Original Nazi propaganda caption: "A 14-year-old youth from Ukraine repairs damaged motor vehicles in a Berlin workshop of the German Wehrmacht. January 1945."
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The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (German: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale.[2] It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe. The Germans abducted approximately 12 million people from almost twenty European countries; about two thirds came from Central Europe and Eastern Europe.[1] Many workers died as a result of their living conditions – extreme mistreatment, severe malnutrition, and worse tortures were the main causes of death. Many more became civilian casualties from enemy (Allied) bombing and shelling of their workplaces throughout the war.[3] At its peak the forced labourers constituted 20% of the German work force. Counting deaths and turnover, about 15 million men and women were forced labourers at one point during the war.[4]
Besides Jews, the harshest deportation and forced labor policies were applied to the populations of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. By the end of the war, half of Belarus' population had been killed or deported.[5][6]
The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 freed approximately 11 million foreigners (categorized as "displaced persons"), most of whom were forced labourers and POWs. In wartime, the German forces had brought into the Reich 6.5 million civilians in addition to Soviet POWs for unfree labour in factories.[1] Returning them home was a high priority for the Allies. However, in the case of citizens of the USSR, returning often meant suspicion of collaboration or the Gulag. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), Red Cross, and military operations provided food, clothing, shelter, and assistance in returning home. In all, 5.2 million foreign workers and POWs were repatriated to the Soviet Union, 1.6 million to Poland, 1.5 million to France, and 900,000 to Italy, along with 300,000 to 400,000 each to Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Belgium.[7]
Hitler's policy of Lebensraum (room for living) strongly emphasized the conquest of new lands in the East, known as Generalplan Ost, and the exploitation of these lands to provide cheap goods and labour for Germany. Even before the war, Nazi Germany maintained a supply of slave labour. This practice started from the early days of labour camps of "unreliable elements" (German: unzuverlässige Elemente), such as the homeless, homosexuals, criminals, political dissidents, communists, Jews, and anyone whom the regime wanted out of the way. During World War II the Nazis operated several categories of Arbeitslager (labour camps) for different categories of inmates. Prisoners in Nazi labour camps were worked to death on short rations and in bad conditions, or killed if they became unable to work. Many died as a direct result of forced labour under the Nazis.[1]
After the invasion of Poland, Polish Jews over the age of 12 and Poles over the age of 12 living in the General Government were subject to forced labor.[8] Historian Jan Gross estimates that “no more than 15 percent” of Polish workers volunteered to go to work in Germany.[9] In 1942, all non-Germans living in the General Government were subject to forced labor.[10]
The largest number of labour camps held civilians forcibly abducted in the occupied countries (see Łapanka) to provide labour in the German war industry, repair bombed railroads and bridges, or work on farms. Manual labour was a resource in high demand, as much of the work that today would be done with machines was still a manual affair in the 1930s and 1940s – shoveling, material handling, machining, and many others. As the war progressed, the use of slave labour increased massively. Prisoners of war and civilian "undesirables" were brought in from occupied territories. Millions of Jews, Slavs and other conquered peoples were used as slave labourers by German corporations, such as Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben, Bosch, Daimler-Benz, Demag, Henschel, Junkers, Messerschmitt, Siemens, and even Volkswagen,[11] not to mention the German subsidiaries of foreign firms, such as Fordwerke (a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company) and Adam Opel AG (a subsidiary of General Motors) among others.[12] Once the war had begun, the foreign subsidiaries were seized and nationalized by the Nazi-controlled German state, and work conditions there deteriorated as they did throughout German industry. About 12 million forced labourers, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, were employed in the German war economy inside Nazi Germany throughout the war.[13] The German need for slave labour grew to the point that even children were kidnapped to work in an operation called the Heu-Aktion. More than 2,000 German companies profited from slave labour during the Nazi era, including Deutsche Bank and Siemens.[14]
A class system was created amongst Fremdarbeiter ("foreign workers") brought to Germany to work for the Reich. The system was based on layers of increasingly less privileged workers, starting with well paid workers from Germany's allies or neutral countries to forced labourers from conquered Untermenschen ("sub-humans") populations.
In general, foreign labourers from Western Europe had similar gross earnings and were subject to similar taxation as German workers. In contrast, the central and eastern European forced labourers received at most about one-half the gross earnings paid to German workers and much fewer social benefits.[1] Forced labourers who were prisoners of labour or concentration camps received little if any wage and benefits.[1] The deficiency in net earnings of central and eastern European forced labourers (versus forced labourers from western countries) is illustrated by the wage savings forced labourers were able to transfer to their families at home or abroad (see table).
