Nazi Forced Labour

Forced labour in Nazi Germany began before the war. From 1933 political prisoners, welfare recipients, Roma and Sinti and Jews were put to work in the first concentration camps, and by 1937 most Jewish men in Germany were compelled to work. When German forces occupied the Czech lands in 1938, workers from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were conscripted for the Reich.

The war multiplied both the supply of people and the demand for them. In 1939 Polish prisoners of war were set to work in German agriculture, and that autumn the new General Government required Poles and Jews to labour. The Poland Decrees of 8 March 1940 then separated Polish workers from the German population: they wore the letter P on their clothing and were barred from public transport, cinemas, theatres, restaurants and churches. After the conquest of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France in the spring of 1940, French prisoners of war also went to work in German fields and factories.

The war against the Soviet Union changed the scale. Nazi leaders had at first rejected the use of Soviet prisoners as labour, because they regarded them as a racial and political danger, but shortages of workers in Germany reversed that policy by October 1941. By February 1942 about two million of the roughly 3.4 million Soviet soldiers taken prisoner up to then had already died. The setbacks of the winter of 1941 to 1942 showed that the war would last longer than planned and that industry had to convert to armaments production. Albert Speer became Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions on 15 February 1942, decrees of 20 February laid down the status of the "Eastern workers", and on 21 March Hitler appointed Fritz Sauckel Plenipotentiary General for the Utilisation of Labour.

Speer sent Sauckel an estimate of the workers his factories needed, and Sauckel found them. His labour offices and agents recruited, pressed and seized people in the occupied territories and sent them to the Reich by train. Sauckel reported that 3,638,056 new foreign workers had entered the German war economy between 1 April 1942 and 31 March 1943. The pressure fell hardest on the occupied Soviet Union, from which nearly three million people were deported to Germany between 1942 and 1944. The Nuremberg tribunal later accepted Sauckel's own statement that of about five million foreign workers who had come to Germany, not even 200,000 had come voluntarily.

In western Europe the workers came under law as well as by raid. On 22 June 1942 Pierre Laval announced the Relève, which offered to release one French prisoner of war for every three French workers who went to Germany; only about 17,000 volunteers had left by August. A law of 4 September 1942 then made men aged 18 to 50 and unmarried women aged 21 to 35 liable for labour, and the Service du travail obligatoire of 1943 called up whole age classes. About 600,000 French workers went to Germany. After the Italian armistice of 8 September 1943 German troops disarmed the Italian army and took about 800,000 soldiers captive, and many of them were put to work as forced labourers under the status of "military internees".

From the autumn of 1943 the SS contracted the labour of concentration-camp prisoners to state and private firms on a large scale, and between 1942 and 1944 hundreds of subcamps grew up beside factories and mines. At Mittelbau-Dora prisoners worked in underground factories that produced rockets. In August 1944 there were 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and prisoners of war in German territory, about 26 per cent of the workforce. SS reports counted more than 700,000 prisoners still in the camps in January 1945, and nearly half of all concentration-camp deaths between 1933 and 1945 came in the last year of the war.

Responsibility for the programme was divided between two offices. Speer transmitted to Sauckel an estimate of the total number of workers needed, and Sauckel obtained the labour and allocated it to industry according to Speer's instructions. The Nuremberg tribunal found that Speer knew when he made his demands that foreign workers under compulsion would supply them. Speer also used concentration-camp labour in industries under his control and employed prisoners of war in armaments plants, and he maintained that he had used Soviet prisoners only in industries covered by the Geneva Convention.

Sauckel's own orders set the standard of treatment. A regulation of April 1942 stated that all the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable expenditure. He described his recruiting agents as a batch of men and women assembled as in the old days of shanghaiing sailors. The tribunal held him responsible for the deportation of more than five million people to slave labour under these conditions, and he was hanged on 16 October 1946.

The SS controlled a separate system. Oswald Pohl took over the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office on 1 February 1942, which gave him charge of the concentration camps, their construction and their prisoners. The SS signed contracts with state and private firms to supply prisoners for armaments and related industries, and the Holocaust Memorial Museum describes a policy of annihilation through work, in which prisoners laboured under conditions that deliberately led to illness, injury and death.

