Forced Labour

During the National Socialist period, the Nazis made extensive use of forced labor to maintain their fledgling empire, with two concerns driving this- racist ideology that held that so-called ‘subhumans’ could be worked to death, as well the need for more workers to uphold the German war machine with most of Germany’s able-bodied men serving in the army. Following the Nazi conquest of Poland, 300,000 Polish prisoners of war were transported into the Reich and used as a source of forced labor, primarily at German farms, with a total of 2.4 million non-Jewish Poles being used as a source of forced labor over the course of the war. After German victory in the west and sizable German gains on the eastern front, more than a million French prisoners of war, 600,000 Soviet POWs, and nearly 3 million Soviet civilians (namely, women and children) were rounded up and sent to Germany to work as forced laborers in the period 1940-1942. Towards the end of the war, this included Italians whose new government had surrendered to the allies. It should therefore come as no surprise to note that, over the course of the Second World War, “every fourth worker in Germany was a foreigner….”

Go on and read about Siemens and how they build a production side inside a concentration camp.

Take me back to the introduction.