Persecution of the Jews: Forced (slave) labour / labor

7,500,000 people as slaves - because the lightning victory against Russia never came

     

from: Encyclopaedia Judaica 1971, vol. 6

presented by Michael Palomino (2007 / 2015)

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<FORCED (Slave) LABOUR.

[7,500,000 foreign labourers in the Third Reich]

During World War II a significant contribution was made to the German economic potential by the population of the occupied territories. While the German civilian labour force was constantly being reduced due to military requirements [[because the lightning victory against Russia never came]], the need for labour in the large-scale war effort increased , and the solution was the mobilization of the labour force in German dependencies.

By September of 1944, a peak of 7,500,000 foreign labourers were employed in Germany proper, as compared with 300,000 on the eve of the war. In the occupied territories locally employed persons also worked to a large extent for the German economy, primarily in war installations and the armament industry.

[Workers from Eastern Europe with a badge "T" or "OST" - murder by working - Jewish work against Hitler's and against Goering's orders]

Whereas West European laborers in Germany worked in tolerable conditions, their East European colleagues were sharply discriminated against in wages, conditions of work, food, and fringe benefits. Moreover, Poles and Soviet citizens (Ostarbeiter [[workers from Eastern Europe]]) in Germany carried a badge bearing the letters P, or OST, respectively, to prevent them from contact with the local population. Soviet prisoners of war were condemned to immediate or slow death (see *Holocaust, Jewish Behaviour).

Badges for forced labourers / laborers
P badges since 8 March 1940 according to the law for working Poles in Germany ("Polenerlass")	Polish forced labourer with a P badge, portrait
OST badge since 20 February 1942 according to the new law for working people from Eastern Europe ("Ostarbeitererlass")	Woman worker from Eastern Europe with an OST badge	Forced labourer from Eastern Europe with OST badge, Wernigerode 1943
Soviet forced labourers transported in summer in open railway wagon		"SU" on the back of Soviet forced labourers

Within this framework, the Jews occupied a position of persons temporarily reprieved from unavoidable murder. *Heydrich openly declared at the *Wannsee Conference that

"in the course of the exploitation of Jewish labour a majority would undoubtedly fall away through natural decline."

[The conditions on building sites were partly so hard that the S.S. doctors calculated a survival time of 80 days].

Jewish labor by persons aged 12 to 60 was exploited in Greater Germany, in the occupied territories, and to a lesser degree, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in the satellites (Italy, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria). Jews worked in Germany notwithstanding Hitler's order of April 7, 1941, and in their home countries occupied by Germany notwithstanding Goering's declaration of August 1941 that the Jews had no business in German-dominated areas.

They worked in civilian endeavours, in war industry, and even in auxiliary "military" units on the front line; in ghettos and outside the ghettos, in ghetto workshops, in labor camps, and in concentration and extermination camps.

They performed menial work, repairs, skilled (col. 1429)

work - such as manufacture of uniforms - construction, specialized and precision work, and clerical work. They worked for municipal institutions, for the ghetto administrations, for the concentration and extermination camps, for the German army, for the SS companies - such as OSTI - and for private firms based in and around the ghettos and camps.

[The Reich and the S.S. robbing the salaries - 12-hour workday - sometimes horrible conditions]

They received no wages at all or substandard wages. (Although the private firms did pay wages, the money did not go directly to the labourers, but rather to the Reich and the SS, who retained most of it).

The working week was seven days, with a 12-hour workday, a starvation diet, unsanitary housing conditions [[depends of the company]], and brutal guards [[also depends on the company]]. Describing the labour conditions in concentration camps, the judgment of the International Military Tribunal [[in Nuremberg in 1946]] stated:

"The conditions under which they worked would make labour and death almost synonymous terms."

[[This indication is right for the building sites with a survival time of 80 days. Statistically in the concentrations camps were 85-90% Jews, the others were communists, socialists, gays, lesbians, "asocials", and gipsies]].

Examples of forced labour in towns and concentration camps
Concentration camp Ravensbrueck (women camp), textile work	Concentration camp Ravensbrueck (women camp), earthworks	working camp "Schuetzenplatz", Braunschweig, 2 Polish girls as forced labourers
Bremen, submarine bunker Vanlentin, forced labourers	CC Auschwitz, working women in gravel pit (1942)	CC Auschwitz, forced labourer working on building site for a Krupp production plant
CC Plaszow (near Cracow, Poland), women forced labourers on the rope pulling carts filled with rocks CC Plaszow (near Cracow, Poland), forced labourers pushing carts filled with rocks		Camp Weisssee ("White lake", branch of CC Dachau) in 2,300 m over sea level, power plant constructioning
CC Flossenbuerg, forced labourers in a stone pit	CC Dachau, forced labourers working in a hall	Camp Ternberg (Austria), forced labourers and war prisoners on a power plant building site
Camp Letmathe (near Hagen), barack camp for French forced labourers	Camp Letmathe (near Hagen), French forced labourers for foto session	Polish youths in road constructioning forced labour in Germany
Otto Line, Jewish forced labourers during earthwork for ramparts	Zamosc, Jews forced for forced labour, roadworks	Neuengamme, forced labourers trenching a trench
Kohnstein, forced labourers on rocket V2	Kohnstein, forced labourers electronic works	Kohnstein, dead detainee
CC Ebensee, detainees reduced to a sceleton 1945	Tunnel system Kahla 01, forced labourers bringing wooden stakes	Tunnel system Kahla 02, forced labourers on stripping he forms
CC Ebensee, dead bodies on a trolley

