forced labour. Serfdom was not abolished in Russia till 1861, slavery in the USA not till 1865; but thereafter it was presumed to have vanished from every part of the world that claimed to be modern and civilized, though it remained endemic in parts of South-West Asia and Central Africa. However, Stalin introduced it into the USSR in the 1930s, as an unpublicized part of the industrial revolution he conducted there (see GUlag); and once the Pacific war had started the Japanese used slave labour to build the Burma–Thailand railway.

But by far the most systematic use of forced labour was employed by the Nazis. In 1944, 7.1 million foreign civilians and prisoners-of-war (POW) were registered as part of the workforce in the territory of ‘Greater Germany’. There were also about 500,000 mainly foreign prisoners in concentration camps, so that at that particular time, in the entire economy of the Reich, over 24% of workers and employees were foreigners who had, to a large extent, been brought to work in the Reich by compulsion (see Table 1). The National Socialist employment of foreigners between 1939 and 1945 thus became the most important case in history of a large-scale, use of forced labour since the end of American slavery in the 19th century. It had, however, been neither planned nor prepared for by the Nazi leadership.

Forced labour, Table 1: Foreign workers in the German war economy, 1939–45

	1939	1940	1941	1942	1943	1944
Source: Contributor.
Agriculture
Germans	10,732,000	9,648,000	8,939,000	8,969,000	8,743,000	8,460,000
Foreign civilians	118,000	412,000	769,000	1,170,000	1,561,000	1,767,000
Prisoners-of-war	–	249,000	642,000	759,000	609,000	635,000
All foreigners	118,000	661,000	1,411,000	1,929,000	2,170,000	2,402,000
Foreigners as a % of all employed	1.1%	6.8%	15.8%	21.5%	24.8%	28.4%
All except Agriculture
Germans	28,382,000	25,697,000	24,947,000	23,298,000	22,278,000	21,340,000
Foreign civilians	183,000	391,000	984,000	1,475,000	3,276,000	3,528,000
Prisoners-of-war	–	99,000	674,000	730,000	954,000	1,196,000
All foreigners	183,000	490,000	1,658,000	2,205,000	4,230,000	4,724,000
Foreigners as a % of all employed	0.6%	1.9%	6.6%	9.5%	19.0%	22.0%
Total economy
Germans	39,114,000	35,345,000	33,886,000	32,267,000	31,021,000	29,800,000
Foreign civilians	301,000	803,000	1,753,000	2,645,000	4,837,000	5,295,000
Prisoners-of-war	–	348,000	1,316,000	1,489,000	1,563,000	1,831,000
All foreigners	301,000	1,151,000	3,069,000	4,134,000	6,400,000	7,126,000
Foreigners as a % of all employed	0.8%	3.2%	9.0%	12.8%	20.6%	24.0%

Shortly before the beginning of the war, a memorandum of the department for the defence economy of the Wehrmacht stated that, as far as the expenditure for arming their forces was concerned, preparations for the war had encountered three main problems: foreign exchange, certain raw materials, and labour. For foreign exchange and raw materials a solution was found: following the blitzkrieg campaigns the resources of the Reich were to be successively increased through the reserves belonging to the countries overrun. This policy had already proved successful in the case of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and was to be confirmed once again in the period 1939 to 1941. The question of labour was more difficult, because it involved, apart from economic aspects, security, and above all, ideological factors. There was a shortage of around 1.2 million workers in the Greater German Reich: a further rise in this number was to be expected after the outbreak of war.

Two possibilities were considered: either large numbers of German women could take their place in the economy, as they had done during the First World War, or workers could be imported on a large scale from the countries that were to be conquered. But both options were rejected. During the First World War, the conscription of German women had led to considerable political destabilization and dissatisfaction inside the country. Moreover, it would have constituted a flagrant violation of the National Socialists' programme regarding women and social policies. But to bring millions of foreign workers, particularly Poles, to work in the Reich conflicted strongly with the ethnic principles of National Socialism, according to which the mass employment of aliens inside the Reich would be a threat to the purity of blood of the German people (see Nazi ideology). The decision was reversed only after the beginning of the war when, compared with the drafting into essential services of German women, employing foreigners seemed to be the lesser evil. It was believed that the risks entailed by the latter could be contained more easily by using repressive measures.

About 300,000 Polish POW who had fallen into German hands after the Polish campaign were very quickly put to work, mainly in agriculture. A massive recruitment campaign was also started, continuing a long tradition of employing Polish farm workers in Germany. As time went on harsher and harsher methods were adopted and from the spring of 1940 recruitment developed into a regular manhunt inside the so-called General government (see Poland, 2(b)), where workers were drafted by age group and people were rounded up by raids on cinemas, schools, and churches. By May 1940 more than one million Polish workers had been brought into the Reich in this way.

