Ostarbeiter

• 1. Introduction

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  Ostarbeiter - a German compound word meaning "Eastern worker" - was the bureaucratic label the Nazi state applied to millions of people it kidnapped from Central and Eastern Europe and forced to labor in the Reich. Between 3 million and 5.5 million people carried this designation. By 1944, those numbers included children as young as 10 years old.

  The badge they wore read "OST" - East - a single three-letter mark that determined where they could go, what they could eat, whether they could take shelter from a bombing raid, and whether they would survive. It placed them at the very bottom of an elaborate hierarchy the Germans constructed among the millions of foreign workers they had seized.

  How did this system come to exist? Who were the people it consumed? What happened to them when Germany fell - and what happened after they finally came home?

• 2. A Hierarchy of Captives

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  By the late summer of 1944, official German records counted 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and prisoners of war inside the Greater German Reich. That figure represented roughly a quarter of all registered workers in the German economy at that time. Almost all of them had been brought there by force.

  The Nazi state did not treat these millions as a uniform mass. It built a layered class system among the Fremdarbeiter - foreign workers - organized by national origin. At the top sat the Gastarbeitnehmer, so-called "guest workers" from Germanic countries, Scandinavia, Romania, and Italy. Below them came the Zwangsarbeiter - forced workers - including military internees, prisoners of war, and Polish prisoners from the General Government. These groups received reduced wages and smaller food rations, could not use public transportation, restaurants, or churches, and in some cases had to wear a visible badge known as the "Polish P."

  The Ostarbeiter occupied the lowest rung of all. They were primarily drawn from Reichskommissariat Ukraine, as well as the District of Galicia, Reichskommissariat Ostland, and the broader occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Their camps were fenced with barbed wire and kept under armed guard. They were classified under German racial theory as Untermenschen - subhumans - which in practice meant the Gestapo and industrial plant guards could exercise arbitrary violence against them with near impunity.

• 3. Recruitment Becomes Abduction

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  Fritz Sauckel launched a recruitment campaign in January 1942, advertising the prospect of work in Germany as an opportunity. One announcement in Kiev offered hot meals on the train and named the departure date as the 28th of January. The first special train actually left Kiev on the 22nd of January, already full.

  A newspaper advertisement that ran in Kiev on the 3rd of March 1942 addressed Ukrainians directly: "Germany calls you! Go to Beautiful Germany! 100,000 Ukrainians are already working in free Germany. What about you?" The campaign attracted volunteers at first. Then word returned from Germany about the actual conditions waiting there.

  Once the pool of willing workers dried up, German forces turned to mass round-ups. They targeted large gatherings - church congregations, crowds at sporting events - and simply marched entire groups at gunpoint onto waiting cattle trucks. By 1944, the policy had escalated into the seizure of virtually anyone who could be put to work. Between 40,000 and 50,000 Polish children aged 10 to 14 were kidnapped during an operation called the Heuaktion. That name was an acronym for allegedly homeless, parentless, and unhoused children - the pretext that children were being gathered in place of absent guardians. After arriving in Germany, these children were handed over either to the Reich Labour Service or to the Junkers aircraft works.

• 4. Living Under the OST Badge

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  Inside Germany, Ostarbeiter lived either in private camps run by large companies or in camps policed by a paid private security service called the Werkschutz. The working day averaged 12 hours, six days a week. Wages, when paid at all, amounted to roughly 30 percent of what a German worker would receive - and most of that went directly toward the cost of food, clothing, and lodging.

  The labor authority known as the RSHA Arbeitskreis documented complaints that many firms treated these workers as "civilian prisoners" and paid them nothing at all. Those who received any payment got specially printed paper money and savings stamps redeemable only at the limited shops inside their own camps.

  Food rations by law fell below those issued to every other forced labor group. Those who tried to escape were hanged in view of other workers. On the 7th of December 1942, Himmler decreed that unauthorized sexual intercourse between Germans and Ostarbeiter would be punishable by death. Hundreds of Polish and Russian men were executed under these racial laws, which the German regime called prohibitions against Rassenschande - racial pollution.

