HITLER’S SLAVES

Life Stories of Forced Labourers

in Nazi-Occupied Europe

Edited by
Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh
and Christoph Thonfeld

Berghahn Books
NEW YORK • OXFORD
 First published in 2010 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com

German edition, Hitlers Sklaven. Lebensgeschichtliche Analysen im

internationalen Vergleich, published 2008, Boehlau Publishers.

©2010 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages

for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented,
without written permission of the publisher.

This research was financed by the Foundation

“Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hitlers Sklaven. English
Hitler’s slaves : life stories of forced labourers in Nazi-occupied Europe /
edited by Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh, and Christoph Thonfeld. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84545-698-6 (hbk. : alk. paper)
1. Forced labor—Germany—History—20th century. 2. Forced labor—
Europe—History—20th century. 3. Slavery—Europe—History—20th
century. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Conscript labor—Germany. 5. World War,
1939–1945—Conscript labor—Europe. 6. World War, 1939–1945—Biography.
7. Concentration camp inmates—Europe—Biography. 8. Prisoners of war—
Europe—Biography. 9. Germany—History—1933–1945—Biography.
10. Europe—History—1918–1945—Biography. I. Plato, Alexander von.
II. Leh, Almut. III. Thonfeld, Christoph. IV. Title.
HD4875.G4H5713 2010
940.54’05—dc22
2010013476

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-1-84545-698-6 Hardback

 CONTENTS

Foreword ix
Board of Directors of the Foundation ‘Remembrance,
Responsibility and Future’
Acknowledgements xiii

I
Introduction 3
Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

II
1. Reports from Germany on Forced and Slave Labour 23
Alexander von Plato
2. Work, Repression and Death after the Spanish Civil War 37
Mercedes Vilanova
3. Czechs as Forced and Slave Labourers during the Second
World War 47
Šárka Jarská
4. Slovak Republic (1939–1945) 59
Viola Jakschová
5. ‘You can’t say it out loud. And you can’t forget’: Polish
Experiences of Slave and Forced Labour for the ‘Third Reich’ 71
Piotr Filipkowski and Katarzyna Madon;-Mitzner
vi Contents

6. The Fate of Polish Slave and Forced Labourers from Łódz; 86

Ewa Czerwiakowski and Gisela Wenzel
7. Interviews with Polish Roma: A Report of My Experiences 99
Artur Podgorski
8. The French Experience: STO, a Memory to Collect,
a History to Write 113
Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset
9. The Experiences of Hungarian Slave and Forced Labourers 124
Éva Kovács
10. ‘Mother, are the apples at home ripe yet?’ Slovenian Forced
and Slave Labourers during the Second World War 138
Monika Kokalj Koc=evar
11. Of Silence and Remembrance: Forced Labour and the NDH,
and the History of their Remembrance 151
Christian Schölzel
12. ‘If you lose your freedom, you lose everything’: The
Experiences and Memories of Serbian Forced Labourers 166
Barbara N. Wiesinger
13. They Survived Two Wars: Bosnian Roma as Civil War
Refugees in Germany 177
Birgit Mair
14. Forced Labour in Bulgaria 1941–1944: Tracing the Memories 188
Ana Luleva
15. Lithuania 1941–1944: Slave and Forced Labourers Remember 199
Rose Lerer Cohen
16. Belarusian Forced Labourers: Types and Recruitment
Methods 211
Alexander Dalhouski
17. Forced and Slave Labour in Belarus: Experiences, Coping
Strategies and Personal Accounts 226
Imke Hansen and Alesja Belanovich
18. The Experience of Forced Labourers from Galician Ukraine 238
Tetyana Lapan
19. Oral Histories of Former Ukrainian Ostarbeiter: Preliminary
Results of Analysis 250
Gelinada Grinchenko
Contents vii

20. Oral Testimonies from Russian Victims of Forced Labour 262

Irina Scherbakova
21. The Experience of Citizens of the Former Soviet Union
as Forced Labourers in Nazi Germany 276
Natalia Timofeyeva
22. Presenting Life in Captivity: Oral Testimonies of Former
Forced and Slave Labourers from St Petersburg and the
Russian Northwest 286
Anna Reznikova
23. Women’s Biographies and Women’s Memory of War 296
Olga Nikitina, Elena Rozhdestvenskaya and
Victoria Semenova
24. The Deportation of the Italians 1943–1945 310
Doris Felsen and Viviana Frenkel
25. Former Forced Labourers as Immigrants in Great Britain
after 1945 324
Christoph Thonfeld
26. Slave Labour and Shoah: A View from Israel 338
Margalit Bejarano and Amija Boasson
27. International Slave and Forced Labour Documentation
Project: United States, Atlanta, Georgia 351
Sara Ghitis and Ruth Weinberger
28. Forced and Slave Labour in the Context of the Jewish
Holocaust Experience 364
Dori Laub and Johanna Bodenstab

