Forced labour under German rule during World War II information
Use of forced labour in Nazi Germany and its occupied territories during World War II
See also: Forced labor in Nazi concentration camps
Use of forced labour by Nazi Germany
Original Nazi propaganda caption: "A 14-year-old youth from Ukraine repairs damaged motor vehicles in a Berlin workshop of the German Wehrmacht. January 1945."
Foreign forced labourers
Numbers
10 million (1944 est.)[1] including: 6.5 million civilians 2.2 million POWs 1.3 million camp inmates
Abducted
12 million[1]
Place of origin
USSR (33.6%), Poland (21.7%), France (17.1%), Belgium, Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, Denmark, Greece, Spain, Romania and others[1]
The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (German: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale.[2] It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe. The Germans abducted approximately 12 million people from almost twenty European countries; about two thirds came from Central Europe and Eastern Europe.[1] Many workers died as a result of their living conditions – extreme mistreatment, severe malnutrition and abuse were the main causes of death. Many more became civilian casualties from enemy (Allied) bombing and shelling of their workplaces throughout the war.[3] At the peak of the program the forced labourers constituted 20% of the German work force. Counting deaths and turnover, about 15 million men and women were forced labourers at one point during the war.[4]
Besides Jews, the harshest deportation and forced labor policies were applied to the populations of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. By the end of the war, half of Belarus' population had been either killed or deported.[5][6]
The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 freed approximately 11 million foreigners (categorized as "displaced persons"), most of whom were forced labourers and POWs. During the war, German forces brought into the Reich 6.5 million civilians, in addition to Soviet POWs, for unfree labour in factories.[1] Returning them home was a high priority for the Allies. However returning citizens of the USSR were often meant suspicion of collaboration or reincarceration in a Gulag prison camp. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), Red Cross, and military operations provided food, clothing, shelter, and assistance in returning home. In all, 5.2 million foreign workers and POWs were repatriated to the Soviet Union, 1.6 million to Poland, 1.5 million to France, and 900,000 to Italy, along with 300,000 to 400,000 each to Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Belgium.[7]
^ abcdeJohn C. Beyer; Stephen A. Schneider. Forced Labour under Third Reich. Nathan Associates. Part1 Archived 2015-08-24 at the Wayback Machine and Part 2 Archived 2017-04-03 at the Wayback Machine.
^Herbert, Ulrich (1997). Hitler's Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labour in Germany Under the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-47000-5.
^Czesław Łuczak (1979). Polityka ludnościowa i ekonomiczna hitlerowskich Niemiec w okupowanej Polsce [Civilian and economic policy of Nazi Germany in occupied Poland]. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie. p. 136. ISBN 832100010X. Retrieved 11 October 2013. Also in: http://www.polishresistance-ak.org/30%20Artykul.htm [Eksploatacja ekonomiczna ziem polskich] (Economic exploitation of Poland's territory) by Dr. Andrzej Chmielarz, Polish Resistance in WW2, Eseje-Artykuły.
^Panayi, Panikos (2005). "Exploitation, Criminality, Resistance. The Everyday Life of Foreign Workers and Prisoners of War in the German Town of Osnabrck, 1939–49". Journal of Contemporary History. 40 (3): 483–502. doi:10.1177/0022009405054568. JSTOR 30036339. S2CID 159846665.
^Johannes-Dieter Steinert. "Kleine Ostarbeiter: Child Forced Labor in Nazi Germany and German Occupied Eastern Europe". ...apart from Jewish forced labourers – workers from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia had to endure the worst working and living conditions. Moreover, German occupation policies in the Soviet Union were far more brutal than in any other country, and German deportation practices the most inhuman.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^"The Holocaust in Belarus". Facing History and Ourselves. 12 May 2020. Retrieved 29 December 2020. The non-Jewish population was subjected to Nazi terror, too. Hundreds of thousands were deported to Germany as slave laborers, thousands of villages and towns were burned or destroyed, and millions were starved to death as the Germans plundered the entire region. Timothy Snyder estimates that "half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country."
^William I. Hitchcock, The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (2008), pp 250–56
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