Schachtweg was the "financial center" of the "town of the KdF car near Fallersleben". Three banks were located here until the end of the war. The first financial institution in the new town was the branch of Kreissparkasse Gifhorn, founded on November 18, 1938. It was followed by a branch of the Bank der Deutschen Arbeit on June 12, 1939

and on June 16 of the same year a branch of Deutsche Bank. The latter mainly handled foreign transactions. The Italian civilian workers employed in the settlement on the Mittelland Canal were allowed to transfer a monthly sum to their home country. This was paid into the Deutsche Bank, from where the money was transferred to the "collective account of Italian industrial workers" in Berlin. The Berlin headquarters then settled these amounts with the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in Rome, which in turn paid the individual amounts to the respective recipients.

The Bank der Deutschen Arbeit occupied a special position. This was not an invention of the National Socialists, but had already been founded in 1923 by the free trade unions as Kapitalverwertungsgesellschaft AG. On May 31, 1934, it was renamed Bank der Arbeiter, Angestellten und Beamten. As a result of the dismantling of the trade unions in 1933, the bank was transferred to the German Labor Front (DAF), which took over from the trade unions. On October 31, 1933, the bank was renamed Bank der Deutschen Arbeit.

In the following years, the bank was able to steadily increase its balance sheet - also due to the aggressive expansion policy of the Third Reich since 1938. In the 1938 financial year, the balance sheet total amounted to RM 510 million; by 1940 it had risen to RM 1.8 billion, making Arbeiterbank one of the major banks. Nevertheless, it essentially acted as the DAF's house bank. Curiously, it performed almost exclusively subsidiary tasks. The majority of its capital was made up of income from the party branches; the DAF's membership fees alone amounted to around half a billion Reichsmarks by the end of the 1930s. The money for the KDF travel savings scheme and the savings for the KdF car were also paid into a special account of the Arbeiterbank, as it was popularly known.-__-0000-__- By and large, the financial institution financed DAF ventures, including the Volkswagen project, for example. As early as 1937, the Bank der Deutschen Arbeit provided the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens (Gezuvor) with a loan of RM 50 million.-__-0001-__-

Karl Lentge, a native of Goslar who had managed the Gifhorn district savings bank branch in Fallersleben since 1934 and was also an NSDAP member, took over the management of the branch of the workers' bank in the "city of the KdF car".-__-0002-__- One of the main tasks of the local branch was to manage the factory's payment transactions. "We always transferred the millions to the head office in Berlin at the end of the month," recalled Lentge in the 1970s.-__-0003-__- Initially, the bank had ten employees, but this number soon rose to 18 to 20 people.-__-0004-__- All companies that were established in the Volkswagen city had to open an account with the Bank der Deutschen Arbeit. In return, the businesses were supported with loans. Salary transfers and financial transactions of DAF organizations such as the Stadtbaubüro and the Neuland housing association were also made through the DAF's house bank.

During the air raids on the Volkswagen factory in 1944, the barracks of the workers' bank were also hit.-__-0005-__- They were almost completely burnt out. However, the files stored in the steel cabinets were preserved. A bunker had already been built next to the bank, in which important documents had been stored every evening, so that a large part of the files were preserved and the bank employees - with the help of Dutch and Italian forced laborers - immediately began to salvage and rebuild the branch. "We used the walls of the large meeting room from the city council barracks as building material," Lengte recalled the situation. "These walls had been left standing when the administration barracks -__-0006-__- burned down, while our bank was completely destroyed. We simply 'confiscated' this material. The city council objected to this, but we were able to say: if we don't get this, then give us another hut, and of course that wasn't possible. And we stayed in this makeshift building until the end of the war."-__-0007-__-

-__-0008-__- "Collection points for the money", in: Comrades of Labor. Zeitschrift für das Gemeinschaftslager des Volkswagenwerkes, 4th issue, April 1940, p. 15f.
-__-0009-__- Christoph Kreutzmüller/Ingo Loose, "Die Bank der Deutschen Arbeit 1933-1945 - eine nationalsozialistische 'Superbank'?", in: Bankhistorisches Archiv, vol. 31 (2005), pp. 1-32. On the Bank der Deutschen Arbeit, see also Rüdiger Hachtmann, Das Wirtschaftsimperium der Deutschen Arbeitsfront 1933-1945. Göttingen 2012, pp. 105-190 and Michael Schneider, Unterm Hakenkreuz. Workers and the Labor Movement 1933 to 1939. Bonn 1999, pp. 236-237.
-__-0010-__- Hans Mommsen/Manfred Grieger, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich. Düsseldorf 1996, p. 206.
-__-0011-__- "Bank der Deutschen Arbeit im Gemeinschaftslager", in: Aller-Zeitung of July 1, 1939.
-__-0012-__- StadtA WOB, EB 4, Interview with Karl Lentge from January 6, 1970, p. 5.
-__-0013-__- Ibid, p. 2.
-__-0014-__- See in detail Manfred Grieger, "Target Volkswagenwerk. Bombenkrieg und Unter-nehmenspolitik", in: Günter Riederer (ed.), Luftkrieg und Heimatfront. Ein vergessener Flie-gerlynchmord in der "Stadt des KdF-Wagens". Brunswick 2016, pp. 41-57.
-__-0015-__- StadtA WOB, EB 4, Interview with Karl Lentge from January 6, 1970, p. 9.