In the town of Dachau itself there were 12 sites where prisoners worked for local companies. Most of the work details consisted of small groups of 19-12 prisoners per group, but two of the largest were the Wulfert Wurst sausage factory and the Prazifix screw factory, which was co-located on the premises of the sausage factory until it moved inside Dachau camp itself.

 

Employment of prisoners at the sausage factory began with 16 prisoners in August 1941. This increased to 350 by the end of the war.

 

According to the book Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, by Harold Marcuse, the owners of the factory were Hans Wulfert and Bernhard Huber, both of whom became the main sponsors of the fledgling Nazi Party after its failed coup of 1924, when the Party found itself in financial trouble. Wulfert became one of three founders of his local Nazi Party branch in 1930. 

 

During the Great Depression, the firm was on the edge of bankruptcy, but still managed to employ 50 workers, thus making it the fourth largest employer in Dachau. From 1937 until the end of the war, the company sold nearly half a million Reichmarks of meat to the camp, with which it enjoyed close relations, even using one of its buses for a workers outing on one occasion. The war enabled the company to make large profits but it also created a shortage of workers, thus forcing the company to use slave labourers from the camp. These workers weren't paid any wage, but the company paid the SS directly for their labour.

 

In Two Thousands at Dachau: Experiences of a Christian under the Master Race and Stove Men (Munich o. J. [1946]: 109), Karl Adolf recalls prisoners talking enthusiastically about "the land of plenty", referring to the factory. It seems that it was a preferred location among the prisoners, because of easier access to food there. Adolf also recalls that the company employed "300 slaves processing whole herds of oxen, cows, pigs and chickens" into hundreds of thousands of cans of meat, "to make Mr W. become a millionnaire" (Five Minutes to Twelve. The First Millennium's Last Days under the Master Race and Stove Men (Dachau Diaries of Prisoner No 16921, Munich, o. J. (1946)).

 

According to Karl Leisner's website, when Dachau was liberated in 1945, the factory's inventory was confiscated and distributed among the prisoners. Wulfert and Huber themselves were arrested and they were tried in 1947, being found guilty of "intentional and illegal participation in mass cruelty and mass mistreatment". This carried a sentence of two years imprisonment with credits for good behaviour. The credits, in effect, meant that they had already served their sentences. However, under the denazification programme, the pair were listed as 'major offenders', which carried an additional sentence plus loss of rights. They appealed against this and due to a number of witness statements by former prisoners the listing was reduced to 'lesser offenders', carrying a fine of 20,000 deutschmarks and 15,000 deutschmarkes respectively.