In 1938 the paramilitary Schutzstaffel security staff (SS) founded the "German Earth and Stone Works," which immediately took out a lease to quarry granite in Flossenbürg. Inmates of the concentration camp had to perform heavy labor, using the most primitive tools, with no safety precautions and entirely inadequate food. The stone quarried here was destined for the Reich's major building sites, including the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, where the Nazis raised monumental structures for their elaborate propaganda spectacles from 1933 to 1938.