Ruins of the Former Gerätebau Munitions Factory

The factories were built south of the Peterhof Inn in Margarethenholz in the Mühlhausen municipal forest on 22.5 hectares of land bought by the city on June 22, 1934, with funding from the Reichswehr Ministry. The plant consisted of several single-storey buildings with a basement and planted flat roofs and was surrounded by a 2.5 m high concrete wall. The main part of the system was made up of three reinforced concrete skeleton structures: the two double-angled, approx. 300 m × 25 m large production halls as well as an administrative building located in between, where there was also a testing and acceptance point for the Army Weapons Office. An asphalt road and a branch of the Mühlhausen tram led to the factory entrance.Gerätebau GmbH, Diedorfer Stieg 1, manufactured precision instruments and detonators. Initially, local skilled workers were employed, and later mainly Ukrainian and Polish foreign workers or “Eastern workers” as well as Jewish forced laborers from Poland and Hungary. These were assigned by the Buchenwald concentration camp and housed in the “Martha II” subcamp, a barracks settlement around 1.5 km to the east on the edge of the forest. The barracks also housed foreign workers and the SS guards and are still known today as B camps among the Mühlhausen population. After the end of the war, around 1,700 soldiers of the Soviet Army (GSSD from 1954) were stationed there.The factories were blown up in 1947 by order of the Soviet major Korolev. Ruins and rubble of the building and the surrounding wall have been preserved to this day under the emerged ash pioneer forest. A horse chestnut avenue in the middle of the mixed beech forest and old curbs along the driveway also remind of the work. The reinforced concrete slabs of the privacy wall were used as floor slabs for the beach basin of the Mühlhausen outdoor pool at the Schwanenteich.
(WIKIPEDIA)