slave labourers engaged in non-armaments work were transferred to the arms factories, including the aforementioned 4,000 prisoners transferred from the Krakow district to Skarzysko-Kamienna in November 1943, and after 1,500 Jews were transferred from the Łódź ghetto to Skarzysko-Kamienna in March 1944.

On the Osti firm, see see Jan-Erik Schulte, ‘Zwangsarbeit für die SS. Juden in der Ostindustrie GmbH’ in: Norbert Frei et al (eds), Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Oeffentlichkeit. Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik. Munich: KG Saur, 2000, pp.41-74.
Jahresbericht 1943 DAW Lemberg, BArch NS 3/146, p.34.
On these camps see Rainer Karlsch, ‘Ein vergessenes Grossunternehmen. Die Geschichte der Karpaten Oel-AG’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 2004/1, pp.95-138, as well as the older work by East German historian Hanns-Heinz Kasper, ‘Die Ausplünderung polnischer und sowjetischer Erdöllagerstätten im Gebiet der Vorkarpaten durch den deutschen Imperialismus im zweiten Weltkrieg’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1978/II, pp.41-64. The rescue activities of Berthold Beitz are now the subject not only of extensive discussion in Sandkühler, ‘Endlösung’ in Galizien, but also two recent biographies: Joachim Käppner, Berthold Beitz: die Biographie. Berlin: Berlin-Verl., 2010; Norbert F Pötzl, Beitz: eine deutsche Geschichte. Munich: Heyne, 2011
Lutz Budrass, ‘ “Arbeitskräfte können aus der reichlich vorhandenen jüdischen Bevölkerung gewonnen werden’. Das Heinkel-Werk in Budzyn 1942-1944’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1, 2004, pp.41-64; Wojciech Lenarczyk, ‘Budzyn’ in Wolfgang Benz and Barbara Distel (eds), Der Ort des Terrors. Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager. Band 7. Munich: C.H. Beck, 2007, pp.89-92.
Adam Rutkowski, ‘Hitlerowskie obozy pracy dla zydow w dystrykcie radomskim’, Biuletyn ZIH 17/18, 1956, pp.106-128; cf. Seidel, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik, pp. 353-365. There are now several detailed studies of individual camps. On Skarzysko-Kamienna see Felicja Karaj, Death Comes in Yellow. Skarzysko-Kamienna Slave Labor Camp. Amsterdam, 1996; on the Kielce camp see Felicja Karaj, ‘Heaven or Hell? The Two Faces of the HASAG-Kielce Camp’, Yad Vashem Studies XXXII, 2004, pp.269-321 ; on Starachowice see Browning, Remembering Survival.
Piotr Matusak, Przemysl na ziemiach polskich w latach II wojny swiatowej, Tom 1, Warsaw/Siedlce, 2009, p.207; Hilberg, Vernichtung, p.563.
027/1/Bi/Si, Überführung von 1500 Juden in das Generalgouvernement, 18.3.1944, I.A. gez Biebow, BArch B 162/21665 unpag., also published in Tatiana Berenstein, Artur Eisenbach and Adam Rutkowski (eds), Eksterminacja Zydow na ziemiach polskich w okresie okupacji hitlerowskiej. Zbior dokumentov, Warsaw, 1957, p.256; cf. Karaj, Death Comes In Yellow, p.66.

Italics are post-2011 additions, I happen to have this updated file open.

Skarzysko-Kamienna required many extra workers because conditions in the chemical part of the ammunition factory were so awful, literally poisonous. This was 'Werk C', one of three sub-plants in the complex. Turnover was likely over 100% in 1943-mid 1944 before the evacuation of the workforce. While claims of 18-23,000 deaths there may be overblown, the known transfers with big reinforcements from the Lodz ghetto, Plaszow and Majdanek in the last twelve months of its existence topped up the camp at a high level, with thousands vanishing inside the factory and not being sent elsewhere until the evacuation.

Mortality wasn't nearly as high in other industrial/armaments camps in the Radom District; Christopher Browning established that it was about 25% (IIRC) in Starachowice over 1942-44.

The records of the Armaments Inspectorate in the GG and the subordinate Armaments Commands in Radom etc became available in NARA T77 in August 2022, the Bundesarchiv digitised the corresponding original files in RW 23 a year or so later. They confirm the conventional understanding as spelled out in the studies of individual camps as well as the Radom District - Robert Seidel's Deutsche Besatzungspolitik im Distrikt Radom was published in 2006 and was made open access practically a decade ago at Digi20.

