Forced labour under German rule during World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  Forced labour under German rule during World War II operated on a scale that had no precedent in modern history. At its height, forced workers made up 20 percent of the entire German workforce. Some 12 million people were abducted from nearly twenty European countries, two thirds of them from Central and Eastern Europe. The questions this history raises are not just about numbers. They are about how a state machinery deliberately fed human lives into an industrial economy, what happened to the survivors, and who, if anyone, was ever held to account.

• 2. The Machinery of Abduction

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  Hitler's doctrine of Lebensraum, meaning 'room for living', made the conquest and exploitation of Eastern lands central to Nazi strategy. Even before the war, the regime had built a supply of forced labour from people it labelled 'unreliable elements,' among them homosexuals, political dissidents, communists, Jews, and the homeless. After the invasion of Poland, Polish Jews and Poles over the age of 12 living in the General Government territory were made subject to forced labour. Historian Jan Gross estimates that no more than 15 percent of Polish workers went to Germany voluntarily.

  The most common method of mass abduction in occupied cities was the Lapanka: armed raids in which civilians were seized off the streets. As the war expanded, Soviet and Polish civilians from areas including Distrikt Galizien and Reichskommissariat Ukraine were rounded up to become Ostarbeiter, or Eastern workers. They wore a badge marked 'OST' and were confined behind barbed wire, exposed to the arbitrary authority of the Gestapo and industrial guards. Estimates place the number of Ostarbeiter between three and 5.5 million people.

  So great was the German need for labour that the programme eventually extended to children. An operation called the Heu-Aktion was launched specifically to kidnap children for use as workers. By the late summer of 1944, German records counted 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and prisoners of war inside German territory, brought there to compensate for the conscription of 11 million German men into the armed forces.

• 3. A Hierarchy of Suffering

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  The Nazi regime built a formal class system among what it called Fremdarbeiter, or foreign workers. At the top stood Gastarbeitnehmer, guest workers from Germanic and Scandinavian countries, allied nations such as Romania and Hungary, and neutral countries like Spain and Switzerland. Only about 1 percent of all foreign workers in Germany came from this privileged tier.

  Below them sat Zwangsarbeiter, forced workers, subdivided by origin and ethnicity. Ethnic Poles from the General Government fell into the Zivilarbeiter category. They received far lower wages than German workers, were barred from public transport, restaurants, swimming pools, and church services. They had to work seven days a week without holidays, faced a curfew, could not marry without a permit, and were forbidden from possessing money or valuables, even bicycles or cameras. They were required to wear a visible badge: the 'Polish P'. In 1939, roughly 300,000 Polish Zivilarbeiter were in Germany; by 1944, that number had risen to approximately 1.7 million, and some accounts place it as high as 2.8 million.

  Western European workers, in contrast, received gross earnings comparable to those of German workers and faced far less degradation. The gap in net wages was stark: Central and Eastern European workers received at most about half the gross earnings paid to Germans, and concentration camp prisoners received little if any wages at all. In January 1944, the median transfer payment back home for a worker from the occupied USSR was 4 Reichsmarks, while a worker from Belgium could send back 913 Reichsmarks.

• 4. Corporate Complicity

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  Millions of Jews, Slavs, and other peoples from conquered territories were put to work for some of the most recognisable names in German industry. Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben, Bosch, Daimler-Benz, Demag, Henschel, Junkers, Messerschmitt, Siemens, and Volkswagen all used slave labour. So did the German subsidiaries of foreign firms, including Fordwerke, a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company, and Adam Opel AG, a subsidiary of General Motors. Once the war began, these foreign subsidiaries were seized and brought under Nazi state control, and working conditions worsened throughout German industry as a result.

  More than 2,000 German companies profited from slave labour during the Nazi era, among them Deutsche Bank. The industrial demand for workers grew so acute that by 1944, slave labour made up one quarter of Germany's entire work force, and the majority of German factories held a contingent of prisoners. In the war industry specifically, foreign workers had made up just 3 percent of the workforce in 1940; by 1944, that share had climbed to 29 percent. In agriculture, the figure rose from 6 percent in 1940 to 22 percent by 1944.

  Organisation Todt, the Nazi civil and military engineering body named for its founder Fritz Todt, became one of the largest consumers of forced labour of all. From 1938 to 1940, over 1.75 million Germans were conscripted into its labour service. After 1942, the organisation employed approximately 1.4 million workers, of whom just 1 percent were Germans rejected for military service and 1.5 percent were concentration camp prisoners. The rest were prisoners of war and compelled workers from occupied countries, all treated effectively as slaves.

