Museum of Work

This guide to the Museum of Work in Hamburg starts at an old cutting lathe in the ground-floor workshop, once used by the New York Hamburger Gummi-Waaren Compagnie, a rubber factory that opened in 1873 turning out combs and buttons for a workforce of over a thousand. It follows what happened when that factory shifted to wartime production, bringing in forced laborers, most of them women marched in from occupied countries, to work the same machines under guard. Walk back past the machines still capable of running, and remember whose hands once turned them.