All events · The World Wars
Forced Labour in the German War Economy
1939–1945 · Europe & Northern Eurasia
Displacement
Sexual Violence
Displaced
8 million
By August 1944 about 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and prisoners of war were registered as working in the Reich, roughly a fifth of the German workforce; some 13 million people in total performed forced labour for Germany during the war, of whom about 8.4 million were foreign civilians deported into the Reich. Nearly three million Soviet citizens were deported as Ostarbeiter between 1942 and 1944 and at least 1.5 million Polish citizens from 1939. The figures come from German labour administration returns and from the documentation assembled for the German Forced Labour Compensation Programme, which made payments to about 1.66 million former labourers between 2001 and 2007.
Killed
1–2.5 million
deaths in transit or in camps
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What happened
Labour shortages caused by conscription led Germany to draw workers from every occupied country, first by recruitment and then by force. Fritz Sauckel, appointed plenipotentiary for labour deployment in March 1942, organised round-ups in Poland, the occupied Soviet territories, France, the Netherlands and the Balkans; whole villages were emptied and people seized in street and cinema raids. A racial hierarchy governed treatment: workers from western Europe were relatively better placed, Poles and Soviet Ostarbeiter wore identifying badges, lived in guarded barracks, faced separate penal law and were fed at levels that produced widespread illness. Concentration camp prisoners were hired out to firms under a policy of extermination through labour, and camp satellites were built beside factories. Sauckel was convicted at Nuremberg and executed. After decades of litigation, the German state and German industry created the Foundation 'Remembrance, Responsibility and Future' in 2000, which paid compensation to about 1.66 million surviving forced labourers.
Parties
German authorities under Fritz Sauckel's plenipotentiary office conscripted and deported civilians from occupied Europe to work in the Reich
Disputed
Totals differ according to whether prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners hired out to firms, and labourers conscripted within their own occupied countries are counted alongside civilians deported into the Reich.
The denominator
No single denominator is defensible: the deported workers came from more than a dozen occupied and allied countries, chiefly the occupied Soviet territories, Poland and France, whose combined population ran to roughly 200 million but which were never a single administrative or demographic unit. Ulrich Herbert's standard account records about 7.6 million foreign civilian workers and prisoners of war in the Reich in August 1944, with roughly 13.5 million passing through the system in all.
Where the baseline comes from
On the death toll
There is no agreed total. Deaths among foreign civilian labourers in the Reich from malnutrition, disease, industrial accidents, punishment and Allied bombing are usually put in the hundreds of thousands; adding concentration camp prisoners worked to death in the camp economy and Soviet prisoners of war used as labour produces figures above two million. The lower bound counts civilian deportees, the upper bound the whole labour system.
Documented forms of violence
Forced LabourArbitrary DetentionTortureDestruction of PropertySexual Violence
Round-ups and deportation, the penal regime applied to Polish and Soviet workers, punishment camps and the forced abortions and separation of children imposed on Ostarbeiter women are documented in German labour and police records, in the Nuremberg evidence against Sauckel and in the survivor interviews of the Forced Labor 1939-1945 archive.
Formal findings
- International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg (1946) — Convicted Fritz Sauckel of war crimes and crimes against humanity for the deportation of civilians from occupied territories for slave labour — source
Movements mapped
- Occupied Soviet Union -> industrial western Germany (Ostarbeiter)2.8 million
- Occupied Poland -> agriculture and industry in southern Germany1.5 million
- France (Service du travail obligatoire) -> the Reich650,000
Countries touched, on present-day borders
Germany, Ukraine, Poland, France
Related entries
- Includes: German Anti-Partisan Warfare and Village Destruction in Belarus
The Belarus entry's displacement figure is the National Archives of Belarus count of about 400,000 people taken from Belarus to forced labour in Germany. These deportees are among the Soviet Ostarbeiter counted in the forced labour entry's 8 million, so the two displacement figures must not be summed. The archive gives no figure for people driven from the 9,200 burned villages or the cleared 'dead zones', so no separate figure can be substituted. 400,000 people are counted in both entries.
- Overlaps with: German Captivity and Mass Death of Soviet Prisoners of War
Soviet prisoners of war put to work in the German war economy appear in both the prisoner-of-war entry and the forced labour entry, whose upper death estimate includes prisoners of war who died as labourers.
Sources