Forced laborer camps
1 Foundry camp
3 Canal port camp
6 General camp
7 Camp for military convicts and prisoners of war
8 ”Eastern workers” camp
9 Reislingen camp
10 Laagberg camp
12 Hutted camp Hohenstein
Penal and concentration camps
2 KZ ”Arbeitsdorf” (Work Village)
4 Satellite concentration camp in Hall 1
11 Satellite concentration camp Laagberg
5 Penal camp 18

In the late 1920s, the vision of mass motorisation along American lines gains momentum in Germany. Many designers and engineers are working to make real the idea of a car for personal use that is available to broad swathes of the population. The National Socialists take up this idea and turn mass motorisation into a propaganda tool for their social utopian programme of government. In June 1934, Ferdinand Porsche is commissioned by the Reich Association of the German Automotive Industry (Reichsverband der Automobilindustrie) to develop a “Volkswagen”, a “people’s car”.
On 28 May 1937, the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront) founds the “Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagen mbH” (company for the preparation of the German people’s car). The opening of the Midland Canal in 1938, the existing rail connection and the central location at the heart of the then German Reich all feed into the decision to go ahead with the ambitious project of building the largest automobile factory in the world at this location. Construction begins in February 1938 and the laying of the corner stone takes place on 26 May 1938. The company, renamed Volkswagenwerk GmbH on 16 September 1938, builds its main plant in what is now Wolfsburg, while the outlying plant is established in Braunschweig. Vehicle production is scheduled to start in autumn 1939. But with the outbreak of World War II on 1 September 1939, the then Volkswagenwerk GmbH becomes part of the German armaments industry, and series production of the civilian version remains a dream. Instead, workers, mainly foreign forced labourers, are tasked with producing military vehicles and other armaments.