Firms took their share in what the system supplied. Krupp employed about 100,000 forced labourers during the war, and as many as 25,000 on 1 January 1943. The firm also built production sites at Auschwitz and at Markstädt in Lower Silesia so that it could draw on labour from the concentration camps.

Collaborating governments carried part of the burden. In 1942 Germany asked Vichy France for more than 300,000 skilled workers, and Laval answered with the Relève and then with the laws that made labour service compulsory.

The labour offices turned recruitment into transport. People taken in the occupied territories were gathered at stations and sent to the Reich by rail, and a photograph taken at Kyiv Central Station around 1942 shows Soviet women being deported to Germany. Workers who refused an assignment or left their workplace without permission faced the withdrawal of their food and clothing ration cards, a sanction set out in Sauckel's regulations.

German rules ranked the workers by origin. The Poland Decrees of 8 March 1940 forbade Poles to leave their homes, use public transport or visit cinemas, theatres, restaurants and churches, and required them to wear a badge with the letter P. The decrees of 20 February 1942 gave the Soviet workers a badge reading OST and placed them in camps fenced with barbed wire and kept under guard. Soviet workers received the worst treatment in this racial hierarchy, and by regulation they received worse food rations than the other groups.

The camps stood in and beside German cities. The camp at Berlin-Schöneweide was built from the end of 1943 under the General Building Inspector for the Reich capital, an office headed by Albert Speer. It had thirteen accommodation barracks and a service barrack for 2,160 forced labourers, though it was never fully occupied. Over 400 Italian military internees and workers from eastern and western Europe lived there, and in the last months of the war two barracks held women prisoners from the concentration camps.

Many forced labourers died of ill-treatment, disease and starvation. Italian internees were guarded by armed sentries until July 1944, when Hitler and Mussolini agreed to reclassify them as civilian workers; the guards left the camps, but the work and the hunger went on. At Mauthausen, according to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, emaciated prisoners had to run up 186 steps out of a stone quarry carrying heavy boulders.

About 2.5 million people did not survive forced labour in the Reich; most of them were Soviet prisoners of war and concentration-camp prisoners from across Europe. Of about 5.7 million Soviet soldiers who fell into German hands, around 3.3 million died, 57 per cent, whereas 3.6 per cent of the 231,000 British and American prisoners died in German custody.

When the war ended the Allies found 11.3 million forced labourers in Germany. From May to September 1945 the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, working under Allied military control, helped to repatriate about seven million people. In the Soviet Union returning workers were often treated with suspicion by their own authorities, and many carried marks on their papers that followed them for years.

The tribunal at Nuremberg convicted Sauckel and Speer on the counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1946. American tribunals then tried Friedrich Flick (April to December 1947), the directors of IG Farben (August 1947 to July 1948) and the directors of Krupp (December 1947 to July 1948). Alfried Krupp received twelve years and the forfeiture of his property on 31 July 1948, and on 31 January 1951 the US High Commissioner John McCloy commuted his sentence and restored his property.

Compensation came late. The late 1940s claims of former forced labourers were rejected by the German government and by firms, and the Federal Compensation Act of 1953 excluded them. After class-action lawsuits against German companies in the United States in the 1990s, the federal government and industry agreed on 17 July 2000 to fund a foundation, and the law creating it passed on 2 August 2000. Between 2001 and 2007 the foundation paid about EUR 4.4 billion to 1.66 million people in 98 countries: up to DM 15,000 for those held in concentration camps and ghettos, and up to DM 5,000 for the others.

The labour administration documented its own work. The Nuremberg exhibits printed in the series Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression include Sauckel's reports on the numbers of workers delivered, and the judgments of the International Military Tribunal on Sauckel and Speer set out what the tribunal accepted. The Documentation Centre Nazi Forced Labour in Berlin and the Holocaust Memorial Museum supply the policy chronology, the camp evidence and the figures for deaths, and the Arolsen Archives hold records of persecution, forced labour and displacement.

Totals depend on what is counted. The figure of more than twenty million includes civilian workers, prisoners of war and concentration-camp prisoners in the Reich and in the occupied territories; the figure for August 1944 counts only the people in German territory at one moment. French sources give about 600,000 workers sent to Germany from 1942, while studies of the Service du travail obligatoire date the departures differently. The compensation files of the Bundesarchiv record 1,665,000 recipients.