During the Nazi era millions of men and women were forced to work for German industry in support of the war effort. Some were transported into the Reich from countries occupied by German, including France and the eastern countries. Others were German Jews and other "undesirables" who were treated as slaves. Counting deaths and turnover, about 15 million men and women were forced laborers at one point during the war. I've often wondered about the fate of these men and women. One of my favorite poets is Gertrud Kolmar, who as a Jew living in Berlin was forced into slave labor in a munitions plant. In 1943 she was transported to Auschwitz where she was immediately murdered. In Sie kam aus Mariupol, Natascha Wodin wites about her mother, who was an Ostarbeiterin - a forced worker from the Ukraine, who gave birth to Natascha while working under deplorable conditions at an aircraft plant in Leipzig. But for the most part very little is known about these men and women who slaved for the Nazis - their fate was largely ignored after the war, and it was not until the year 2000, when only a couple of million were still alive, that some small reparations were paid through the Stiftung „Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft“ (Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.").
The fate of these forced and slave laborers were in the news again last month when the German tire group - Continental AG - issued a report by the historian Paul Erker, commissioned by the company, on Continental's use of slave labor during the Nazi period - 75 years after the fact („Zulieferer für Hitlers Krieg: Der Continental-Konzern in der NS-Zeit“}. Why did it take so long for Continental to come clean about this dark chapter in the company's history? This is not entirely clear.
Andere Konzerne in Deutschland waren schneller, wenn auch immer noch sehr spät dran: Volkswagen, Bayer und Daimler etwa haben sich in den 1980er und 1990er Jahren ihrer Vergangenheit gestellt.Warum es bei Continental so lange gedauert hat, vermochte Vorstandschef Elmar Degenhart bei der Vorstellung der Studie nicht zu erklären: „Wir können nicht für frühere Generationen des Managements sprechen, und wir möchten denen auch keine Vorwürfe machen.“ Nun aber sei es an der Zeit, die Historie zu „durchleuchten“. Dafür scheue die Firmenleitung auch nicht davor zurück, „unbequeme Tatsachen und Vorgänge ans Tageslicht zu bringen“.
Also not clear is whether Continental paid any restitution to the thousands of slave workers who toiled in its factories.
To protect German war production from Allied bombs, Nazi leaders relocated it partly underground. Prisoners were forced to build tunnels and shelters for arms factories and fuel refineries, housed in satellite camps nearby. These camps included several around Kaufering (attached to Dachau), where prisoners helped to build massive bunkers for aircraft factories. Around half of the 30,000 prisoners (mostly Jewish men) taken to Kaufering in 1944–5 lost their lives. One survivor was Ladislaus Ervin-Deutsch, a young Jew, who had been deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in summer 1944, and later to Kaufering. He described his time in hell in a short memoir - Nachtschicht im Arbeitslager III in Kaufering - which I found in the essay collection Sklavenarbeit im KZ ( Dachauer Hefte 1986). Ladislaus describes in hellish detail what life was like under Himmler's Vernichtung durch Arbeit (Extermination through Labor) regime. The policy was to extract the maximum amount of "value" from the prisoners until they would die from hunger or exhaustion - or, if they somehow managed to survive, in the gas chamber. In one scene he describes how a fellow inmate decided to short-circuit Himmler's objective by throwing himself into an electrified fence:
Inzwischen hatter der Selbstmordkandidat, er wollte wahrscheinlich Selbstmord begehen, den Drahtzaun erreicht, griff in die mit Strom geladenen Drähten, seine Augen glotzten glassig in die Ferne hinter dem Zaun - in die Freiheit. Der Strom hatte ihn im Nu getötetet, er war frei...Am nächsten Tag, vielleicht auch erst in einer Woche oder in einem Monat wäre er sowieso in der Gaskammer umgekommen, unter tausendfach gröβeren Qualen.
("Meanwhile the suicide candidate - for he most likely wanted to commit suicide - reached the barbed wire fence, grasped the electrified wires, his glassy eyes gazing into the distance - into the freedom beyond. The electric charge killed him instantly - he was now free. In any case, he would have been killed the following day or perhaps in a week or a month in the gas chamber, with an agony a thousand time greater.")
As Himmler made clear in his Posen Speeches to SS officers, it didn't matter if the workers were Jews, Poles, Hungarian, Russian, etc. - they all belonged to an inferior human species and their fate was to be slaves to the greater glory of the German Reich:
„Ein Grundsatz muss für den SS-Mann absolut gelten: ehrlich, anständig, treu und kameradschaftlich haben wir zu Angehörigen unseres eigenen Blutes zu sein und sonst zu niemandem. Wie es den Russen geht, wie es den Tschechen geht, ist mir total gleichgültig. Das, was in den Völkern an gutem Blut unserer Art vorhanden ist, werden wir uns holen, indem wir ihnen, wenn notwendig, die Kinder rauben und sie bei uns großziehen. Ob die anderen Völker in Wohlstand leben oder ob sie verrecken vor Hunger, das interessiert mich nur soweit, als wir sie als Sklaven für unsere Kultur brauchen, anders interessiert mich das nicht. Ob bei dem Bau eines Panzergrabens 10.000 russische Weiber an Entkräftung umfallen oder nicht, interessiert mich nur insoweit, als der Panzergraben für Deutschland fertig wird.“
(One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men: We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.)
What a crime that 75 years later there still hasn't been sufficient recognition or restitution for the suffering these millions of men and women were forced to endure.
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