The women assembled ignition timing devices for bombs, artillery ammunition and V-1 and V-2 rockets; they used every opportunity to sabotage the production.

In January 1945, citing the lack of food, the prisoners conducted a strike, an unheard-of action in a concentration camp.

Production ended on 23 April 1945 and the women marched toward Wolfratshausen, where their commander eventually surrendered to advancing American troops.

At the onset of war, the SS increasingly employed concentration camp prisoners in armaments factories and these specific labor commands created a network of subcamps throughout Germany.

[2] From 1941, Agfa Camera works produced exclusively for the Wehrmacht and employed a growing number of prisoners from Dachau.

[3] Most likely they were returned to the main camp in the evenings during the first years, and the subcamp in München-Giesing, where the laborers[Note 1] assembled timing devices, was not established until September 1944.

[4] About five hundred prisoners from Eastern and Southeastern Europe, mainly Poland, arrived from Ravensbrück concentration camp on 13 September 1944.

[9] In May, 2015, the stories of a number of Dutch Dachau political prisoners were published as Geen nummers maar namen.

One of the Dutch prisoners, Blockälteste Rennie van Ommen-de Vries, recalls the strength they obtained in these encounters in her biography.

In September 1944, Kurt Konrad Stirnweis, a Waffen-SS lieutenant and World War I veteran,[12] was transferred from an artillery detail near Freising to the main camp at Dachau; he was subsequently placed in charge of Agfa-Commando.

[14] When the factory took over the distribution of the soup and started watering it down, while at the same time trying to raise the production quotas, the Dutch women spontaneously crossed their arms and stopped their work.

In the end, Mary Vaders, who had arrived from Ravensbrück on October 15, 1944,[16] was selected at random and incarcerated in the Dachau bunker cell for seven weeks of solitary confinement.

As the war drew to a close and American personnel began to encircle the region, production at the factory halted on 23 April 1945.

[13] The women were given a small sausage and a piece of bread for the journey, with their standard bowl of soup for their previous evening meal.

Against his SS-superiors' orders, Stirnweis halted the march on 28 April just outside the town of Wolfratshausen and further persuaded a farmer named Walser to shelter the five hundred remaining prisoners in his hayloft.

Despite specific orders to the contrary, he did not resume the march, but let the women shelter in place until the American troops drew closer.

After about a week on the farm, being fed by the generous Walser couple the women were relocated nearby, in the abandoned labor camp Föhrenwald.

[13] His deputy, a 29-year-old Latvian named Alexander Djerin,[17] was sentenced to six years imprisonment for his cruel treatment of the prisoners, commencing 9 May 1945.

In April 1945, a group of twenty-two war correspondents was quartered in a villa on the Isar river in Grünwald, another Munich suburb.