German Earth and Stone Works (German:Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke GmbH,DEST) was anSS-owned company created to procure and manufacture building materials for state construction projects inNazi Germany. DEST was a subsidiary company ofAmtsgruppe W (Amt. W) ofSS Main Economic and Administrative Office (WVHA). BothAmt. W and the WVHA were headed byWaffen-SS generalsOswald Pohl andGeorg Lörner.
The headquarters for DEST were located inSankt Georgen an der Gusen, a small town inAustria where Gusen II, a subcamp of Mauthausen, was built in 1944.[1][2][3]
DEST, founded on April 29, 1938, inBerlin, was administered by theWHVA for the purpose of procuring building materials and organizing slave labor and overseeing quarry operations.TheSachsenhausen (1936),Buchenwald (1937),Flossenbürg (1938),Mauthausen (1938),Natzweiler-Struthof (1939),Gross Rosen (1940) andNeuengamme (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.
DEST was widely successful in the exploitation of slave labor, most of whom were Jews, in the quarries. Human labor was used cruelly, becoming one of the main tenets ofwar crime charges in theNuremberg Trials. The director of the program,SS-ObergruppenführerOswald Pohl, who was stationed in Berlin, was sentenced to death for war crimes in 1947 in Nuremberg, and executed in 1951.
In 1943,DEST changed its focus from stone industry to armaments. From this time the organization played a key role, helping the SS to enter some key war industries. This was underlined by its industrial park atSt. Georgen andGusen that made the SS a key supplier of aircraft fuselages (Bf 109,Me 262), carbines and machine guns to companies likeBFW,Messerschmitt andSteyr-Daimler-Puch. To run its business with the inmates of the Gusen and Mauthausen concentration camps,DEST operated its headquarters ofGranitwerke Mauthausen between 1940 and 1945 in the town of Sankt Georgen an der Gusen which was its biggest and most important "Werkgruppe" (industry group).[4]
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