Workplaces and Working Conditions
The German economy during the Second World War was largely based on forced labour. Both the continuation of the war and the provision of the German population depended on forced labourers and their ruthless exploitation. Every sector of the German economy was affected by forced labour - mining, (arms) industry, construction, agriculture and forestry, local public enterprises, administration and crafts, churches and food production, down to small bakeries and private households.
Forced labour in every branch of industry
In 1944, forced labourers filled 25% of the jobs in Germany. Civilian forced labourers or prisoners of war were forced to work in one out of every three mining and construction jobs in 1944. In agriculture, as many as half of all jobs were filled by forced labourers. By 1942 at the latest, all of German industry was fully geared to the war effort, with major companies such as Siemens, BASF, ThyssenKrupp, and Volkswagen shifting their production to the manufacture of vital war goods. A very large number of forced labourers were then employed in these factories.
For example, the construction of the Valentin submarine bunker in Bremen-Farge involved fifty different companies and up to 8,000 forced labourers of various origins. There, as in similar factories, the forced labourers had to do heavy, sometimes extremely heavy, work without any protective clothing or equipment. Their shifts lasted ten to twelve hours, six days a week. Injuries from the machinery were commonplace.
The special role of the arms industry
The Nazis were very concerned about acts of sabotage. For this reason, forced labourers in armaments factories or on large-scale armaments projects were often kept in the dark about the purpose of their work. The language barrier was another source of uncertainty. What they did know, however, was that they were working on the production of weapons and other vital war materials to be used against their own countrymen.
In addition to the armaments industry, agriculture was also heavily dependent on forced labourers. Without them, the food supply in the German Reich would have collapsed as early as 1939, at the very beginning of the war.
Forced labourers also had to work in the private homes of Germans. Managers of businesses and Nazi authorities, as well as high-ranking party officials, often used their contacts to recruit domestic help or childcare for their wives. This form of forced labour mainly affected young women, many of them from Ukraine. Particularly towards the end of the war, forced labourers had to clear the rubble of bombed-out buildings in German cities.
Wages
Civilian forced labourers were paid for their work as a matter of course. But their wages were heavily taxed and the cost of food and accommodation was deducted. Poles and Ostarbeiter (Soviet forced labourers) also had to pay a special deduction from their wages. All this meant that different groups of workers were paid different amounts of wages for doing the same work:
The differences in the wages paid had a direct impact on the daily lives of the different groups. For example, the money that Western European forced labourers earned allowed them to try to barter for extra food.
Differences in wages also meant that people were different costs to the companies they worked for. Western European forced labourers cost comparatively more than those from Eastern Europe. The German state and the factories, whose production would simply not have been possible without the use of forced labour, enriched themselves enormously from the proceeds of forced labour.
Further reading:
Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz. Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939-1945, Stuttgart/München 2001.
Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des "Ausländer-Einsatzes" in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches, Berlin/Bonn 1999.
