Forced labor camp
In September 1942, the K&B company, which was active in landscaping and gardening, applied for a permit for the so-called "Kowahl & Bruns community camp" and built three barracks near the airport to accommodate 144 foreign civilian workers, as well as a combined washing and toilet barracks. Until 1945, the camp was occupied by forced laborers from Poland, Italy, France and the Netherlands.
The K&B company was commissioned in Hamburg to camouflage the airport, also produced concrete slabs for temporary buildings and was involved in clearing rubble. Most of the camp's workers were employed by the CHF-Müller/Röntgenmüller company (now Philips Medical Systems), at the time a supplier to the armaments industry.
One of the forced laborers, the Dutchman Theo Massuger, later described:
"When the Germans realized that their advertising leaflets, with which they wanted to lure workers to Germany, were not working, they thought of something else. Without a leaflet, there was no food for my parents and our ten siblings. So I was forced to go to Germany to work. I arrived in Hamburg in 1943 and ended up in the barracks on Wilhelm-Raabe-Weg a few months later. The beds were full of vermin, the winter was cold and we hardly had any work clothes. Every day except Sundays, I stood at a lathe at Röntgenmüller and all this with meager food, mostly consisting of turnip soup."
- Theo Massuger[1]
Kowahl & Bruns operated three more camps in Hamburg and developed into a large company for the construction and camouflage of military facilities. The company had three branches in Belgium, France and the General Government and employed over 2,000 people in 1944, mostly forced laborers. The company owner Emil Bruns was sentenced to three years in prison after the war in one of the Curiohaus trials because he had personally mistreated female forced laborers.[2]