worked on the project as subcontractors. P & Z had already been active in the area of Mühldorf in the 1920s, with the building of the Inn Canal. Almost 200 employees of the company were sent to Mühldorf for the project, where they operated as the OT unit Polensky & Zöllner, Bautrupp 773. The P & Z leader at the construction site was the engineer Karl Gickeleiter. The cost of the project has been estimated at almost 26 million Reichsmarks (equivalent to million €). Workforce A huge workforce was necessary for the construction project. P & Z used a total of 200 of its own workers, about 800 to 1000 workers from their affiliated Soviet companies, and 200 to 300 Italian workers. This group of about 1,500 was vastly inadequate if the project was to be completed on schedule. Therefore, it was decided that forced labor would be employed, as was common under the Nazis for projects of this magnitude. A large portion of the forced workers were prisoners of the Mühldorf concentration camp. Further labor camps were built by the OT to house them in the Mühldorfer Hart, Ampfing, Mettenheim and Ecksberg. A large number of Soviet prisoners of war also made up the forced laborers. Overall more than 10,000 workers were assigned to the Weingut I construction site. As a rule, two shifts of 4,000 men apiece worked on the project. According to the records of P & Z the POWs worked a total of 322,513 hours; the concentration camp prisoners, 2,831,974. The company was paid 1,892,656.20 Reichsmarks by the SS and the OT. Preparations Adolf Hitler's orders of 21 April 1944 gave official approval for the commencement of work on the structure. Next the necessary ground for the project was confiscated without compensation. Around the middle of May the OT established its offices in the Ecksberg Foundation's (Stiftung Ecksberg) building complex. The Ecksberg Foundation, a home for the mentally ill, had been taken over by the state in 1938. It was uninhabited by this time, as the Nazis had soon thereafter murdered some 248 to 342 of those in the foundation's care as part of the Action T4 killing program. At the same time the OT erected its first barracks camp. Afterward the required construction machinery was little by little supplied to Mühldorf. The equipment had to be brought together from sources throughout the Reich and its