AGFA Commando



The Agfa Commando was a satellite camp of the Dachau concentration camp. Around October 1944 the camp housed about five hundred women, mostly political prisoners. About three hundred of them came from Eastern and Southeastern Europe, mainly Poland. Two hundred Dutch women came from the Dutch concentration camp Vught, after a one-month stay in Ravensbrück. They were used as slave laborers in the Agfa camera factory in München-Giesing (part of the IG Farben group). 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.

The women were housed in an apartment block, part of which had been bombed out before it was completed. The complex was surrounded by a high barbed wire fence with watch towers on the four corners. In the center court of the U-shaped building was a wooden barrack mess hall. The prisoners slept six to seven women per small room.

Their ten-hour workday started after standing in formation at 5 a.m. and a twenty-minutes march from the camp to the factory. Poorly dressed and on wooden clogs, the march became a trial slogging through the deep snow in the cold 1944 winter, with thick clumps of snow sticking to their clogs. They endured regular bombardments. Their only food was a bowl of thin, lukewarm cabbage soup. Fortunately, the factory was heated because of the temperature-sensitive instruments. Since the prisoners worked along with civilian German women, the prison guards did not use clubs as they did in Ravensbrück.

According to former prisoners' testimony, camp commander Kurt Konrad Stirnweis was a reasonable man. Nevertheless he was sentenced to two years work camp after the war. His assistant, the Latvian was sentenced to four years imprisonment for his cruel treatment of the prisoners.

Production at the factory was halted on April 23, 1945. The allied bombings and the advance of the 7th US Army had cut off the supplies of raw material and distribution of the products. The camp commander was ordered to evacuate the prisoners and begin their Death March into southern Bavaria. Against his SS-superiors orders, Stirnweis halted the march on April 28 just outside the town of Wolfratshausen. He persuaded farmer Walser to shelter about 450 of the remaining prisoners in his hayloft.

On May 1, 1945 Stirnweis surrendered to the US Army and asked for protection of the prisoners. After about a week on the farm, being fed by the generous Walser couple, the women were relocated in the nearby abandoned labor camp "Föhrenwald", from where they were repatriated by the Red Cross.

The Dutch Contingent of the Agfa Commando
Little is known about the mostly Polish prisoners. Many of them were not political prisoners but taken as slave labor in reprisal for the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The 21 Slovenian women were political prisoners, mostly (Communist) Yugoslav Partisans.

Most of the Dutch women had been active in the resistance and had formed bonds already at the 's-Hertogenbosch Michelin factory (part of concentration camp Vught), where they had to make gas masks. They were a cohesive supportive group, they went singing into the cattle cars in Vught and walked singing into Ravensbrück concentration camp. Out of the two hundred Dutch Agfa Commando women, "only" two died just before the war's end.

The estimated death number of the seven hundred Dutch women who remained in Ravensbrück was between two hundred and three hundred. One of the better-known victims was Corrie ten Boom's sister Betsie. As from July 1944 the mail privileges had been taken away, both the prisoners and their loved ones in Holland were kept in suspense. An occasional released Ravensbrück prisoner, such as Corrie ten Boom, could bring news out of Ravensbrück, but they did not know where the two hundred women were transferred to.

The Strike
In January, 1945 the 14-miles road from the main camp in Dachau had become impassable as a result of the allied bombings. The meals now became the responsibility of the Agfa management. The soup deteriorated by the day, and few women were spared digestive problems and complications from undernourishment. Disease was rampant, there were outbreaks of typhoid fever, scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Ending up in the main camp's dispensary was close to a death sentence.

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. The Slovenian women joined the protest. Strikes were unheard of in the concentration camps, so this would lead to severe punishments. In the end the women made their point that they just could not work under the conditions of a starvation diet and constant bombing raids. The chief Gestapo agent Willy Bach came down from the headquarters in Dachau and tried to find the instigators, but no one came forward. In the end Mary Vaders was picked out and thrown in the Dachau bunker cell for seven weeks solitary confinement. She came back damaged but unbroken. The other Dutch and Slovenian women were punished with hours standing in formation in the court yard.

Religion
The religious meetings that were held in Vught continued in secrecy in Dachau. One of the Dutch prisoners, Rennie de Vries-van Ommen, recollects the strength they obtained in these encounters in her biography. Since the women were not under guard in their rooms, they held regular devotions and produced their own song books. They translated parts of the Old Testament from a German Bible that was lent to them by a civilian factory worker.

The US War Press in Dachau
In April 1945, a group of twenty-two war correspondents was quartered in a villa on the Isar river in Grünwald, a Munich suburb. Just before the women prisoners were transferred from the Walser farm to Föhrenwald, two of the men came looking for women to help in their kitchen. Rennie de Vries-van Ommen and Nel Niemandsverdriet accepted their offer.

Most of the correspondents had come up together from North Africa through Italy. War correspondent Ernie Pyle and cartoonist Bill Mauldin often were among them. Their job was to document the atrocities of Dachau and to accompany government VIPs and several Hollywood executives. One of the latter was film director William Wyler.

The press was under the command of Colonel Max Boyd, his next in command was Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Jay Vessels (Minneapolis, Mn.), Air Corps Public Relations Officer. Claude Farmer was the driver and Don Jordan the cook. Some of the journalists were Sholem Asch's son Nathan Asch, AP reporter working at the Seattle Times Harry Cowe, Charley Green (from St. Paul, Mn.), Art Everett (from Bay City, Mi.) and Paul Zimmer (from Oakland, Ca.).

Specific Personalities of the Agfa Commando

 * Joukje Smits-Grandia: one of the most decorated Dutch female resistance survivors. She and Rennie van Ommen-de Vries often preached the homely at their Sunday services. Joukje received, among other rewards, the War Medal of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
 * Simone Hoa-Guilissen-Hoa: A Belgian who became a prominent European architect. A collection of photographs of her work is in the International Archive of Women in Architecture at Virginia Tech.