Places of Remembrance

Creating Places of Learning and Remembrance

Forced labour as a Nazi crime played almost no role in post-war Germany. Although investigators targeted well-known companies such as Flick and Krupp in one of the Nuremberg post-war trials, they managed to portray themselves as victims of Nazi economic policy. They obscured the voluntary, every day, mass and often inhumane exploitation of forced labourers that took place in the economic, public and private spheres.

In the everyday life of post-war society, Germans focused much more on their own narrative of victimhood. The prevailing opinion was that the “foreign workers” had been treated well. Displaced Persons did not have a strong enough voice to put pressure on the German government. Instead, they were again subjected to hostility and marginalisation. The injustice that was considered, if at all, focused on the wages that were withheld from the forced labourers by the companies.

The memorials to the victims of Nazism erected in West Germany after the war did not include former forced labourers. In East Germany, as early as the mid-1950s, large national memorials were erected on the sites of former concentration camps, which were accorded great importance in the self-proclaimed “anti-fascist” state. Civilian forced labour, however, played no role in East Germany’s culture of remembrance.

The 1990s were a time of upheaval. After the end of the Cold War, companies in the USA were first confronted with class action lawsuits to compensate former forced labourers. In Germany, initiatives and history workshops increasingly focused on previously forgotten victims, including forced labourers. They initiated exhibitions in their respective local contexts, researched profiteers and supported former civilian forced labourers in their public demands for compensation. Some cities organised City Visit Programmes. They invited former forced labourers to Germany who visited their former places of detention or work and spoke with representatives and the public.

Former forced labourers talking to Berlin secondary school students as part of the Berlin History Workshop’s encounter programme with 19 Polish former AEG forced labourers from Łódź, Berlin, 15 to 19 May 2000 © Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit/Collection Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt

Contemporary witness interview with the former Dutch forced labourer H. v. Uitert and the two former Polish forced labourers K. Kosonowska and I. Szeliga, Berlin, 2 September 2003 © Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit/Collection Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt

In 2000, in response to public pressure and the threat of lawsuits, the German parliament established a foundation to compensate forced labourers with the financial participation of German industry: the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future. For many former forced labourers, like Barbara Jablonska, the debate on compensation, which was far from conflict-free, and the companies’ refusal to admit guilt was a new humiliation:

"I found the debate over compensation [for forced labourers] scandalous [...] because it revealed an inhuman indifference, a cold wind from the past."
Barbara Jablonska, former forced labourer, in an interview, Nuremberg, 2003, © Interview Gerhard Jochem

Flyer Forced labour camp Berlin-Schöneweide by the Society for the Promotion of a Documentation Centre Nazi Forced Labour, c. 2001 Berlin-Schöneweide © Dokumentationszentrum NS-Zwangsarbeit

In 2006, after a long period of civic engagement, the Documentation Centre Nazi Forced Labour opened in Berlin on the site of a former forced labour camp. It was the first place of remembrance dedicated exclusively to the subject of Nazi forced labour. Since 2013, it hosts an exhibition on Nazi forced labour in Berlin and Germany. In 2010, the exhibition Forced Labour. Germans, Forced Labourers and the War opened at the Jewish Museum in Berlin two years earlier. The travelling exhibition, developed by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials, has been shown in numerous European capitals and will be displayed in the newly opened Museum of Forced Labour in Weimar from 2024.

Since then, many projects and information platforms have been created. Numerous initiatives and places of remembrance have also been supported. In addition to the places of learning and remembrance listed on this website, several other memorials, such as Stumbling Stones or memorial plaques, are often created at the initiative of local actors. People from all over Europe make inquiries to the memorial sites and archives in search of more information about the fate of their family members who were former forced labourers, bearing witness to the deep traces that the crime of forced labour has left behind to this day.