Those 1944 figures ought to give you pause. Even if you can accept the harsh conditions in ammunition factories like Skarzysko-Kamienna which killed thousands of Jews, the armaments camps were not big enough to have soaked up the 330,000 deported from the Radom District in 1942 to Treblinka.

[Nazgul]

Those 1944 figures ought to give you pause. Even if you can accept the harsh conditions in ammunition factories like Skarzysko-Kamienna which killed thousands of Jews, the armaments camps were not big enough to have soaked up the 330,000 deported from the Radom District in 1942 to Treblinka.

The Fplo documents show multiple other labour camps for Jews on the same route, not just munitions factories.
TNT poisoning was not just confined to the Reich. The Canary Girls were British women who worked in munitions factories during World War One and World War Two.

They were known colloquially as canaries because their skin turned yellow due to toxic jaundice caused by the phosphorus used to make TNT, often leading to premature deaths.
I doubt if your Radom scenario is accurate but closer to Nessies failings as a historian.

[SanityCheck]

The Fplo documents show multiple other labour camps for Jews on the same route, not just munitions factories.

List those for the Radom District, indicating the type of work and employers.

I seem to recall you highlighting Sedziszow as one "stop" in the past, this had only 350 workers when it was closed and the survivors sent to Skarzysko-Kamienna at the end of 1942, at latest by February 1943. Tomaszow Mazowiecki ZALfJ was closed in May 1943 and 650 survivors sent to Blizyn. There's no hint in the existing sources that anyone was unloaded at Sedziszow to be employed by construction firms on roadbuilding for a few months. Look them up on USHMM Encyclopedia, vol II for ghettos has a lot of information on the numbers held back temporarily for labour. Sedziszow entry here:
https://muse.jhu.edu/document/2530

From a compilation of data on ZALfJ I made in 2006, which incorporated the website data in its previous version, there were virtually no ZALfJ which weren't absorbed into the industrial camps or SS camps in the Radom district in 1942-3.

[Nazgul]

Look them up on USHMM Encyclopedia

Thank you for your clarity and independent thinking.

[Stubble]

To be fair, it makes a valuable cross reference to see if something new has been found, and it also helps by giving some terms to search in period documents for.

I hate reading the USHMM encyclopedea, but, they do exist, and there is ink on the page, and there is some truth in some of the ink.

[Nessie]

...

Those 1944 figures ought to give you pause. Even if you can accept the harsh conditions in ammunition factories like Skarzysko-Kamienna which killed thousands of Jews, the armaments camps were not big enough to have soaked up the 330,000 deported from the Radom District in 1942 to Treblinka.

Have you got any figures for the Jewish population of the camps, all types of camp, after the Lodz ghetto closed in 1944?

[SanityCheck]

The Fplo documents show multiple other labour camps for Jews on the same route, not just munitions factories.

List those for the Radom District, indicating the type of work and employers.

(since we're now speaking of clarity and independent thinking)

[SanityCheck]

...

Those 1944 figures ought to give you pause. Even if you can accept the harsh conditions in ammunition factories like Skarzysko-Kamienna which killed thousands of Jews, the armaments camps were not big enough to have soaked up the 330,000 deported from the Radom District in 1942 to Treblinka.

Have you got any figures for the Jewish population of the camps, all types of camp, after the Lodz ghetto closed in 1944?

By October 1944 there were very few ZALfJ in Poland outside the WVHA KZ system. The only one to be liberated with a signiicant number of inmates was Czestochowa - as far as I can remember. Most camps outside the KZ system as of July 1944, along with most KL-Aussenlager inside Poland, were evacuated into it from July onwards.

[Nazgul]

By October 1944 there were very few ZALfJ in Poland outside the WVHA KZ system. The only one to be liberated with a signiicant number of inmates was Czestochowa - as far as I can remember. Most camps outside the KZ system as of July 1944, along with most KL-Aussenlager inside Poland, were evacuated into it from July onwards.

This is due to the western drive of all camps as the war progressed from the Soviet side.

1942

1945

[SanityCheck]

That's not a list, nor is it quantifiable without text. Try again.

[Callafangers]

That's not a list, nor is it quantifiable without text. Try again.

