Forced labor of Germans after World War II



Forced labour of Germans after World War II refers to the Allied use of German civilians and captured soldiers for forced labor in years following World War II (and in some cases much longer).

The topic of using Germans as forced labour for reparations was first broached at the Tehran conference in 1943, where Soviet premier Joseph Stalin demanded 4,000,000 German workers.

Forced labour was also included in the Morgenthau Plan draft from September 1944, and was included in the final protocol of the Yalta conference in January 1945, where it was sanctioned by UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In March 1947, an estimated 4,000,000 Germans were being used as forced labour.

Soviet Union
The largest group of forced laborers in the Soviet Union consisted of several million German prisoners of war. Several hundred thousand of these POWs had been transferred by the US to the Soviets which used them, alongside Soviet captured POWs and German civilians, as forced laborers. Most German POW survivors of the forced labor camps in the Soviet Union were released in 1953. The last major repatriation of Germans from the Soviet Union occurred in 1956.

Estimates of German POW casualties (in both east and west and cumulative for both the war and peace-time period) range from 600,000 to 1,000,000. According to the section of the German Red Cross dealing with tracing the captives, the ultimate fate of 1,300,000 German POW's in Allied custody is still unknown; they are still officially listed as missing.

The capture and transfer of civilian ethnic Germans to the Soviet Union began as soon as countries with a German minority began to be overrun in 1944. Large numbers of civilians were taken from countries such as Romania, Yugoslavia, and from the eastern parts of Germany itself. For example, after Christmas 1944 between 27,000 to 30,000 ethnic Germans (aged 18–40) were sent to the USSR from Yugoslavia. Women made up 90% of the group. Most were sent to labor camps in the Donbass (Donez basin) where 16% of them died.

Poland
Many ethnic Germans living within the Polish pre-war borders were used for years as forced labor prior to their expulsion in labor camps such as that run by Salomon Morel. Among these camps were Central Labour Camp Jaworzno, Central Labour Camp Potulice, Łambinowice, Zgoda labour camp and others. The law authorising forced labour, Article 20 of the law on the exclusion of the enemy elements from society, also removed rights to Polish citizenship and all property owned.

The many camps were used during the process of the expulsions for the sake of "rehabilitating" Reichs- or Volksdeutsche, to decide if they could stay or go, but in reality this was a program of slave labor. Roughly 200,000 ethnic Germans died in the Polish/Soviet run concentration camps in Poland.

Others were still amongst the rest of the population, but the Polish government had made several declarations that the German population should be exploited as forced labor, instructing a minimum of 60 hours work per week with no rights for breaks. The salaries were insufficient for survival, usually 25 or 50 percent of Polish salaries.

Czechoslovakia
The German-speaking population of the Sudetenland was, in the same case as Poland, expelled after the war. The expulsion was not indiscriminate, however, since as late as 1947, large numbers of skilled German workmen were still being detained. Germans were forced to wear a white armband with the letter "N", for "Němec" signifying German in Czech to identify them (even German Jews had to wear it).

Czech Deputy Premier Petr Mareš has in the past, in vain, tried to arrange compensation for ethnic Germans who were forcibly resettled or used as forced labour after the war.

Eastern Germany
Many Germans in what would become East Germany were forced by the Communist authorities to work in German uranium mines producing the majority of the raw material of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Beginning in the summer of 1946 the Soviets began explorations in the Erzgebirge, and sealing off the old radium hot springs by September of the same year. An initial workforce of four to five thousand was established, with another 20,000 called for by the end of the year. The work was dangerous and stressful and the Soviets made no effort to improve it; as a result the mines became filled with forced labor conscripts and has been compared to a death march and the Gulags of Kolyma. Quotas were repeatedly set and raised, and conscription took place without regard to health or work experience - mines became staffed with office workers, craftsmen and students with no mining experience. By 1948 workers were pulled away from factories and criminals from jails to staff the mines, as were POWs returning to Germany from the Soviet Union. Housing lagged behind the burgeoning workers (with many regions doubling in population between 1946 and 1951), worsening already difficult conditions. The mines were considered worse than a penal colony, but were controlled directly by Moscow and local governments were unable to help. When an extra 60,000 workers were called for in the summer of 1947, a wave of potential workers flooded into West Germany to avoid the mines including many citizens who would otherwise prefer to live in the communist East. Workers who began as volunteers were turned into forced labourers. In an effort to increase the number of labourers, women were increasingly recruited to the non-segregated mines, many of whom brought or were infected with venereal diseases, and were sexually exploited by the Russian guards. Workers who attempted to escape, conscripted or volunteer, were hunted down and returned to the mines. Eventually Germans would become more involved in the running of the mines, forming a joint company with Russia in 1956.

