28th October 1933
AEG Aktiengesellschaften

AEG

Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (General Electricity Company)

Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft AG was a German producer of electrical equipment. It was founded in 1883 by Emil Rathenau as the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft für angewandte Elektricität in Berlin.

AEG donated 60,000 Reichsmarks to the Nazi party after the Secret Meeting of 20th February 1933 at which the twin goals of complete power and national rearmament were explained by Hitler. They joined with other large companies such as IG Farben, Thyssen and Krupp in their support of the Nazis, especially in promoting re-armament of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine

During the war itself, they were to use large numbers of forced labourers as well as concentration camp prisoners, under inhuman conditions of work.

AEG worked extensively with the Nazi party in Poland. AEG was forced to relinquish Kabelwerk Krakow, a cable manufacturing plant, to the Nazi party. Kabelwerk Krakow was located in Krakow-Plaszow and used forced Jewish labour manufacturing cables from 1942 to 1944.

In 1943, AEG began to relocate goods and evacuate workers. Goods were relocated to various places, including Berlin and Sudetenland. When installing electric and lighting systems for the Waffen-SS training grounds in Dębica, AEG used forced labor from Jews placed in the Pustkow labor camp located in south east Poland.

During World War II, an AEG factory near Riga used female slave labour.

AEG was also contracted for the production of electrical equipment at Auschwitz concentration camp.

AEG used slave labour from Camp No. 36 at the new sub-camp of Auschwitz III and also known as Monowitz, called 'Arbeitslager Blechhammer'. Most of them would die in 1945 during the death marches and finally in Buchenwald.

AEG was a major supplier of grips for P38 pistols manufactured by Walther Arms, Mauser, as well as on the early wartime Spreewerk P38s.

In an effort to express regret for its use of Jewish slave labour in World War II, AEG joined with Rheinmetall, Siemens, Krupp, and I G Farben to pay DEM 75 million in reparations to the Jewish Claims Conference.

In 1945, after the Second World War, the production in the factories in the western sectors of Berlin - what today is the building of the headquarters of DW (TV) Deutsche Welle - and Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Mulheim an der Ruhr resumed and further new works were erected, among others an Electric meter plant in Hameln.

1948: The AEG factories Kassel (FK) were founded on the site of the former MWK Motorenbau Werk Kassel at Lilienthalstrasse 150 in Kassel/Hesse/Germany. The first factory part was the high voltage switchgear factory (HSF), later the refrigerator factory (KSF), the ticketprinter factory (FDF), the isolating material factory (IF) as well as the worldwide accepted high voltage institute (HI) were founded. In the early sixties more than 5000 people worked for AEG in Kassel.

Source: Wikipedia

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