It is the same data/source as from the original post in this thread. For the GG specifically:

[Total known Jewish labor camps in each GG district:]

Silesia = 213
Reichsgau Wartheland = 205
District Galicia = 164
District Lublin = 126
District Radom = 93
District Krakow = 84
District Warsaw = 72
Reichsgebiet = 40
District Bialystok = 7
Reichsgau Sudetenland = 17
Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen = 8
Reichsgau Oberdonau = 1

What is not known, for the most part, is the size of these camps. There are at least some confirmed to have had inmates numbering in the thousands but others were as low as in the dozens or hundreds.

Of the 1,030 total, here is some of the data which I found most important:

459 of these entries indicate the camp closing date is only assumed based on the time of its "last mention" ("letzte Erwähnung")
204 were reported (or assumed) closed no earlier than sometime in 1944 (with even mid-to-late 1944 not being uncommon)
20 were reported closed in 1945
About 10-15% have no known closing date at all
346 of the 1,030 entries have no map location due to missing/insufficient information (many others have only an approximate location)

To recap:

• More than half (459 "last mention" only, plus ~120 totally unknown) of the total camps known at all to have been within the GG have no known closing date, and about half of these were still mentioned into 1944, some even into 1945.
• Information overall is remarkably vague, reminding us of the original thesis of this thread: it is farfetched to interpret the available evidence as ruling out Jewish presence by the hundreds or even thousands at many of these camps
• While this vagueness is broken down numerically here for the GG, it is even worse for camps further East, where administrative units (e.g. OBL) were virtually non-existent, as also evidenced in the OP
• And as Nazgul rightly points out, Jews were also apparently shifting West, further complicating your efforts to diminish the count

Overall, you're very much limping on this one, despite attempts to deflect via utilization of anecdotes, isolated "gotchas" and the like. The bigger picture (the best compilation of raw, comprehensive data to-date on these Jewish labor camps, despite your nitpicking) flies in the face of your challenges thus far.

Just sayin'.

[SanityCheck]

That's not a list, nor is it quantifiable without text. Try again.

It is the same data/source as from the original post in this thread. For the GG specifically:

[Total known Jewish labor camps in each GG district:]

Silesia = 213
Reichsgau Wartheland = 205
District Galicia = 164
District Lublin = 126
District Radom = 93
District Krakow = 84
District Warsaw = 72
Reichsgebiet = 40
District Bialystok = 7
Reichsgau Sudetenland = 17
Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreußen = 8
Reichsgau Oberdonau = 1

What is not known, for the most part, is the size of these camps. There are at least some confirmed to have had inmates numbering in the thousands but others were as low as in the dozens or hundreds.

Of the 1,030 total, here is some of the data which I found most important:

459 of these entries indicate the camp closing date is only assumed based on the time of its "last mention" ("letzte Erwähnung")
204 were reported (or assumed) closed no earlier than sometime in 1944 (with even mid-to-late 1944 not being uncommon)
20 were reported closed in 1945
About 10-15% have no known closing date at all
346 of the 1,030 entries have no map location due to missing/insufficient information (many others have only an approximate location)

To recap:

• More than half (459 "last mention" only, plus ~120 totally unknown) of the total camps known at all to have been within the GG have no known closing date, and about half of these were still mentioned into 1944, some even into 1945.
• Information overall is remarkably vague, reminding us of the original thesis of this thread: it is farfetched to interpret the available evidence as ruling out Jewish presence by the hundreds or even thousands at many of these camps
• While this vagueness is broken down numerically here for the GG, it is even worse for camps further East, where administrative units (e.g. OBL) were virtually non-existent, as also evidenced in the OP
• And as Nazgul rightly points out, Jews were also apparently shifting West, further complicating your efforts to diminish the count

Overall, you're very much limping on this one, despite attempts to deflect via utilization of anecdotes, isolated "gotchas" and the like. The bigger picture (the best compilation of raw, comprehensive data to-date on these Jewish labor camps, despite your nitpicking) flies in the face of your challenges thus far.

Just sayin'.

In 2006, I copied the data for all of these camps from the previous website, and for the GG compiled them into a table in Word, organised by district, with the database number and columns for all details. I also compared with Georg Tessin's Verbaende und Truppen Bd 16, unit locations by Wehrkreis and occupation region, Tessin was clearly using the same source which we know to be the ITS 1979 Verzeichnis.

