Riederloh I - II

About 80 kilometers southwest of Munich, there is a small town called Kaufbeuren, and there were between 1939 and 1945 two camps called Riederloh I and II. The first was established in 1939 and was adjacent to an ammunition factory built and owned by DAG (Dynamite-Aktien Gesellschaft). It was also DAG that ran the camp. Construction continued until 1941 and the labour force consisted of German workers living in barracks. Between 1941 and 1945, it was mainly prisoners from Poland, Soviet Union and Italian prisoners of war who sat in the camp and were used as slave workers in the ammunition factory. The second camp, about two kilometers east of the first camp, was established in September 1944 by the SS as a satellite camp to the Dachau concentration camp. The camp was relatively small and consisted of about 1,300 Jewish prisoners who had been brought there from Auschwitz. Their main task was to carry out slave labor in the munitions factory. About 475 of these prisoners died in the camp of either starvation, disease, maltreatment, slave labour or were murdered by the SS. Sick prisoners were sent to Kaufbeuren - Irsee where they were murdered if they did not recover in four weeks. After the war, parts of the camps became housing for displaced Germans from Czechoslovakia.