Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union information
Soviet policy during and after WWII
The mother of a prisoner thanks Konrad Adenauer upon his return from Moscow on September 14, 1955. Adenauer had succeeded in concluding negotiations for the release to Germany, by the end of that year, of 15,000 German civilians and prisoners of war.
Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union was considered by the Soviet Union to be part of German war reparations for the damage inflicted by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union during the Axis-Soviet campaigns (1941–1945) of World War II. Soviet authorities deported German civilians from Germany and Eastern Europe to the USSR after World War II as forced laborers, while ethnic Germans living in the USSR were deported during World War II and conscripted for forced labor. German prisoners of war were also used as a source of forced labor during and after the war by the Soviet Union and by the Western Allies.
Nazi Germany had used forced labour of people in the occupied territories since the beginning of World War II. In 1940, it initiated Ostarbeiter, a massive project of enslaving the populations of Eastern European countries to use as forced labour in German factories and agricultural facilities. The Soviet government proposed the use of German labor as reparations in 1943, and raised the issue at the Yalta Conference in February 1945. The USSR began deporting ethnic Germans from the Balkans in late 1944, most of the surviving internees had returned by 1950.[citation needed] The NKVD took the lead role in the deportations via its department, the Chief Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internee Affairs (GUPVI).
Information about the forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union was suppressed in the Eastern Bloc until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Before that, however, it was known in the West through accounts released in West Germany and recollections of the internees. Historians cite German accounts that cover the employment of German labor by the USSR. Statistics for the Soviet use of German civilian labor are divergent and contradictory. This article details the published statistical data from the West German Schieder commission of 1951–1961, the German Red Cross, the report of the German Federal Archives and a study by Gerhard Reichling (an employee of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany). Recently declassified statistical data from the Soviet archives on the use of German civilian labor in the Stalin era were published in the book Against Their Will (Russian: «Не по своей воле», 2001).
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