The Warthegau and Upper East Silesia camp complexes were discussed in considerable detail in Wolf Gruner's 2006 book Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis. Indeed, in 2003 I took part in a residential workshop at USHMM along with Wolf Gruner, discussing forced labour - my interests at the time were primarily in non-Jewish forced labour,Soviet civilians working for the Wehrmacht, but I'd been discussing ZALfJ and ghettos with the USHMM staff, especially Martin Dean, who edited the encyclopedia vol II and was also constantly referencing how many ZALfJ there were in the Warthegau, but how small they were and how they shifted around a lot.

The numbers of camps do after all have to be presented alongside the sources and data for how many Jews had been registered in these regions, and whether there was any evidence of transfers in. Silesia, as one example, had registered 90,000 Jews (going from memory but this is a document in Sybille Steinbacher's Musterstadt Auschwitz) before any deportations began, while in the Korherr report, p.13, the Organisation Schmelt was identified as using 50,570 Jews, of which 42,382 were 'stateless' (i.e. Polish) and 8,188 'foreigners', which fits with the known selections at Cosel from various transports out of western Europe to Auschwitz in the summer/autumn of 1942. The Schmelt camps were absorbed into KL Gross-Rosen (see Bella Gutterman, A Narrow Bridge to Life, 2008) or KL Auschwitz III at the end of 1943/beginning of 1944, with Blechhammer the largest (see a 2024 study by Susanne Barth which is open access).

The Korherr report, p.13, similarly notes 95,112 Jews in the Posen (Warthegau) area in ghetto and camp work, mostly Polish; on p.11 it recorded 87,180 Jews in the Lodz ghetto, which means the camps in the Warthegau at that time could have had as few as 7,932 workers. This is not a lot for 205 camp locations, but most of those had ceased operating. While the Lodz ghetto was very much a work ghetto by the turn of 1942/43 one can expect some not to have been counted as workers. There are plenty of documents about the existing labour detachments in 1942-43 in the Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt records since it took over the finance side administering the receipt of pay for workers and paying out some costs. So there's a 2005 study in Polish of Jewish forced labour in the Warthegau by Anna Ziołkowska. The ZALfJ outside the Lodz ghetto were almost entirely closed down at the end of August 1943 and the inmates transferred to Auschwitz, where they were often sent out to new sub-camps of what was shortly known as KL Auschwitz III. The SS in effect grabbed one set of workers to help build up their KZ workforce (which also meant a slightly higher than usual selection for work ratio for these transports).

So that's a nominal 418 ZALfJ accounted for quite easily, since the regional statistics and documentation do not allow any of those with 'loose ends' to have been places of employment for thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Jews.

The same is true of the Galicia district, since Katzmann tells us in his report from the end of June 1943 that there are only 21,000 Jews left in work camps.

One issue with the database is it seems to count camps for men and women separately when the descriptions indicate they were the same camp, and might note that the women's 'camp' was really just 10 female prisoners assigned to Lagerarbeiten (i.e. presumably cooking, cleaning, clothes-washing and so on).

That casts doubt on the validity of your numbers if the camps aren't named and listed.

Another pattern with the Government-General is a lot of early camps for land reclamation or working for the Wasserwirtschaftsinspektion. These were mostly closed down with a network around Sobibor in Chelm county a significant exception. Deportation transports to Sobibor were certainly selected for these camps, including Slovakian Jews, but the network was shut down in spring 1943.

Other types of work left statistics in documents; these exist for Jews employed in road building and for the railways (also mainly construction). In June 1942 there were 18,365 Jews working in road building in the GG, of which 2545 were in the Lublin district (Bodgan Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung, p.294). There were 15,383 Jews working for the railways (Gruner, Jewish Forced Labor, p.264), a document about this asking that these workers not be deported is in a recently digitised file and dates from September 1942.

Since many of these kinds of construction camps held only a few hundred workers, one can rack up quite a few camps from such relatively small numbers (61 camps with 300 workers for the 18,365 Jews employed in roadbuilding, as an example).

The type of work therefore matters. It also indicates where to look for sources. The document noting 15,383 Jews employed by Gedob came from a file of the Reichsverkehrsministerium. The employment of Jews in building up the railways in the GG and annexed territories was discussed earlier in files of the Reich Labour Ministry, while there are further files of the General of Transport in OKH which cover the 'Otto' program, the codename for the 1940-41 build-up which was still in use in 1943, which would be worth checking to see if workforces are ever discussed. The Government-General central authorities definitely discussed the 'Otto' program in department reports through to 1944. District authorities also left files, the document cited by Musial on Jews in roadbuilding from June 1942 was from the records of the Governor of the Lublin District.

