A quartz-sand hill hollowed out to build the world’s first operational jet fighter, using forced labour drawn from thirteen countries at a rate that outpaced its own record-keeping. The factory never reached a tenth of its production target; the runway on its summit is gone, and for nearly fifty years afterward the site itself was too, sealed by an occupying army and reopened only after 1997.
At a glance
REIMAHG — Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring Werke — was an underground factory built from March 1944 into the quartz-sand galleries of the Walpersberg, near Kahla in Thuringia, to produce components and eventually complete airframes for the Messerschmitt Me 262, the first jet fighter to reach operational service. The site was chosen and expanded in 1944 specifically because Allied bombing had made surface aircraft production too costly to sustain.
Soviet forces demolished the bunkers and gallery entrances in 1947, and a military base — first Soviet, then East German, then, after reunification, the German federal army — occupied the ground until 1997–98, blocking research and public access to its own history for most of the postwar period. A memorial and documentation centre opened only in the 2000s.
Key facts
- Decision and construction: the decision to build REIMAHG was taken on 1 March 1944, in existing quartz-sand quarries used for porcelain production; expansion work began in July 1944, though the first barracks for labourers went up as early as April 1944. Project codename: «Lachs» (salmon).
- Scale: sources give varying figures for different sections of the tunnel network — a main complex («Werk A») reported at around 20 km of galleries, and a wider system («Werk E») reported as high as 100 km; English-language sources give a single figure of around 30 km. These numbers are not fully reconciled between sources and are reported here as an approximate range, not a fixed total.
- Workforce: 12,000–15,000 forced labourers over the site’s history, from at least thirteen European countries including Italy, the Soviet Union, Slovakia, Belgium, Poland, Ukraine, France and Yugoslavia. The first 500 workers, Italian, arrived on 11 April 1944. They were housed across a number of camps that grew over time — sources give 21, 28 and roughly 40 depending on the date referenced, reflecting genuine growth rather than a contradiction between sources.
- Deaths: German Wikipedia states the range directly — 991 deaths documented by name in surviving registers, against estimates as high as 6,000; local historians and the site’s memorial put the more likely figure at roughly 2,000. A partial register of named deaths, compiled by the International Red Cross across 39 files (1944–45), is held today at the Arolsen Archives.
- Production: propaganda targets called for 1,200 aircraft a month; actual completed Me 262s numbered between 17 and 30, depending on the source. The first test flight from the runway built on the Walpersberg’s summit took place on 21 February 1945. The factory was never completed.
- Liberation and aftermath: US forces liberated the site on 12–13 April 1945 and completed five further aircraft before withdrawing ahead of Soviet occupation that July, taking technical drawings and personnel with them. In 1947, Soviet forces demolished the bunkers and gallery entrances and removed the runway. The site then served as a military installation — East German National People’s Army from 1974, West German Bundeswehr after reunification — until 1997–98, which blocked both research and public access for most of the postwar period.
- Coordinates: 50.7946° N, 11.5571° E (Walpersberg).
How it was built
REIMAHG’s galleries were expanded, not dug from nothing: the Walpersberg’s quartz-sand quarries already existed when the decision to build an aircraft factory here was made in March 1944. What followed was less construction than conversion under pressure — barracks up within weeks, the first forced labourers arriving in April, gallery excavation and aircraft-component production running in parallel through the second half of 1944, on a workforce drawn from thirteen countries and expanded continuously as the war’s demands grew.
Who tells it, and where the accounts diverge
The documented tension at REIMAHG is not primarily about who tells the story, but about how the victims are classified. Public accounts of the site frequently describe it, in passing, as a satellite camp of Buchenwald — but REIMAHG does not appear on the official German list of Buchenwald’s subcamps, and the site’s own memorial, alongside Buchenwald’s own memorial foundation, consistently uses the terms «Zwangsarbeiter» (forced labourer) and «Kriegsgefangene» (prisoner of war), categories administratively distinct from the concentration-camp prisoner system. The genuine link to Buchenwald is specific: in April 1945, workers evacuated from Kahla joined a death march alongside prisoners evacuated from Buchenwald itself. That connection is documented and real; describing REIMAHG as a Buchenwald subcamp, as some popular accounts do, is not.
The other documented gap is institutional rather than historiographical: because Soviet, then East German, then reunified German military forces occupied the site continuously from 1947 to 1997–98, no objective historical research into its Nazi-era history was possible until after reunification. The support association that now runs the memorial and documentation centre was founded only in 2003.
What you see today
- A documentation and memorial centre at Großeutersdorf, run by the Förderverein Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Walpersberg, open by appointment and guided tour.
- A local history museum in Kahla.
- Annual commemorations around 8 May; the original tunnel entrances were sealed by demolition in 1947 and are not open to casual visitors.
Getting there
The Walpersberg rises near Kahla, Thuringia; the documentation centre is at Großeutersdorf, and visits to the site are arranged through the Förderverein Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Walpersberg.
Sources
- German Wikipedia, REIMAHG — construction, workforce and death figures, production output.
- English Wikipedia, Walpersberg — postwar military occupation and site chronology.
- Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (bpb.de), on the Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Walpersberg — camp numbers, death toll, postwar research access.
- Förderverein Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Walpersberg (walpersberg.de) — site history and current access.
- KZ-Gedenkstätte Buchenwald (buchenwald.de) — on the April 1945 death march connecting Kahla’s forced labourers to Buchenwald evacuees.
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