German Earth and Stone Works

[1][2][3] DEST, founded on April 29, 1938, in Berlin, was administered by the WHVA for the purpose of procuring building materials and organizing slave labor and overseeing quarry operations.

The Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937), Flossenbürg (1938), Mauthausen (1938), Natzweiler-Struthof (1939), Gross Rosen (1940) and Neuengamme (1940) concentration camp sites were chosen because of their proximity to soil suitable for making bricks, or due to the close proximity of a brickworks factory or stone quarry.

Human labor was used cruelly, becoming one of the main tenets of war crime charges in the Nuremberg Trials.

The director of the program, SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, who was stationed in Berlin, was sentenced to death for war crimes in 1947 in Nuremberg, and executed in 1951.

This was underlined by its industrial park at St. Georgen and Gusen that made the SS a key supplier of aircraft fuselages (Bf 109, Me 262), carbines and machine guns to companies like BFW, Messerschmitt and Steyr-Daimler-Puch.

Wiener Graben quarry at Mauthausen : the "Stairs of Death"; prisoners were forced to carry granite blocks, some weighing up to 50 kg (110 lb) up 186 steps.