A decision to beef up those 18,365 Jews employed in roadbuilding in mid-1942, just before the acceleration of Aktion Reinhardt, would have shown up somewhere. The hypothetical 61 camps could have received 1,000 extra workers each - but there's no evidence of such a largesse. The Korherr report counted 297,000 Jews in the GG at the end of 1942, the March 1943 census counted about 203,000 Jews (from memory), in both cases still mainly in Galicia. If Jews were employed by non-SS agencies, they would be included.

The SS likely did not report on how many Jews were in Majdanek for the census - SS camps could easily become 'extraterritorial'. The SS also progressively strove to take over Jewish forced labour and use it only in its camps. Thus, Globocnik counted 45,000 Jews in forced labour camps of the SS in the Lublin district in June 1943. This is after the census, and after various ghettos and camps had been dissolved and workers transferred. The 45,000 figure may or may not include Majdanek. But it would certainly include Poniatowa, Trawniki, Budzyn, Krasnik, Dorohucza, many of which had received a significant boost from the Warsaw ghetto uprising deportations, and which were being further boosted by selecting Dutch Jews deported to Sobibor.

Wehrmacht (Army and Luftwaffe) employment of Jews in 1942 is something I've been exploring for a few years now, alongside identifying German corporations setting up in the GG, seeing where the line can be drawn between economics and military logistics. There's nothing so far indicating the Army held onto a significant Jewish workforce (I'm sure there were some remnant camps with a hundred here and a hundred there, but not 10s of 1000s), while memoirs and testimonies match up with known Luftwaffe facilities around Warsaw, but the work detachments were in this case returned to the Warsaw ghetto just before the Stroop action/Warsaw ghetto uprising, one memoirist who'd worked for the Luftwaffe ended up in Budzyn in the Lublin district.

SS policy was stated and restated by Himmler: he wanted in July 1942, October 1942, May 1943 and June 1943 to reduce the number of Jews in the GG to the lowest level possible, and for any key workers to be held in camps, preferably under SS control. The Wehrmacht was quite clear this was the case in August-September 1942, and the Wehrmacht commander of the GG, von Gienanth, lost his job after protesting to try to keep more Jewish workers. This paper trail makes it very unlikely that the SS did any deals to provide more Jewish workers to less immediately war-critical employers. Armaments interests slowed the trend down. SS control also meant that Jewish workers in light industry and less war-critical sectors, such as the textiles firms taken over by Osti in 1943, could be eliminated quite easily if Himmler got the heebie-jeebies about Jews as a security threat, which he did after the Sobibor revolt in October 1943, ordering 'Harvest Festival' the next month. Which is 43,000 Jews who vanished alongside the remaining Jewish workers in Lwow-Janowska in the same month.

The only certain cases of Jews being taken from transports to the Reinhardt camps in 1942 - and thus included in the Hoefle-Korherr figures - are
1) the workforces inside Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka
2) some extracted from transports to SS-Sonderkommando Treblinka (Treblinka II) for SS-Arbeitslager Treblinka (Treblinka I), amounting to hundreds as far as can be determined
3) selections on arrival at Sobibor for the camps of the Wasserwirtschaftsinspektion in Chelm county, who were 'returned' in spring 1943 and deported back to Sobibor

There's currently no evidence of Cosel-like stops before reaching the Reinhardt camps for workers to be extracted; all the descriptions of actions indicate selections at the departure point with labourers held back and sent separately to camps.

[SanityCheck]

Just to be clear, the Organisation Todt as such did not operate in the Government-General until 1944. OT-Einsatzgruppe Russland-Sued was split during the 1944 retreats into a new OT-Einsatzgruppe Karpathen with some commands going south, i.e. to Army Group South Ukraine, whle other parts evidently retreated into Galicia with Army Group North Ukraine. At that moment, Speer extended Russland-Sued's responsibilities to encompas the GG, and had to notify Hans Frank in the process (the decrees are in several files).

Before then, the GG's central administration departments oversaw any construction work for roads, railways or other purposes, unless carried out directly by the Wehrmacht or SS-Police who had their own construction administrations. The setup was basically the same as in the Reich, the annexed territories of western Poland, and further east, in that construction firms could well be brought in as contractors, while Speer did retain some oversight as general plenipotentiary for production. But the contracts and relations were civilianised, not paramilitarised as with the OT at the front (Einsatz Jakob).