Forced Labour in the Occupied Territories of Europe
Forced labour played a large role in the occupied territories of Europe and North Africa. The Nazis regarded the people of the occupied territories as spoils of war. The Wehrmacht, the German administrative apparatus and the German companies that had established themselves in the occupied territories all exploited forced labourers. The number of people who were forced to work in the occupied territories of Europe and North Africa can only be estimated. Lower estimates put the figure at around 7 million, while higher estimates put it at around 13 million. In addition to the approximately 13 million forced labourers employed in Germany, they also were exploited for Germany’s war economy.
Exploitation along racist lines
The occupied countries and their inhabitants were affected by forced labour in very different ways. The severity of the work they were forced to do depended on a racial hierarchy according to which the Nazis classified people as high or low value. This meant that people from Poland, Russia and Ukraine were treated worse than French or Czech forced labourers. Jewish men and women were particularly badly treated, with the Nazi administration in conquered Poland forcing them to work from the very first days of the war in September 1939. The aim was to humiliate and ridicule the victims by forcing them to do degrading work. For most of them, forced labour would simply be a postponement of the murder already planned for them.
One of the Nazis’ war aims was to conquer what they called Lebensraum (lit. living space), in Eastern Europe, where raw materials would be plundered and German farming families resettled after the war. The people living there would be displaced, murdered or forced to work for racially motivated reasons.
Labourers for the German war economy
In other cases, however, economic motives were central. From the very beginning of the war, labour offices were set up behind the front lines in occupied Poland, and their staff set about recruiting the local population for forced labour. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, German companies followed the Wehrmacht and the German administration into the occupied territories. They appropriated existing factories, set up branches and exploited the civilian population as forced labourers.
Daimler-Benz, for example, maintained a large repair factory for Wehrmacht vehicles in Minsk, Belarus. With 5,000 workers, the factory soon became one of the largest in occupied Eastern Europe. Prisoners of war and civilians, including Jewish men and women, were forced to work there.
Forced labour in ghettos
There was a special form of forced labour in the ghettos where Jewish men and women were imprisoned. They were forced to make items such as clothing and uniforms, or everyday items such as brushes, for German companies or on behalf of the Wehrmacht. For the inhabitants of the ghettos, forced labour was the only hope of survival, as only those who worked received the bare minimum of food and could hope to avoid deportation to a death camp.
In the Litzmannstadt ghetto in the Polish city of Łódź, for example, hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, men and children struggled to survive by working themselves to exhaustion in the ghetto workshops set up by Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Judenrat (lit. Jewish council) set up by the Nazis. With orders from the Wehrmacht, he tried to make Jewish workers indispensable to the Nazis, hoping to save at least some of the ghetto’s inhabitants.
But the German ghetto administration supplied too little food and a quarter of the 200,000 people in the Litzmannstadt ghetto perished of hunger and disease. In addition, the SS had sick people, children under ten and older people, whom they classed as “unfit for work”, deported to the Kulmhof death camp near Chełmno. In the summer of 1944, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of the surviving ghetto inhabitants to the Auschwitz death camp. This was the final failure of the rescue strategy.
In the occupied territories of Western Europe
The Wehrmacht also exploited many people as labourers in the occupied territories of Western Europe, for example in Italy, which was being fought over by Nazi Germany and the Allies. In 1944, Italian men in areas close to the front were recruited by the Wehrmacht as forced labourers. The aim was to prevent them from escaping into the Allied zone of influence by keeping them available as workers for German arms production. Members of the Wehrmacht sent these men as forced labourers to northern Italy, where Italian companies were producing arms for the German Reich.
In Norway, around 90,000 Soviet prisoners of war were used as forced labour, mainly to build and improve new roads, improve and widen old roads, clear snow and build railway lines.
Further reading:
Dieter Pohl, Tanja Sebta (Hrsg.). Zwangsarbeit in Hitlers Europa. Besatzung – Arbeit – Folgen, Berlin 2013.
Alexander Nützenadel (Hrsg.). Das Reichsarbeitsministerium im Nationalsozialismus. Verwaltung – Politik – Verbrechen, Göttingen 2017.