Nevertheless, the so-called Poleneinsatz (employment of Poles), was still perceived as offending against the racial principles of National Socialism. The national and political dangers arising therefrom, as Himmler stated in 1940, were to be counteracted by suitably stringent measures. Accordingly, a vast system of repressive regulations was brought to bear on the Poles. They had to live in hutted camps (which, in the countryside, soon proved to be impossible), received smaller wages, were not allowed to use public facilities (ranging from express trains to public baths), nor attend German church services; they had to work longer hours than Germans and were obliged to wear a badge—the ‘Poland-P’—pinned to their clothing. Outside work, contact with Germans was forbidden; any Pole involved in sexual relations with German women was punished by public execution. In order to protect ‘German Blood’ it had also been decided that at least half of the civilian workers recruited must be women.

For the German authorities Poleneinsatz was, by and large, successful. They managed, within a short time, to bring a large number of Polish workers into Germany against their will, and to establish, within the Reich, a hierarchy dividing society into two classes based on racial criteria.

By May 1940 it was already obvious that even the recruitment of Poles could not satisfy the need for labour in the German economy. So more than a million French POW were brought into the Reich as workers, during and soon after the fall of France. Furthermore, an extensive recruitment drive was carried out in the occupied territories to increase manpower. For each of these new groups of people special regulations were passed, though, compared with those applying to the Poles, these were definitely less harsh as regards treatment, wages, accommodation, and so on. In this way a graduated system of national hierarchies developed, a scale on which the then so-called ‘guest workers’ from allied Italy were placed at the top and the Poles at the bottom.

By far the greater part of the foreign civilian workers and POW acquired during the ‘blitzkrieg phase’—up to the summer of 1941—were employed in agriculture. Foreigners did not play an important part in industry, which had set its sights on retrieving its German workers from the army soon after the end of this phase. At the same time, the ideological reservations of the party and the authorities, against extending the employment of foreigners, were so great that it was decided to freeze the number of foreigners at the level of spring 1941, at just under 3 million. This policy worked so long as a long war of attrition could be avoided.

However, in the autumn of 1941 an entirely new situation arose. The German armies fighting in the German–Soviet war had already suffered their first defeat outside Moscow and a quick end to the war was now out of the question. Instead, German munitions production had to adjust itself to a war of attrition which meant considerably increasing its capacity. But a massive wave of call-ups reached even the workers in the armaments factories, who had been exempt until then, and the efforts made to replace them from occupied western European countries could not close the gap. Only the use of manpower from the USSR would be able to provide an effective solution, but the employment of Soviet POW, or civilian workers, in the Reich had been explicitly ruled out before the beginning of the war and continued to be strongly opposed by Nazi leaders. Also, the first newsreels showing the war on the Eastern Front had begun to appear, creating antipathy to the employment of Soviet citizens among the German population. As the Sicherheitsdienst (see RSHA), reported: ‘People are worried about what we intend to do with these “animals”; in the future. Many of our countrymen believe that they should be radically exterminated. Caused partly by acts of terror perpetrated by escaped Russian prisoners-of-war, a certain fear is spreading that these alien types, with their strange build and features, could enter the territory of the Reich in large numbers and even be given employment.’

For Soviet POW, the consequences of this decision were disastrous. Since the German war economy did not apparently need them, millions were abandoned to their fate in the mass camps in the hinterland of the German Eastern Front. More than half of the 3.3 million POW taken by the Germans up to the end of 1941 froze to death, died of starvation or exhaustion, or were murdered. Altogether, up to the end of the war, of the roughly 5.7 million in German custody, 3.5 million lost their lives.

The decision soon had to be reversed, but by then the vast majority of the Soviet prisoners were no longer available for employment. Of the 3 million POW taken only 160,000 had, by March 1942, arrived to work in the Reich. Hence a new drive to recruit Soviet civilian workers became a matter of urgency for newly appointed ‘Plenipotentiary for Employment’, Sauckel, who performed his task efficiently and with boundless brutality. In barely 2 ½ years, more than 2.5 million civilians were deported from the USSR by the employment staff of the Wehrmacht to become slave workers in the Reich—20,000 people a week.

Although created by the needs of the war economy, the employment of Soviet citizens again offended against the ideological principles of National Socialism. Parallel to the developments at the start of the Poleneinsatz, this offence was compensated for by a system of repression and discrimination directed against Soviet civilian workers, which, in its harshness, far exceeded what the Poles had been subjected to. The reasoning of the authorities could be described in these terms: if employment of Soviet citizens in the Reich was inevitable, then the least one could do was to treat them badly.

