The concentrationcamp Nibelungenwerk in Herzograd, Saint Valentin, is
highly officially inaugurated as a branch camp of the concentration camp
Mauthausen at August 21st, 1944. The prisoners of the concentration camp
work in the tank produciton of the Nibelungenwerk.At that time the Nibelungenwerk belonged to the Steyr Daimler Puch AG. Nowadays, the Nibelungenwerk is a part of the Canadian supplier of automotive systems Magna International.
Apart from an administrative building, the national socialists have built ten shacks for 800 to 1.480 prisoners 300 meters (ca. 1.000 feet) of the works premises.
These prisoners must compensate the acute manpower shortage at the Ni-Werk, since more and more younger men are sent to the front line.
Russians, Poles and Belginas are the prisoners of the concentration camp. Also Jews are brought there by the hundreds from Mauthausen. The camp administration registrated altogether 15.000 prisoners in the three years.
Reinforced by criminals, so-called Capos, the camp is guarded by the feared SS. Accordingly brutally, the concentration camp is run.
»The works' guards dealt utterly cruelly with the concentration camp internees. Some were killed (hitten to death), while security chief Beck set blood dogs onto others«, says a documentation of the historian Dr. Renate Mayerhofer. »Hardly anyone could offer resistance against what was done to one. Nevertheless, there were some attempts of sabotage. Escaping prisoners were either shot immediately and burried or catched and hanged.« mentions Mayerhofer.
A hospital was put in one of the air-raid shelters of the concentration camp. According to eye-whitnesses, dead people were thrown into wooden boxes behind it. Probably, also medical experiments were accomplished at this »hospital ward«.
After American air scouts had spied out the works, bomber groups followed. A large part of the Nibelungenwerk was razed to the ground. The production facilities were transfered to secure tunnels in Ebensee, Gusen and Melk. The prisoners had to move too. Therefore, only few prisoners were accomodated in the concentration camp Saint Valentin-Nibelungenwerk.