III
29. A Memorial for the Persecuted, Materials for Education and
Science: The Compilation of Biographies of Former Slave
and Forced Labourers 377
Almut Leh and Henriette Schlesinger
30. ‘A moment of elation … and painful’: The Homecoming
of Slave and Forced Labourers after the Second World War 394
Christoph Thonfeld
31. Witnesses at the First Auschwitz Trial in Frankfurt 407
Dagi Knellesen
viii Contents

32. Twenty-five Years Later: Revisiting Testimonies of Holocaust

Survivors 426
Dori Laub and Johanna Bodenstab
33. It Was Modern Slavery: Some Results of the Documentation
Project on Forced and Slave Labour 441
Alexander von Plato

Appendix 1: Interview Guidelines (Alexander von Plato) 485

Appendix 2: Timeline: Forced Labour and Compensation
(Joachim Riegel) 495
Appendix 3: Interview Partners 509
List of Contributors 523
Bibliography 525
Index 538
 FOREWORD
Board of Directors of the Foundation
‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’

T he Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’ has a two-

fold mandate: firstly, in recognition of Germany’s responsibility for Na-
tional Socialist injustice, to make payments to former victims of National
Socialism, in particular former forced labourers, and secondly to keep
alive the memory of this injustice for future generations and promote
projects that enable us to learn the lessons of history and so foster under-
standing between peoples. In the summer of 2001, one year after it was
founded and as the culmination of a nationwide debate and international
negotiations, the foundation began making payments to former victims
of National Socialism. Between 2001 and 2007, *4.37 billion was dis-
bursed to 1,655,000 forced labourers in almost 100 countries. Payments
were also made to victims of National Socialist medical experiments and
to those who suffered property and insurance losses. In addition, over
€300 million was used to support special humanitarian assistance pro-
grammes for Jewish and non-Jewish Holocaust victims. These payments,
which were made fifty-five years after the end of the war and reached
only a fraction of former forced labourers, were not intended as ‘compen-
sation’ for the personal suffering inflicted, but nevertheless represented
real material assistance for many. They were also understood as moral
recognition of the suffering caused.
The payments may have brought financial closure to the question of
compensation for forced labour, but according to the text of the Founda-
tion Law, they did not draw a line under our moral and political responsi-
bility. We must now ask ourselves: how can the memory of the injustices
x Foreword

inflicted on forced labourers be kept alive for current and future genera-
tions? The first way is to document the memories of these people. The
importance of this task was underscored by the representatives of the
victims’ organisations on the foundation’s Board of Trustees. In contrast
to the political persecutees of National Socialism, who have documented
their remembrances in a variety of ways since 1945, and unlike the Jewish
survivors of the Holocaust, who have been encouraged since the 1970s
to bear witness and for whom an impressive memorial has been created
through the over 50,000 interviews conducted worldwide by the Shoah
Foundation initiated by Steven Spielberg, forced labourers have had little
opportunity, to date, to report on their fates and to document these in
written form. This applies especially (but not exclusively) to victims in
Central and Eastern Europe.
In the summer of 2003, the Board of Trustees therefore decided to
launch an international programme that would give former forced labour-
ers an opportunity to relate their life stories and talk about their suffering.
In recognition of the injustices brought upon them, victims who were not
legally entitled to payments from the foundation were also invited to take
part in these interviews: these included former Soviet prisoners of war,
Italian military internees and forced labourers from Western Europe.
It is particularly difficult for the survivors to talk about their past suf-
fering to strangers, most of whom belong to a much younger generation.
Nobody finds it easy to recall pain and degradation, even if they know
that in doing so they are helping save future generations from this experi-
ence. On the other hand, for many of those affected it was a chance to
‘share’ their fate with others – a fate that many had remained silent about
for decades or had revealed only to close family members. The inter-
views, which were conducted in the native languages of the interviewees
by researchers from the respective countries, did not focus exclusively
on reports of injustice. The intention was rather to give the survivors
an opportunity to talk about their lives, thoughts and feelings, and to
go beyond the experiences of victimhood during the National Socialist
era. For many, the postwar era was also very painful, and some were once
again victims of discrimination or new forms of persecution in their own
countries. Many of the interviewees found this broader biographical ap-
proach particularly beneficial; it also allows members of postwar genera-
tions to recognise and show respect for the impressive life achievements
of these people.
The foundation’s partner, Alexander von Plato and the team at the
Institute for History and Biography at the Fernuniversität Hagen, ful-
filled these expectations professionally and sensitively. Between 2005 and
2006, thirty-two projects in twenty-seven countries were carried out un-
der his leadership. The result is a unique collection of biographical inter-
Foreword xi