Inside the Reich, a whole new world of camps had sprung up. In the big towns as in the countryside, there were foreigners' camps on every corner. In Berlin alone there were about 500. Altogether there may have been more than 20,000 in the Reich. About 500,000 Germans were drafted into the organization controlling foreign workers, from camp managers to foremen in charge of foreigners in a factory. The living conditions of the various groups of foreigners followed a strict national system of classification, regimented down to the smallest detail. While the workers from the occupied western territories, and the so-called friendly countries, did mainly have to live in camps, they received the same wages and rations as Germans in comparable posts, and had the same conditions of work. But Ostarbeiter (workers from the East), especially Soviet workers, were a great deal worse off. Their rations were so poor that within weeks of arrival they were often severely undernourished and unfit for work.

In the early summer of 1942 a large number of businesses were quick to report that Russeneinsatz (employment of Russians) was not an economic proposition, because effective employment required not only better food and sufficient rest periods, but also the training of forced labour for particular kinds of work. In the case of the French workers, measures for improving their conditions had resulted, after a relatively short time, in their output reaching almost the same level as that of the Germans. Conditions, particularly those of Soviet workers, varied a great deal, from one industrial plant to another and from camp to camp. They were generally better looked after in agriculture than in industry, but even there the differences in treatment and in their rations were evident, specially after the end of 1942. Effective and widespread improvement in their conditions did not come until after the defeat at Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943, when a far-reaching campaign was started that involved linking rations to performance at work. Simultaneously, improved job training brought about a considerable improvement in performance. Allotting skilled tasks to the foreigners, however, was bound to have repercussions on their relations with German workers. Hence the authorities saw to it that the regulations they issued ensured that Germans kept their positions of privilege in relation to all foreigners, but especially the Russians, in all areas of employment. Germans automatically held a superior grade to Ostarbeiter; in some firms the German workers who had to provide initial training for the Ostarbeiter were given a special rank.

An extract from the report of an official from one of the ministries, who, in 1943, visited various Ostarbeiter camps in Berlin illustrates what the situation of Soviet slave workers in Germany was actually like:
Despite the official rations Ostarbeiter are entitled to, it has been reliably established that the meals in the camps are as follows: In the morning, half a litre of turnip soup. At lunchtime, on the worksite, one litre of turnip soup. At night, one litre of turnip soup. Also, Ostarbeiter are given 300 gr. [about 10 oz] of bread per day. In addition, they receive, per week, 50 to 75 gr. [about 1.8 to 2.5 oz] of margarine, 25 gr. [about one ounce] of meat or meat products, which are distributed or withheld according to the whim of the camp leader. Large amounts of these rations get corruptly distributed. But the biggest scourge in the camps is tuberculosis, which is also spreading rapidly among minors. In the context of the Ostarbeiter's health and sanitary situation, it has to be emphasized that the factory medical insurance schemes will not allow their German and Russian doctors to give any medicine whatsoever to the Ostarbeiter. Those suffering from tuberculosis are not even isolated. Sick workers are forced to remain at work by beatings, because the camp authorities doubt the competence of the doctors in attendance. I am not aware of the reason why the German authorities imported a large number of children from the Eastern Territories. It is a fact, however, that many children between the ages of 4 to 15 are in the camps, and that they have neither parents nor relatives in Germany. Most of the children are sick and the only food they get to build up their strength is the same watery turnip soup as the older Ostarbeiter.

The employment of foreigners in Germany had by now become accepted as a fact of wartime life, and in view of their own personal worries, for most Germans the fate of the foreign workers was of precious little interest. Their employment was by no means restricted to major industries, but covered, apart from the administration, the entire economy: from small farms to metal workshops with six employees, up to the Reichsbahn (state railway), local authorities, and the large arms factories, as well as many private households which employed a total of 200,000 Soviet maids, who were much in demand because they were cheap. In the summer of 1944 there were 7.8 million foreigners employed in the Reich: of these, 5.7 million were civilian workers and just under 2 million POW. Of these 2.8 million came from the USSR; 1.7 million from Poland; 1.3 million from France—altogether there were at that time people from nearly 20 European countries employed in the Reich (see Table 2). More than half of the Polish and Soviet civilian workers were women, below 20 years old on average—the typical slave worker in Germany in 1943 was an 18-year-old schoolgirl from Kiev. Thus 26.5% of all those employed in the Reich were foreigners; 46% in agriculture, almost 40% in industry, about 50% in the core armaments industry, and up to 90% in individual concerns that had a large proportion of unskilled labour.