• 5. Sexual Slavery and Social Control

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  The Nazi state issued a blanket ban on sexual relations between Germans and foreign workers, framing the prohibition in the language of racial purity under the banner of Volkstum, or racial consciousness. Pamphlets instructed German women to avoid any physical contact with foreign workers, framing such contact as a threat to their blood. Women who violated the ban were imprisoned; some were executed. Even casual fraternisation was treated as dangerous, and pamphlet campaigns targeting it ran through 1940 to 1942.

  Wehrmacht soldiers and SS officers were explicitly exempt from these restrictions. At least 34,140 Eastern European women, seized in Lapanka raids, were forced to serve as sex slaves in German military and camp brothels during the Third Reich. In Warsaw alone, five such establishments were set up under military guard in September 1942, each with over 20 rooms. The women were subjected to weekly genital inspections, and alcohol was prohibited inside the brothels, unlike on the Western front.

• 6. French Shipyards and the Atlantic War

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  When France fell and the ports of Brest, Lorient, and Saint-Nazaire came under German control, the Kriegsmarine found itself critically short of skilled labour. By 1939, German naval planners had assumed they would have more time to build up their workforce before fighting began. At the end of 1940, the Kriegsmarine requested 2,700 skilled workers from Wilhelmshaven to staff Atlantic coast bases, but the total available pool in Wilhelmshaven was only 3,300. A request for 870 men skilled in machinery and engine building ran into the reality that only 725 such workers existed there.

  In February 1941, the naval dockyard at Brest employed 470 Germans and 6,349 French workers. French dockyard workers filled the gap. In April 1941, French workers replaced defective superheater tubes on the battleship Scharnhorst. The captain of the Scharnhorst judged their work to a better standard than could be obtained in German yards. An assessment commissioned by Vizeadmiral Walter Matthiae in October 1942 found that if French workers were withdrawn, following 32 French fatalities in an air raid at Lorient Submarine Base, all surface fleet repairs would cease and U-boat repairs would fall by 30 percent.

  Admiral Francois Darlan declared on the 30th of September 1940 that it was useless to decline German requests for collaboration. In September 1942, Rear Admiral Germain Paul Jardel, commander of the French navy in the occupied zone, stated that the French had a special interest in keeping their arsenal workers at work inside France, rather than letting them be conscripted to Germany as happened to 1 million others. A practical calculus, not ideological commitment, kept many French workers in the yards.

• 7. Extermination Through Labour

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  Millions of Jews were forced to labour inside ghettos before being deported to extermination camps. The Nazi state operated concentration camps that provided free forced labour for industrial purposes, and others that existed solely to kill. To deceive new arrivals, the phrase 'arbeit macht frei,' meaning 'work brings freedom,' was placed at the entrances of a number of camps, creating a false impression that cooperation would lead to release.

  A notable example of the labour-concentration camp form was Mittelbau-Dora, a complex dedicated to producing V-2 rockets. The principle the Nazis called 'extermination through labour' was not incidental but structural: it demanded that camp inmates work for the German war industry using only basic tools, on minimal food rations, until completely exhausted. For populations in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia, the consequences were catastrophic. By the end of the war, half of Belarus's population had been either killed or deported.

• 8. Aftermath and Reparations

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  The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 freed approximately 11 million foreigners categorised as displaced persons, most of them forced labourers and prisoners of war. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the Red Cross, and Allied military operations provided food, clothing, shelter, and help with repatriation. In total, 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, with between 300,000 and 400,000 each going to Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Belgium.

  For Soviet citizens, return carried its own danger. Repatriated Soviets often faced suspicion of collaboration or imprisonment in a Gulag camp rather than a welcome home.

  Compensation came slowly and unevenly. The London Debt Agreement of 1953 deferred all claims arising from the war until a final reparations settlement, a settlement that has never fully arrived. Polish forced labourers fared particularly badly. Under the Potsdam Agreements of 1945, Poland was to receive its reparations not from Germany but from the Soviet Union's share. Soviet pressure on the Polish Communist government produced a repayment system that left most Polish victims with little or nothing comparable to what victims in Western Europe received. In 1953, the People's Republic of Poland, under further Soviet pressure, renounced its right to further reparations claims from the successor states of Nazi Germany. Only after the fall of communism in 1989 and 1990 did Poland attempt to renegotiate, finding little support from Germany and none from the Soviet, later Russian, side.

  As of August 1999, 2.3 million survivors of Nazi forced labour were still alive. The German Forced Labour Compensation Programme was established in 2000. A dedicated fund paid out more than 4.37 billion euros to close to 1.7 million living victims worldwide, in one-off payments ranging from 2,500 to 7,500 euros. German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged in 2007 that before the fund was created, nothing had gone directly to the forced labourers themselves. German President Horst Koehler described the payments as symbolic, noting that the suffering of the victims had gone publicly unacknowledged for decades. More than 2,000 companies that profited from that labour continue, in many cases, to exist today.