views that will be available for research and education purposes once the
technical and academic preparatory and compilation work is complete.
This volume breaks new ground in academic research. It not only
contains interpretations of the individual interviews but also focuses on
how the collection came into being and how it will be applied in future
research. For the first time, objective and personal historical accounts of
forced labour under National Socialism are brought together in a broad
international perspective, and research into the history of the Holocaust
is combined with that of forced and slave labour. If we thus succeed in
anchoring the subject of forced labour under National Socialism as a field
of international research, we will have achieved one of the foundation’s
primary objectives.
At the same time, we still face a great challenge: to prepare and com-
pile the eyewitness accounts collected in this project for future educa-
tional work. With this in mind, the foundation has joined up with the
Freie Universität Berlin and the German Historical Museum to create a
living archive entitled ‘Forced Labor 1939–1945: Memory and History. A
Digital Archive for Education and Research’. The Freie Universität went
online with the archive in January 2008, and the materials are now avail-
able to researchers, teachers and other interested persons throughout
the world at <www.zwangsarbeit-archiv.de>. After registering, visitors
can access the audio and video interviews, use the transcripts and the
database for their research work, and view documents that have already
been translated into German. In the same month, the German Histori-
cal Museum at Berlin installed a PC work station containing excerpts
from twelve interviews as part of its permanent exhibition. These are also
available online at <www.dhm.de/zwangsarbeit>. Teaching materials for
use in schools are currently being prepared and will be available in 2010.
The academic team plans to continue developing the collection, and by
2012 the ‘Forced Labour 1939–1945’ online portal will have grown into
an interactive platform for academics and educators working in this field.
Over the long term and on this basis, the foundation will support projects
that enable young people to consult these extraordinary eyewitness testi-
monies, each according to his or her individual interests and background
knowledge. For the foundation, the task is to ensure that the biographi-
cal accounts of the victims of National Socialism remain available for use
in historical and political education over the long term.
On behalf of the Board of Directors of the foundation, I would like
to thank Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh, Christoph Thonfeld, Elena
Danchenko, Joachim Riegel and Henriette Schlesinger for their excellent
work in managing the programme and for initiating this first study. My
thanks also go to all the researchers, who brought their academic exper-
tise to the programme and conducted the interviews with great dedica-
xii Foreword

tion and sensitivity. I would also like express my appreciation to the staff
at the foundation, especially Ralf Possekel and Evelyn Geier, who have
provided academic, conceptual and organisational support throughout
the entire project. Without them, the excellent results achieved in the
work with the various parties would not have been possible. They also
supported the Board of Directors in finding solutions to complex project
design and financing issues.
Finally, I would like to thank the former forced labourers who were will-
ing to relate their life stories and allow these to be used for the purposes
of research and education. This is a real sign of trust, and we are greatly
indebted to them for this.

Günter Saathoff
Member of the Board of Directors
Foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility and Future’
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T he editors are grateful for the assistance of Elena Danchenko, Joachim

Riegel and Henriette Schlesinger in the preparation of this volume.
I
 INTRODUCTION
Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh
and Christoph Thonfeld

T here are numerous publications on forced labour in National Socialist

Germany during the Second World War. But a publication such as this
one, combining the depiction of historical conditions and developments
with the biographies and memories of former forced labourers from
twenty-seven countries, is unprecedented, particularly in that it displays
such regional variety and adopts a comparative international perspec-
tive. This is the first time that research on the Holocaust and its survi-
vors has intersected with investigations of the experiences of slave and
forced labour. Up to now, no publication has succeeded in productively
crossing the borders between different regional research fields, between
documentary and lived history, or between research and educational
work in ways that are both productive for scholarship and accessible to
young people and adults at schools and universities or at non-university
educational institutions.

II

During the Second World War about 13.5 million people in all were
employed in forced labour in Germany or in the territories occupied by
the German Reich. They included 8.4 million civilian workers who had

Notes for this chapter begin on page 17.