Forced labour, Table 2: Principal nationalities, of foreign civilian workers and prisoners-of-war, their numbers, and the industry in which they worked, August 1944

	Agriculture	Mining	Metal	Chemicals	Building	Transport	Total
Source: Contributor.
Belgians
total	28,652	5,416	95,872	14,029	20,906	12,576	177,451
Civilians	3,948	2,787	86,441	13,533	19,349	11,585	137,643
Pris.-of-war as % of all	24,704	2,629	9,431	496	1,557	991	39,808
Belgians workers	16.1	3.0	54.0	8.0	11.8	7.0	100%
French
TOTAL	405,897	21,844	370,766	48,319	59,440	48,700	954,966
Civilians	54,590	7,780	292,800	39,417	36,237	34,905	465,729
Pris.-of-war as % of all	351,307	14,064	77,966	8,902	23,203	13,795	489,237
French workers	42.5	2.3	39.0	5.0	6.2	5.0	100%
Italians
TOTAL	45,288	50,325	221,304	35,276	80,814	35,319	468,326
Civilians	15,372	6,641	41,316	10,791	35,271	5,507	114,898
Pris.-of-war	29,916	43,684	179,988	24,485	45,543	29,812	353,428
as % of all
Italian workers	9.7	10.7	47.3	7.5	17.3	7.5	100%
Dutch
Civiliansas % of all	22,092	4,745	87,482	9,658	32,025	18,356	174,358
Dutch workers	12.7	2.7	50.2	5.5	18.4	10.5	100%
Soviet
total	862,062	252,848	883,419	92,952	110,289	205,325	2,406,895
Civilians	723,646	92,950	752,714	84,974	77,991	158,024	1,890,299
Pris.-of-war as % of all	138,416	159,898	130,705	7,978	32,298	47,301	516,596
Soviet workers	35.8	10.5	36.7	3.9	4.6	8.5	100%
Poles
total	1,125,632	55,672	130,905	23,871	68,428	35,746	1,440,254
Civilians	1,105,719	55,005	128,556	22,911	67,601	35,484	1,415,276
Pris.-of-war as % of all	19,913	667	2,349	960	827	262	24,978
Polish workers	78.1	3.9	9.1	1.7	4.7	2.5	100%
Citizens from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
Civilians as % of all	10,289	13,413	80,349	10,192	44,870	18,566	177,679
Citizens from the Protectorate	5.8	7.5	45.2	5.7	25.3	10.5	100%
TOTAL	2,499,912	404,263	1,870,097	234,297	416,772	374,588	5,799,929
Civilians	1,935,656	183,321	1,469,658	191,476	313,344	282,427	4,375,882
Pris.-of-war	564,256	220,942	400,439	42,821	103,428	92,161	1,424,047
as %	43.1%	7.0%	32.2%	4.0%	7.2%	6.5%	100%

However, from the beginning of 1944 it became apparent that even these quite considerable numbers of workers could no longer meet the labour requirements, particularly those of the big armaments projects. But the recruitment of workers was slowing down, especially from the USSR and attention therefore turned to the only organization that still had at its disposal a considerable potential of labour: the concentration camps of the SS. In the first few years of the war the employment of prisoners from concentration camps had not played a part in the war economy, though since 1938 the SS had its own industrial enterprises, mainly quarries, brickworks, and repair shops, and nearly all prisoners were drawn into some kind of slave labour. But even in this situation, the concept of work as punishment, ‘education’, or ‘revenge’ was still upheld. In practice, it led even before 1939, and more so afterwards, to the extermination of those groups of prisoners who held a low rank in the political and racial hierarchy of the Nazis. It was only in the spring of 1942 that the SS began to send more prisoners into armaments work. Yet the volume of arms production in the concentration camps remained extremely low, their productivity being around 17% compared with the rest of the economy. In the debate between the various factions of the SS, the idea of punishment and extermination, as opposed to work and productivity, found continued support. This was due to the mass deportation of Soviet manpower into Germany, which had started at that time, and by supplying the war economy with labour, had taken the pressure off the concentration camps.

It was not until the late autumn of 1942 that, at the instigation of Speer, a new system was introduced in which prisoners from concentration camps were loaned to private businesses in groups of 500, to be housed in external concentration camps specially constructed in the towns. However, this system was slow to develop; in the summer of 1943 only about 100,000 registered prisoners from concentration camps were put to work in this way. Even by the spring of 1944 the armaments ministry was working on the assumption that only 32,000 concentration camp prisoners had actually been placed in the private arms industry.

