The exhibition in the Memorial Hall focuses on forced labour in the Ruhr area and offers a comprehensive introduction to the subject, especially for students from the 9th grade upwards, using specific regional examples. The Memorial Hall is a partner of the website Forced Labour Archive. Under the submenu Education it provides the online introduction for the Ruhr area: https://www.zwangsarbeit-archiv.de/bildung/ruhrgebiet/index.html.

The online introduction to Nazi forced labour serves as preparation for a workshop in the Hall of Remembrance. The suggestions for working with two memoirs offer an approach to the topic by encountering people who talk about their individual experiences as forced labourers in Essen and Gelsenkirchen. They talk about the pre-war period in their home countries, the deprivation of their rights during the occupation and their deportation to forced labour and concentration camps.

The educational aim of the online introduction is not only to impart factual knowledge about the history of forced labour in the Ruhr area, but to enable users to formulate their own questions and to provide an impulse for a deeper engagement with the subject in a subsequent advanced workshop. Tips are also given on how to prepare for the workshop.

The workshop in the Hall of Remembrance explains the historical, social, political and ideological background to Nazi forced labour, which was increasingly used from 1939 onwards in the Ruhr, the “arsenal of the Reich”, as elsewhere.

The Nazi system used forced labour in order to continue the war it had started. More than 13 million people were brought into the German Reich from territories occupied by the Wehrmacht, mostly against their will. In an almost inescapable system of racial exploitation, they were reduced to nothing more than labour. Forced labourers were exploited not only by local authorities, the mining industry and armaments companies, but also by private individuals. Many paid with their lives – in Oberhausen alone 1,200 died and were buried in two segregated cemeteries.

Because of the large numbers of people deported to Germany, forced labour was for many years a visible part of everyday life for all Germans. This “normality”, disguised as vital to the war effort, long obscured the fact that it was the largest mass crime committed by the Nazis in terms of numbers. The public discourse on forced labour only changed when the debate on compensation emerged more than 50 years later.

The workshop will conclude with some examples of contacts between Germans and forced labourers, and the question of how much freedom of action the Germans had. Was the way they dealt with forced labourers determined by racism and exploitation, or by humanity and willingness to help? Discussing the relationship between the social framework and individual attitudes can lead to talking about current issues facing us in the present.

Contact
Email: info-gedenkhalle@oberhausen.de