[[Other forced to forced labour had better luck and had other conditions as the fotos prove]]:

Forced labour camp Hagen-Wehringhaus
Camp Hagen-Wehringhausen, barracks	Camp Hagen-Wehringhausen, barracks with bunk beds and cupboards
Camp Hagen-Wehringhausen, dance for workers from Eastern Europe	Camp Hagen-Wehringhausen, couple of workers of Eastern Europe

Brothel for forced labourers
Brothel for forced labourers, cash point, Breslau 1942-1943	Brothel for forced labourers, dance, Breslau 1942-1943

Good moments at other locations
Soviet women forced labourers on a controlled walk with their children	East European working women with babies in front of a children nursing station for eastern workers at Ochtr

[[We see that the conditions could be very different. But the terror of the NS regime came surely up when people loved each other who wanted to overcome the racial laws. The affected German people were pilloried, and the forced labourers from foreign countries were hanged for it]]:

Punishments for violation of racial NS law, "racial defilement"
Polish man chained with shield for racial defilement, Eisenach (Thuringia) 15 Nov 1940: "Ich bin ein Rassenschänder" ("I am a racial defiler")	German woman with shield: Expelled from the people's community, Altenburg (Thuringia) 7 Feb 1942, because she was together with a Pole. Text: "Ich bin aus der Volksgemeinschaft ausgestossen!" ("I am expelled from the people's community!")
	Poster that 4 Poles had been hanged for racial defilement, 1942. Text: "Polen! In letzter Zeit wurden hingerichtet: Zlosnik Josef, Sikora Stanislaus, Domagala Wladyslaw, Pesko Josef. Ihr sollt daraus erkennen: Wer arbeitet, hat es gut in Deutschland! Wer nicht arbeiten will, wird dazu gezwungen! Wer sich gegen die deutschen Kriegs- und Sittengesetze vergeht, wird aufgehängt!" (English: "Poles! Recently were executed: Zlosnik Josef, Sikora Stanislaus, Domagala Wladyslaw, Pesko Josef. You shall recognize by this: Who is working will live well in Germany! Who does not want to work will be forced to do so! Who is violating the German war and moral laws will be hanged!")

Hanged Jewish forced labourers, Délvidék 1942 (there is no reason indicated)

[Labour certificates - motives for working]

Still, in the chaotic world of the Nazi regime, Jews clung to their labour certificates, because skilled labourers had a chance of survival.

No official records are available on the selection of forced labourers. With the exception of Lodz, the textile center of Poland, where in certain periods up to 90% of the Jewish population was employed in slave labour, there was far too large a supply of Jewish labour in relation to need. One criterion for the use of slave labour in the ghettos was the possibility of ransoming the victims, with ransom funds then used toward the salaries and maintenance of the labourers.

The monolithic Nazi system, while declaring that "economic questions should not be considered in the solution of the Jewish problem", and notwithstanding its commitment to the immediate and total destruction of the Jewish people, had to make temporary concessions to the exigencies of the war, to private-industry exploitation of cheap Jewish labor, and even to the SS as employer.

The contradictions, however, never reached the stage of opposing the principles on which Jewish forced labour was based: debate was limited to squabbles about individuals and groups, availability of replacements for "indispensable" Jews, and duration of the period of labour duty before deportation to the death camps [[among others death camps with the building sites and tunnel constructioning]].

Slave labor constituted a clear contravention of Articles 46 and 52 of the Hague Regulations, of which Germany was a cosignatory.

See also articles on the individual areas of persecution and extermination.


Bibliography

-- International Labour Office: Exploitation of Foreign Labour by Germany (1945)
-- Jewish Affairs (N.Y., Mar. 1942), special issue

[J.R.]> (col. 1430)


[[Supplement: The end]]

CC Bergen-Belsen: German Nazi woman guards are forced to bury dead bodies of detainees by British occupation forces 1945

Plaszow (near Cracaw, Poland), memorial for the concentration camps and the deads

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