Another source of forced labour to which the Nazis turned was the Jews. From the end of 1941 the political aim of the National Socialist leadership had been their extermination (see Final Solution), not their employment, and the short-term and dangerous—in the racial and political context—use of them as workers had been discouraged. Up to 1944 most had been sent to the death camps (see OPERATION REINHARD), even those who held positions of prime importance in the war economy and despite strong objections and protests from various authorities and firms. Nor, with few exceptions, of which the best known is the construction of the IG Farben works at Auschwitz, in which 25,000 prisoners died, had those Jews who had escaped immediate extermination been employed long-term in the German arms industry. However, from early 1944, the acute shortage of labour—and the fact that National Socialism had virtually achieved its aim so far as the Jews were concerned—brought a change in policy. Jewish prisoners, including those inside the Reich, were now given work in SS enterprises; in industries that had been relocated to underground sites; and in private businesses, especially those linked to the major industries.

By August 1943 it had been decided, by the highest echelons of the leadership, to start production of the V-2 rocket (see V-weapons), which was to be carried out in underground sites using prisoners from concentration camps. The number of deaths was enormous, particularly during the construction phase of the site in the autumn and winter of 1943–4. The work was simple but physically demanding; it was easy to replace prisoners. Lack of food, pressure of work, and bad living conditions were the reasons for the high death rate, which did not begin to fall until the camp's living quarters were completed and production had started. But by that time, only a few weeks after arrival, the prisoners were worn out.

Projects of this kind, which required tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of men working three shifts a day, could only be operated using concentration camp prisoners, as only the SS still had reserves of manpower on that scale. But it was not long before even these reserves were insufficient to handle the amount of work required, and in April 1944 Hitler ordered that for shifting armaments and building large bunkers ‘the required number of about 100,000 men was to be supplied by suitable contingents of Jews from Hungary’.

By the spring of 1944 the number of work groups of the external units of the concentration camps had grown rapidly (to about 1,600); the list of German industrial concerns that employed prisoners of concentration camps and Jews kept increasing and comprised hundreds of otherwise reputable firms. At the end of 1944 the total number of prisoners from concentration camps (Jewish and non-Jewish) was about 600,000 of whom 480,000 were reported to be actually fit for work. According to the estimates of the Wirtschafts und Verwaltungshauptamt (principal office for economic and administrative affairs), of the SS, about 140,000 of them had been assigned to the underground depots, about 130,000 to the building projects of the Todt Organization, and about 230,000 were employed in private industry.

The living and working conditions of the concentration camp prisoners varied considerably. They depended on the type of employment, the position of the individual worker in the racial hierarchy of the SS, and not least on the attitude of the management, as well as that of camp leaders, supervisors, and junior and senior foremen. The Jewish prisoners, separated in special teams, suffered the worst conditions. As a general—but very guarded—statement, it could be said that those who were employed in the arms production industry proper had better chances of survival than the prisoners who worked for the concerns owned by the SS, for the big building projects, and especially in the construction of underground production sites. Where building projects and the underground projects were concerned, speed was of paramount importance. For the prisoners, the consequences were appalling, compounded as they were by poor rations, unhealthy subterranean accommodation, the breakneck pace of work, and above all by the endless stream of new prisoners arriving in the often already overcrowded camps. Towards the end of 1944 the life expectancy of prisoners was limited to an average of a few months. Here, a man was worth no more than the amount of physical strength he could muster for the duration of a few weeks. For the hundreds of thousands of people in these camps, work was synonymous with extermination.

When considering the historical significance of the Auslän dereinsatz (employment of foreigners), there is enough evidence to show that, by the beginning of 1942 at the latest, the German war economy had no alternative but to rely on foreign forced labour. Only the Ausländereinsatz enabled Germany to maintain a level of rationing that was the highest in all the European powers involved in the war. Last but not least, it was the foreign workers who contributed to that gigantic surge in growth and modernization that Germany experienced during the war years, a growth that formed part of the foundation for the rapid upward trend of the economy after 1948.

Most of the foreign workers who survived, described as Displaced Persons (see refugees), returned to their home countries immediately after the end of the war. But for the civilian and prisoner-of-war workers from the USSR, May 1945 brought no end to their suffering. After repatriation to their country they were accused, by the Stalinist authorities, of collective collaboration, and subjected to harsh repression. Quite a number of them were again locked up, often for years, in the GUlag. Their names have not yet been rehabilitated.

Ulrich Herbert

Bibliography

Herbert, U. , Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des ‘Ausländer-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Berlin and Bonn, 1985).
Homze, E. L. , Foreign Labour in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 1967).
Seeber, E. , Zwangsarbeiter in der faschistischen Kriegswirtschaft (Berlin (DDR), 1964).