KZ-Außenstelle Walldorf was one of the lesser-known but brutally efficient satellite camps of Natzweiler-Struthof, created during the final phase of the war when the Nazi regime was desperate to fuel its military projects. It operated for less than four months—August to November 1944—but in that short time it chewed through the lives of 1,700 Jewish women, most of them Hungarian, most of them transported from Auschwitz after surviving earlier selections. Their purpose in Walldorf was simple and merciless: build the runways and service roads for the jet-fighter aircraft the Nazis hoped would save them.
The camp was set up in the forest near the village of Walldorf, just south of Frankfurt am Main, and only a few kilometers from the expanding Frankfurt Flughafen. The Luftwaffe and the SS had designated the area for a major construction project: hardened, extended runways capable of handling the Messerschmitt Me 262—the world’s first operational jet fighter. The Me 262 required long, reinforced surfaces for takeoff and landing, and Germany needed them fast. The women brought to Walldorf were the expendable labor force to make that happen.
The prisoners arrived in August 1944 after a chaotic transport from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many had already survived the annihilation of the Hungarian Jewish community earlier that summer. They were marched under guard into a fenced-off patch of forest, where crude barracks, pit latrines, and watchtowers had been thrown together. SS-Männer and female guards (Aufseherinnen) ran the camp with the usual mix of indifference, violence, and daily humiliation. Food was minimal: watery soup, scraps of bread, and occasional ersatz coffee. Disease, starvation, and exhaustion were constants.
Every day the women were marched several kilometers to the airport worksites. There they hauled gravel, broke stone, pushed overloaded wheelbarrows, mixed cement, and laid the foundations for runways and taxiways. The work was bone-shattering—ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day. They labored in heat, rain, and cold, under the whip and rifle butt of overseers. Collapse meant a beating. Repeated collapse often meant being removed from the work detail and left to die in the camp infirmary, which had neither medicine nor heat. The SS distinguished between those still “useful” and those who were no longer worth feeding.
Despite everything, the camp did not collapse into total chaos. Prisoners tried to help each other, shared scraps of food, and kept each other alive however they could. A handful survived simply because the camp’s lifespan was so short. By late November 1944, Allied air attacks on Frankfurt intensified, and the Me 262 program was unraveling. The SS shut down Walldorf, forced the surviving women on a death march, and dispersed them to Ravensbrück and other camps.
Roughly 50 of the original 1,700 women lived to see liberation.
The runways they built remained in use after the war; the airport grew around them. For decades almost no one spoke about Walldorf. Only in the 1990s did serious research and survivor testimony bring the camp back into public memory. Today a memorial marks the forest clearing—a reminder that even the world’s first jet fighters were built on the backs of starving, brutalized women dragged from Auschwitz and worked to the edge of extinction.
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