Background
At the Yalta conference in January 1945 the Allies agreed upon the use of German forced labor. The U.S. used over 500,000 German POWs in Germany in Military Labor Service Units. Great Britain used 225,000 Germans as "reparations labor". In addition to the 200,000 Germans held by French forces (and 70,000 held by France in Algeria), France demanded 1,700,000 POWs for use as "enforced labor". In July 1945 they were promised 1,300,000 POWs by the SHAEF. The number of actually delivered prisoners is debated, as is the number of surviving POWs eventually released by the French.

Contrary to Section IV of the Hague Convention of 1907, "The Laws and Customs of War on Land", the SHAEF "counter insurgency manual" included provisions for forced labor and hostage taking.

France
General George S. Patton commented in his diary "I’m also opposed to sending POW's to work as slaves in foreign lands (in particular, to France) where many will be starved to death." He also noted "It is amusing to recall that we fought the revolution in defense of the rights of man and the civil war to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles". On 12 October 1945 The New York Herald Tribune reported that the French were starving their POWs, and compared their emaciation to that of those liberated from the Dachau concentration camp. A firsthand account of these conditions was given by Herbert Werner, a German Naval officer who was sent from Norway to Germany to France, in the epilogue of his memoir, Iron Coffins.

German prisoners were for example forced to clear minefields in France and the Low Countries.

According to Simon MacKenzie, "callous self-interest and a desire for retribution played a role in the fate" of German prisoners, and he exemplifies by pointing out that sick or otherwise unfit prisoners were forcibly used for labour, and in France and the Low countries this also included work such as highly dangerous mine-clearing; "by September 1945 it was estimated by the French authorities that two thousand prisoners were being maimed and killed each month in accidents"

Some of the 740,000 German prisoners transferred in 1945 by the U.S. for forced labour in France came from the Rheinwiesenlager camps, these forced labourers were already very weak, many weighing barely 50 kilos.

On 13 March 1947 the U.S. made an agreement with the French to the effect that roughly 450,000 German prisoners would be released, at a rate of 20,000 a month. This number included in addition to the prisoners handed over to them by the U.S. also the roughly 200,000 prisoners the French had themselves captured.

In retaliation for acts of resistance French occupation forces expelled more than 25,000 civilians from their homes. Some of these civilians were subsequently forced to clear minefields in Alsace.

United Kingdom
In 1946, the UK had more than 400,000 prisoners, many had been transferred from POW camps in the U.S. and Canada. Many of these were used as forced labour, as a form of "reparations".

The two main reasons for their internment were political re-education (Wilton Park), and for non-officers employment as agricultural and other labour. In 1946 a fifth of all agricultural work in the UK was performed by German prisoners. An emotional and public debate ensued in the UK, where words such as "slaves", "slave labour" and "forced labour" were increasingly used in the media and in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. In 1947 the Ministry of Agriculture argued against rapid repatriation of working German prisoners, since by then they made up 25 percent of the land workforce, and they wanted to use them also in 1948. Faced with political difficulties in using volunteer foreign labour a compromise solution was suggested by the ministry of agriculture, German prisoners were to be allowed to remain in Britain as free men. Following disputes about how many former prisoners of war would be permitted to remain voluntarily in Britain and whether they would first have to return briefly to Germany before being allowed to officially migrate to Britain, by the end of 1947 about 250,000 of the prisoners of war were repatriated, and the last repatriations took place in November 1948. About 24,000 chose to remain voluntarily in Britain.

Norway
In Norway the last available casualty record, from August 29, 1945, shows that by that time a total of 275 German soldiers had been killed while clearing mines, while an additional 392 had been maimed. German protests that forcing POWs to clear mines was against international law, article 32 of the Geneva conventions, were rejected with the assertion that the Germans were not POW's; they were disarmed forces who had surrendered unconditionally ("avvæpnede styrker som hadde overgitt seg betingelsesløst"). Mine clearance reports received by the Allied Forces Headquarters state: June 21, 1945; 199 dead and 163 wounded Germans; 3 Norwegians and 4 British wounded. The last registration, from August 29, 1945 lists 392 wounded and 275 dead Germans. Mine clearance was then for unknown reasons halted for close to a year before recommencing under better conditions during June–September 1946. This time many volunteered thanks to good pay, and death rates were much lower, possibly thanks in part to a deal permitting them medical treatment at Norwegian hospitals.

United States
The United States transferred prisoners for forced labor to both the UK and France (which received 740,000 from the US). For prisoners in the U.S. repatriation was also delayed for harvest reasons.

Civilians aged 14 – 65 in the U.S. occupation zone of Germany were also registered for compulsory labor, under threat of prison and withdrawal of ration cards.

Conclusion
Most captives of the Americans and the British were released by the end of 1948, and most of those in French captivity were released by the end of 1949.

Compensation to Germans used as forced labor after the war is, according to the Office of Public Administration, (part of Federal Ministry of the Interior) not possible to claim in Germany as of September 29, 1978, due to the statute of limitations.

Nuremberg trials
Judge Robert H. Jackson, Chief US prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials in a letter discussing the potential weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told US President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves: "'have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.'" Under the Nuremberg Principles some of the crimes specified were:
 * ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory;
 * murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population.