The 75th Infantry Division, 1st Battalion moved south with the other 2 Battalions against heavy last ditch German opposition on April 11th, 12th and 13th. My father, 1st Lieutenant Arthur Thorspecken lead C-Company as part of the 1st Battalion was part of this attack. They advanced towards Witten Germany and encountered stiff resistance as they neared the objective. They broke up a large scale counterattack with mortar and artillery fire. They then had to fight a fierce house to house battle through Witten to advance to the Ruhr River.
The 2nd Battalion followed the 1st Battalion for a short time and then it changed its angle of attack to the south, southeast, meeting heavy enemy resistance but reaching the town of Annen. Road blocks and large numbers of riflemen made taking Annen difficult. After entering the town just before it got dark, the Battalion held it’s ground and then continued the attack in the morning.
The 3rd Battalion met equally stiff resistance, with K-Company getting pinned down. Air support helped break up the situation and the Battalion continued it’s attack to the Ruhr River.
The remaining German forces were being backed up against the Ruhr River with no retreat route. Their freedom of movement was curtailed, and they were being pressed in from all sides. The hopelessly trapped units receiving artillery fire from all directions from the Americans and the infantry kept pressing in making their plight hopeless.
Witten, a Ruhr industrial town, was heavily damaged by Allied bombing, particularly in late 1944. Ruhr AG Steelworks was crucial for weapon production, leading to high demand for forced laborers, including a Buchenwald sub-camp. Up to 25,000 people from different countries, including several hundred Poles, were forced to work for the National Socialist regime during the Second World War.
At the beginning of 1945, for example, the forced laborers constituted about 55 % of the total workforce in Witten. The different areas of work that they did meant that a large-scale accommodation was needed. As a result, it is thought that between 230 and 250 forced labor camps of different sizes were established in the town during that period.
The steelworks were not the only place where forced laborers were made to work: they were also used on farms, in various different trades and in other factories producing armaments, or even in private households. The majority of the forced laborers were the so-called “workers from the east”, who made up around 50% of all the prisoners working in Witten. The forced laborers in Witten also included Soviet and Italian prisoners of war. A far smaller number of the forced laborers who were made to work came from Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Czechoslovakia.
The Buchenwald sub-camp in Witten-Annen was created in September 1944 to supply prisoner labor to the Ruhr AG Steelworks in support of increased German rearmament efforts in the last year of the war. Like other sub camps attached to the Buchenwald main camp and within the camp system more generally, the supply of prisoner labor to the steel factory, followed from an agreement between the SS-Business Administration and the administration of the factory. Inmates were hired out from the SS by the firm at a cost of 6 Reichsmark (RM) per skilled laborer and 4 RM per unskilled laborer per day.