  When Allied bombers struck the factories and fields where Ostarbeiter worked, German authorities refused them access to bomb shelters. Many died in raids targeting the very facilities they had been conscripted to operate. German authorities had also issued the instruction, documented in the source record, that Ostarbeiter "should be worked to death."

• 5. Children and Pregnancies

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  By 1944, the majority of newly arriving Ostarbeiter were under 16 years old. Workers older than that were generally conscripted into other service. Thirty percent of those arriving were between 12 and 14 years old. In November 1943, the minimum age for seizure had been formally reduced to 10.

  Rape of female Ostarbeiter was pervasive. Eighty percent of documented rapes occurred on farms where Polish girls worked. The scale of sexual violence was such that the Nazi state created hundreds of special birthing centers specifically to dispose of infants born to foreign workers. At labor camps, infants were killed on site.

  The earlier policy of sending pregnant workers home was replaced in 1943 with an abortion decree issued by the Reichsfuhrer-SS. Ostarbeiter women were routinely forced to undergo abortions, contrary to the Nazi prohibition on abortion that applied to German women.

  In rare cases where both parents were deemed to have passed racial screening - Norwegians were cited as an example - a child might be removed for Germanization and placed with German families or at a Lebensborn institution. Children who did not pass the racial tests were placed in facilities called Auslanderkinder-Pflegestatte. Up to 90 percent of children held in those facilities died from deliberate neglect.

  A separate category involved young women recruited specifically as nannies for German families. Himmler framed this as a benefit to the women, suggesting it offered them a social rise and even the possibility of marriage in Germany. These assignments were administered through the NS-Frauenschaft. Recruitment originally drew only from annexed Polish territories, but the limited supply of women who cleared screening eventually extended it to all of Poland and into the occupied Soviet territories.

• 6. After Liberation, More Punishment

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  When Germany fell, more than 2.5 million Ostarbeiter were liberated and placed in displaced persons camps, with many processed through Kempten before repatriation. The Yalta Agreement required that citizens of the Soviet Union be returned to their country of origin regardless of their own wishes. Those in the French and British zones of occupation were sent back under this provision. At the end of the war, 5.5 million Ostarbeiter were returned to the USSR.

  In October 1945, General Eisenhower banned the use of force in repatriation within the American Zone. Many Ostarbeiter fled to the American Zone as a result. Some, facing forced return, chose suicide instead. Those who did go back to Soviet territory were frequently treated as traitors. Many were transported to remote areas of the Soviet Union, denied education and basic rights, and had their citizenship curtailed.

  The stigma was encoded in official documents. Special notations in Soviet passports - and in the passports of survivors' children and relatives - identified the bearer's time as a laborer in Germany during the war. Those markings closed off employment opportunities for decades. During periods of political repression, former Ostarbeiter were ostracized by their own communities. Many survivors later testified that their fellow countrymen accused them of having helped the Germans, and of having lived comfortably in the Third Reich while Ukraine burned.

• 7. Reckoning, Delayed

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  In 2000, Germany established the Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future," a joint project of the German federal government and 6,500 companies organized through the German Industry Foundation Initiative. The foundation disbursed 10 billion Deutsche Mark - approximately 5.1 billion euros - to former forced laborers.

  For Ostarbeiter, the payment worked out to a one-time amount of 4,300 marks per person. Of the more than 2 million Ostarbeiter in Ukraine, 467,000 received a share, totaling 867 million euros. The last payments were made in 2007.

  Historian Yuriy Kondufor placed the number of Ukrainians taken as Ostarbeiter at 2,244,000. A separate figure of 2,196,166 has also been cited; both probably exclude the several hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from Halychyna, suggesting the true total may have been closer to 2.5 million. Ukrainians constituted between two-thirds and three-quarters of all Ostarbeiter overall.

  Published firsthand accounts of the Ostarbeiter experience remain rare in Ukraine itself, despite the scale of what those people endured. The State Archival Service of Ukraine has placed a collection of official German occupation notices online. Ukraine, according to some sources, lost approximately 10 million people in the Second World War - among the greatest losses suffered by any country in the conflict - and the Ostarbeiter history remains one of the least-examined parts of that toll.