In spring 1944, Günther Quandt traveled from Berlin to attend a roll call in his honor at the Cegielski weapons complex in Poznan. He had bought the expropriated arms works for DWM after first receiving it in trusteeship. Günther expanded the original plants and built a new factory there, making it one of the largest arms and ammo complexes in the Third Reich. His upgraded plants made flamethrowers, air torpedoes, artillery cannons, machine guns, and on-board weapons for the Ju 88 bombers, which were among the Luftwaffe’s most important combat aircraft. There was almost no limit to DWM’s immense manufacturing prowess in the Polish city. Even as late in the war as April 1944, the factory was manufacturing some 400 million infantry bullets.
For this, Günther relied on as many as twenty-four thousand people in Poznan to perform forced labor, a historian later estimated. Tuberculosis was a common affliction among these workers at the plant. Those who worked in the foundry had to endure smoke, fire, and temperatures of up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit. True medical care was available only to Germans. Polish workers received some basic treatment but were refused care if it was deemed too expensive. Children as young as twelve had to work night shifts and perform grueling manual labor; the plant security guards and their commanding SS officer often beat up these youths. Some seventy-five people performing forced labor were executed at the plant.
Speaking before Cegielski’s largely enslaved workforce, Gauleiter Arthur Greiser showered Günther and his firm with praise, comparing them to another legendary weapons producer. “The Wartheland [a Nazi-named region of occupied Poland] is proud of DWM’s presence! Where would we be without Krupp, without DWM? Yes, with all its branches here in the east and west . . . and in the whole of the Greater German Reich, the DWM today represents the same power as Krupp, and the name ‘Quandt’ therefore has just a good a sound as the name ‘Krupp’ and is rightly feared by all our enemies around the world.” Günther followed with a speech of his own, and quipped: “While people thought we were making cooking pots, we were already preparing for the Führer’s war in 1934.”
One German forced into labor at the plant who witnessed this scene was Reinhardt Nebuschka. He had worked as the artistic director of a theater in Poznan, but back in the summer of 1940, he had crossed the wrong person. While visiting Harald in Poznan, Magda had stormed into Nebuschka’s office to demand that he fire the stage actress her son was seeing. Nebuschka refused and was arrested by the Gestapo a few months later. He was forced to work, of all places, at Günther’s DWM plant in Poznan. Nebuschka later claimed that Goebbels had given the order “to finish me off.” And yet, after witnessing Günther’s speech at the plant, Nebuschka wrote letters addressed to Goebbels and Göring, accusing Günther and his factory executives in Poznan of shifting food rations, intended for Polish laborers and Russian prisoners of war, to Berlin. After sending the letters, Nebuschka was once again arrested by the Gestapo and moved to Fort VII, a prison in Poznan that also was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis in occupied Poland. He survived prison, returned to Germany, and soon wrote another letter detailing what he had witnessed at Günther’s factory in Poznan. That letter, however, was addressed to someone else: America’s chief prosecutor at Nuremberg.