Forced Labor under the Nazis

Under the Nazi regime around 25 million people were deployed in forced labor. The historian Jens-Christian Wagner defines forced labor as “work against the will of the employees, enforced using extra-economic measures.”[1] To this definition we can add that in the early years of the war, some people were forced to sign up “voluntarily” for the work effort for ostensibly economic reasons, because the local production structures and hence the means of existence had been destroyed by the German occupation.[2] As the workforce—in contrast to what the propaganda suggested—was subjected to exploitation and hostile conditions the number of “volunteers” rapidly declined, and the Nazi administration switched to a campaign of mass abductions.

Of the 25 million people, more than 13 million were deported to Germany, a number equivalent to the current population of Bavaria. Distributed among 30,000 camps inside the former “German Reich” and housed in constructed barracks or repurposed rooms in guesthouses and schools, their labor was exploited in a publicly visible manner. The number of these mass camps is equivalent to the number of supermarkets and food stores in today’s Germany.[3] Those deported and made to perform forced labor included approx. 1.5. million children, a figure roughly equal to Munich’s total population today. A large part of German society was involved in exploiting forced labor at all structural levels: major concerns, agriculture and trade enterprises, municipalities and cities, public authorities and offices, universities and research institutes, church institutions, opera houses and theaters, families and individuals. All of them requested forced laborers and profited from their work.[4]

[1] See Jens-Christian Wagner, Zwangsarbeit im Nationalsozialismus – ein Überblick, in Stefan Hördler/Volkhard Knigge/Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau/Jens-Christian Wagner (eds.), Zwangsarbeit im Nationalsozialismus. Begleitband zur Ausstellung, Göttingen 2016, pp. 180–193, here p. 180.
[2] See Johannes-Dieter Steinert, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit. Polnische und sowjetische Kinder im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland und im besetzten Osteuropa, 1939–1945, Essen 2013, pp. 23–24.
[3] See Paul-Moritz Rabe, Das RAW-Lager Neuaubing und seine Insassen, in Winfried Nerdinger (ed.), Zwangsarbeit in München. Das Lager der Reichsbahn in Neuaubing, Berlin 2018, p. 130.
[4] See Christine Glauning, Mittendrin und außen vor: Zwangsarbeit in der NS-Gesellschaft, in ibid, pp. 13-14.