HOBAG

Forced Labor Camp by Germans
Location	Breslau, Poland (Wrocław) in German-occupied Europe
Date	April 1940–January 1943
Perpetrators	Nazi Germany

Holzbau Aktiengesellschaft Breslau (HOBAG) was a German firm located in Breslau, Poland.

The use of forced labour under German rule during World War II was common. During the fall of 1940, the Jewish population in the town of Gorlice in south eastern Poland consisted of around 4,000 people. This was an increase from previous years due to Kristallnacht, which drove many Jews out of Germany and into Poland. Jews who used to own small businesses still had them in possession, with only women allowed to work. There was a fear among able-bodied men about being kidnapped and taken to a forced labour camp. This phenomenon happened often, prompting the Germans to create the Judenrat. The seven Jewish leaders were headed by a local lawyer, Dr. Henryk Arnold, with Dr. Jakub Blech as his deputy. The Gorlice Judenrat was placed until the leadership of the regional Judenrat in Jasło. They were then instructed to find labour volunteers to end the random kidnappings. 200 Jewish men were enlisted to work at the German company, HOBAG in April 1941.

HOBAG was a sawmill facility which manufactured various wooden products to assist the German war effort. The majority of products were prefabricated wooden barracks or coffins for German soldiers who died in the line of duty. A few wooden bats were also created for the Jewish Ghetto Police to keep order throughout the cramped Jewish living spaces. Men were killed while laboring in the sawmill if they slowed from work, which created fear throughout the Jewish workers. Non-Jewish Poles also working at HOBAG provided the Jewish workers with additional food apart from their rations so they would be able to keep up with the demanding work required. Up until December 1st, 1942, the Jews working at HOBAG received extremely low wages, which was rare for Jewish forced laborers during WWII. The workers continued to live in the Gorlice Ghetto along with the rest of the Jewish population until evacuations began. During mid-August 1942, around 200 non-HOBAG labourers in the ghetto were collected and sent to the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, while many more were taken by truck to Stróżówka where they were lined up and shot in a pit in the Garbacz Forest by the Nazis. The HOBAG labourers were exempt from these evacuations of the Gorlice Ghetto, and the workers were instead taken to live on the grounds of the sawmill.

On January 6th, 1943, seventy of the two hundred Jews working at ″HOBAG″ had survived and were transported to another labour camp in Muszyna. Only a handful of the men who worked at HOBAG managed to survive the entirety of World War II.