ON THE DARK SIDES OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: NAZI AND OTHER FORCED LABOUR
Forced labour is difficult to distinguish from other forms of economic exploitation. In pre-industrial times, it can be understood as the corvée labour that European peasants had to perform for their landlords in the Middle Ages and early modern period. It also includes the long-established right of a state to conscript its citizens for unpaid public labour. Colonial powers often imposed forced labour on indigenous peoples: In addition to the Spanish, Dutch and French, the British in particular, who after the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, took countless workers from India and China as indentured labourers and deported them to colonies on other continents.
In a narrower sense, "forced labour" is defined as the deprivation of liberty for the purpose of economic exploitation of a prisoner, often linked to political re-education and often based on social, ethnic or religious discrimination.
Forced labour was first used on a significant scale during the First World War, when the German Reich employed nearly three million prisoners of war and civilians from abroad in industry and agriculture to replace Germans called up for military service, particularly in coal mining, which was vital to the war effort.
According to international law, prisoners of war could be used as labourers under certain conditions, but as they could not decide on the nature and duration of their work in the German Reich, their employment was considered forced labour.
German authorities initially tried to recruit civilians in occupied Belgium, but with little success. The illegal deportation of 60,000 Belgian men took place at the end of 1916, not least on the initiative of entrepreneurs. However, most of them refused to work in Germany and the deportations were largely stopped in early 1917. The recruitment of civilians in occupied Russian Poland was more successful. Once they were in Germany, however, they were not allowed to return home: They became forced labourers.
During the Second World War, the Nazi German government used forced labour on an entirely different scale: more than 13 million civilians, prisoners of war from West and East, and concentration camp inmates were forced to work in German industry and agriculture. In August 1944, the civilian labour force alone amounted to 6 million people, a good third of whom were women. After unsuccessful recruitment attempts, labour was conscripted in all occupied countries: First in the Czech Republic and Poland, then in Western Europe, with Russians and Poles eventually forming the vast majority.
On farms and in private households, their living conditions could be bearable - but they were at the mercy of the racism of the German population every day. Industrial companies were happy to request the allocation of forced labourers because their wages were low to minimal: not only could they replace conscripted personnel, but they could also expand, often even creating a basis for the time after the war.
The pay and treatment of forced labourers depended largely on who was defined as 'inferior' in Nazi racial ideology: civilians from Western Europe were paid reasonably tolerable wages, while so-called 'Eastern workers', mainly Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians, were paid a pittance. At first they were housed in dance halls or gymnasiums, but increasingly in quickly erected barrack camps. The food was wretched. Western European civilians were allowed to earn extra money for food, while Soviet POWs were systematically subjected to starvation and hard labour. Historians estimate that around 1.3 million of them died of malnutrition and exhaustion.
From the summer of 1942, more and more prisoners from concentration camps were used in the all-dominant armaments production, especially Jews and Roma and Sinti. They were subjected to the "extermination through labour" propagated by Goebbels, without pay, with miserable care, arbitrariness and violence. More than a million people died a miserable death. The list of companies involved reads like a Who's Who of German industry: I.G. Farben, Daimler-Benz, Flick, Züblin, Siemens, BMW, Krupp, Philipp-Holtzmann... After the war, hardly any company wanted to know anything about inhuman exploitation. It is only since the 1980s that companies have gradually begun to face up to independent investigations.
The first camp for forced labourers was established in the Soviet Union in 1919, and by 1930 a network of more than 200 labour camps had been set up in the north of the USSR and in Siberia. The name "Gulag", by which it became known, stands for "Main Administration of Correctional Labour Camps". Both criminals and dissidents were imprisoned - the number of prisoners depended on the political situation in the Soviet Union: When the collectivisation of agriculture began in 1929, many rich or oppositional peasants were imprisoned. At the height of dictator Stalin's terror, the 'purges' of 1936-38, millions of real and perceived political opponents followed. After the Second World War, tens of thousands of foreign prisoners of war, Soviet soldiers released from German prisons and accused of treason, and ethnic groups from the USSR itself were accused of disloyalty.
Prisoners were mainly used in coal and ore mines, the timber and fishing industries, and on large construction sites, such as the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal in 1931-33. Food - usually bread or soup - and clothing were completely inadequate for the hard labour in the icy climate, and tens of thousands died each year from malnutrition and exhaustion. Despite this, the Gulag system was seen as an important economic factor. After Stalin's death in 1953, the Gulag was officially abolished, but some camps remained. Historians estimate that more than 20 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag. The number of deaths is still unknown.
In the German Democratic Republic, the law explicitly allowed state enterprises to employ prisoners from prisons and youth work centres: Forced labour was supposed to serve the education of a "socialist personality". The background to this was the notorious shortage of labour for poorly paid or dangerous jobs, especially in the chemical industry.
From the 1950s, forced prison labour was used in virtually all industries. Notorious were the open-cast lignite mines, where extremely hard physical labour was required in all weathers. But even more dangerous was work in the Bitterfeld chemical combine, where chlorine and mercury fumes could escape from worn-out equipment, causing serious health problems and even death.
Female prisoners were mainly employed in the textile industry, for example in the production of tights and bed linen. Here, too, the pressure to perform was high, with unregulated working hours and harsh punishments for misbehaviour. Although the companies paid according to collective agreements, most of the wages remained in the prisons where the women were imprisoned.
The products of forced labour were often exported to West Germany in exchange for foreign currency: Textiles, cameras, furniture and other items ended up on Western rummage tables and in mail-order catalogues. Around 6,000 companies made money from this, including Aldi, C&A, Ikea, Quelle, Siemens and Woolworth - but for a long time they didn't want to know anything about the dubious production. Some 15,000 to 30,000 people did forced labour in GDR prisons - the system probably contributed no more than 1% to the economy.