The Nazis issued a ban on sexual relations between Germans and foreign workers.[19] Repeated efforts were made to propagate Volkstum ("racial consciousness"), to prevent such relations.[20]: 139 Pamphlets, for instance, instructed all German women to avoid physical contact with all foreign workers brought to Germany as a danger to their blood.[21] Women who disobeyed were imprisoned.[20]: 212 Even fraternization with the workers was regarded as dangerous, and targeted with pamphlet campaigns in 1940–1942.[20]: 211–2 The soldiers in the Wehrmacht and SS officers were exempt from any such restrictions. It is estimated that at least 34,140 Eastern European women apprehended in Łapankas (military kidnapping raids), were forced to serve them as "sex slaves" in German military brothels and camp brothels during the Third Reich.[22][23] In Warsaw alone, there were five such establishments set up under military guard in September 1942, with over 20 rooms each. Alcohol was not allowed in there, unlike on the western front, and the victims underwent genital checkups once a week.[24]
In the late summer of 1944, German records listed 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and prisoners of war in the German territory, most of whom had been brought there by coercion.[15] By 1944, slave labour made up one quarter of Germany's entire work force, and the majority of German factories had a contingent of prisoners.[15][25] The Nazis also had plans for the deportation and enslavement of 50% of Britain's adult male population in the event of a successful invasion.[26]
| Countries | Number | % of total | RM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total | 6,450,000 | 100.0% | |
| Occupied Central and Eastern Europe | 4,208,000 | 65.2% | median 15 RM |
| Czechoslovakia | 348,000 | 5.4% | |
| Poland | 1,400,000 | 21.7% | 33.5 RM |
| Yugoslavia | 270,000 | 4.2% | |
| USSR including annexed lands | 2,165,000 | 33.6% | 4 RM |
| Hungary | 25,000 | 0.4% | |
| Greece | 20,000 | 0.3% | |
| Occupied Western Europe | 2,155,000 | 33.4 | median 700 RM |
| France (except Alsace-Lorraine) | 1,100,000 | 17.1% | 487 RM |
| Norway | 2,000 | – | |
| Denmark | 23,000 | 0.4% | |
| Netherlands | 350,000 | 5.4% | |
| Belgium | 500,000 | 7.8% | 913 RM |
| Italy[a] | 180,000 | 2.8% | 1,471 RM |
| German allies and neutral countries | 87,000 | 1.3% | |
| Bulgaria | 35,000 | 0.5% | |
| Romania | 6,000 | 0.1% | |
| Spain | 8,000 | 0.1% | |
| Switzerland | 18,000 | 0.3% |
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Main article: Organisation Todt |
The Organisation Todt was a Nazi era civil and military engineering group in Nazi Germany, eponymously named for its founder Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi figure. The organization was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in pre-World War II Germany, and in all of occupied Europe from France to Russia. Todt became notorious for using forced labour. Most of the so-called "volunteer" Soviet POW workers were assigned to the Organisation Todt.[27] The history of the organization falls into three main phases.[28]
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Main article: Extermination through labour |
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See also: List of Nazi concentration camps |
Millions of Jews were forced labourers in ghettos, before they were shipped off to extermination camps. The Nazis also operated concentration camps, some of which provided free forced labour for industrial and other jobs while others existed purely for the extermination of their inmates. To mislead the victims, at the entrances to a number of camps the lie "work brings freedom" ("arbeit macht frei") was placed, to encourage the false impression that cooperation would earn release. A notable example of labour-concentration camp is the Mittelbau-Dora labour camp complex that serviced the production of the V-2 rocket. Extermination through labour was a Nazi German World War II principle that regulated the aims and purposes of most of their labour and concentration camps.[30][31] The rule demanded that the inmates of German World War II camps be forced to work for the German war industry with only basic tools and minimal food rations until totally exhausted.[30][32]
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Further information: World War II reparations |
To facilitate the economy after the war, certain categories of the victims of Nazism were excluded from compensation from the German Government; those were the groups with the least amount of political pressure they could have brought to bear, and many forced labourers from the Eastern Europe fall into that category.[33] There has been little initiative on the part of the German government or business to compensate the forced labourers from the war period.[1]
As stated in the London Debt Agreement of 1953:
Consideration of claims arising out of the Second World War by countries which were at war with or were occupied by Germany during that war, and by nationals of such countries, against the Reich and agencies of the Reich, including costs of German occupation, credits acquired during occupation on clearing accounts and claims against the Reichskreditkassen shall be deferred until the final settlement of the problem of reparations.
To this date, there are arguments that such settlement has never been fully carried out and that Germany post-war development has been greatly aided, while the development of victim countries stalled.[1]
A prominent example of a group which received almost no compensation for their time as forced labourer in Nazi Germany are the Polish forced labourers. According to the Potsdam Agreements of 1945, the Poles were to receive reparations not from Germany itself, but from the Soviet Union share of those reparations; due to the Soviet pressure on the Polish communist government, the Poles agreed to a system of repayment that de facto meant that few Polish victims received any sort of adequate compensation (comparable to the victims in Western Europe or Soviet Union itself). Most of the Polish share of reparations was "given" to Poland by Soviet Union under the Comecon framework, which was not only highly inefficient, but benefited Soviet Union much more than Poland. Under further Soviet pressure (related to the London Agreement on German External Debts), in 1953 the People's Republic of Poland renounced its right to further claims of reparations from the successor states of Nazi Germany. Only after the fall of communism in Poland in 1989/1990 did the Polish government try to renegotiate the issue of reparations, but found little support in this from the German side and none from the Soviet (later, Russian) side.[33]
The total number of forced labourers under Nazi rule who were still alive as of August 1999 was 2.3 million.[1] The German Forced Labour Compensation Programme was established in 2000; a forced labour fund paid out more than 4.37 billion euros to close to 1.7 million of then-living victims around the world (one-off payments of between 2,500 and 7,500 euros).[34] Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel stated in 2007 that "Many former forced labourers have finally received the promised humanitarian aid"; she also conceded that before the fund was established nothing had gone directly to the forced labourers.[34] German president Horst Koehler stated