4 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

to work for private companies and public agencies in industry and in

agriculture. In addition, there were 4.6 million prisoners of war whose
deployment as labour far exceeded the extent permitted by the relevant
sections of the Geneva Convention which had been signed by the Ger-
man Reich (Figure 1)1 and 1.7 million concentration camp prisoners who
had to do forced labour in concentration or similar camps or were ‘lent
out’ or sold by the SS.2

Figure 1. Prisoners of War and Civil Workers 1939–1945

Forced labourers came from different parts of the world, the major-
ity from Eastern and Western Europe (Figure 2); they came from every
imaginable milieu and ethnicity. As this book makes extremely clear, the
fate of those who had to work like slaves in concentration camps under
extreme living and working conditions – principally Jews, so-called Gyp-
sies and political opponents of the National Socialists – was particularly
harsh and brutal. The death rate among them was particularly high.
Most forced labourers came from the Soviet Union – Russia, Ukraine,
Belarus, Moldova and the Baltic countries (which were not statistically
recorded as individual Soviet republics in those years) – and from France,
Introduction 5

with its overwhelming share of prisoners of war, Poland, and Italy. After
Italy’s surrender on 8 July 1943, the Italian armed forces in Italy, Greece,
the Balkans and elsewhere were disarmed by German troops, and under
the name ‘Italian military internees’ (IMI) the bulk of them were de-
ported to Germany for forced labour.
Without these millions of forced labourers the German war economy,
the infrastructure of the German Reich and the occupied countries, and
the supply of food to the German population would have broken down
at an early stage. Many buildings, canals, reservoirs and factories built by
their labour still exist today. In the course of the war the proportion of
forced labourers among the total number of people employed in produc-
tive work in the Reich increased.

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Figure 2. Forced Labourers by Country

Most of the forced labourers worked in agriculture, where they provided

almost half of employees; in the mining, building, chemical and metal
industries they made up about one third and in the field of transport
more than one fourth (Figure 3). In August 1944, 26.5 per cent of those
working in the economy as a whole were foreigners who had been forced
to work in the German Reich in one way or another (Figure 3).3
6 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

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Figure 3. Share of foreign workers among the total number of workers
in per cent (August 1944)

III

For decades, forced labour remained ‘invisible’ to the public and outwith
the official culture of remembrance in the Federal Republic of Germany
(FRG).4 This reflected, among other things, the fact that compensation
payments hardly needed to be discussed publicly, as the London Debt
Agreement of 1953 postponed any compensation payment for foreign
(non-German) forced labourers until the conclusion of a peace treaty,
which never came or – in the form of the Treaty on the Final Settlement
with Respect to Germany – was not called a peace treaty. (This naming
practice may have been a direct reflex of anxieties about Germany’s li-
ability for compensation, or it may have been intended to avoid any kind
of similarity to the Versailles Treaty after the First World War.)5 German
forced labourers were soon confronted with the argument of the statute
of limitations. In short: the old Federal Republic of Germany did not pro-
vide for compensation for forced labour, and the new Federal Republic,
reunited Germany, started to settle this question only at the end of the
1990s. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) too avoided introduc-
ing policies on compensation for forced labour. The Cold War may be
supposed to have done the rest, inasmuch as it was possible to keep the
states that were now West Germany’s allies quiet on this question, while
demands for compensation could be denounced as Soviet propaganda.
“At best, some of those forced labourers who belonged to the concentra-
Introduction 7

tion camp workforce which was deployed at a rather late stage, could
make claims for compensation for wrongful imprisonment according to
the Bundesentschädigungsgesetz (Federal Compensation Act).”6
Thus some former forced labourers tried to make claims under civil
law, but most of them failed in court. In the 1950s there was a first settle-
ment between a forced labourer from a concentration camp and the IG
Farben i.l. (in liquidation) at the Frankfurt District Court. A further Ger-
man industrial enterprise and the Jewish Claims Conference followed
this example, settling out of court. Further examples followed in the
1960s and 1970s, so that one may say that former concentration camp
prisoners had a limited chance of success – if any – through direct nego-
tiations with companies, without the latter acknowledging any binding
claim against them.
Only at the end of the 1980s, when German banks and industrial
concerns were increasingly appearing on the US market, was there a shift
in attitude on their part, in the context of which the question of security
against the claims primarily of former forced labourers from concentra-
tion camps played quite a considerable role. Now there were moves to
create a foundation in partnership with the federal government, which
was to receive funds of about DM10 billion, half from business and half
from public funds. However, only 7.1 per cent of addressed companies
joined in, even though making a commitment did not imply any admis-
sion of guilt. About 200,000 companies with more than ten employees
were asked for financial help, regardless of whether they had existed be-
fore 1945.
The federal foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft (Re-
membrance, Responsibility and Future) was created in the year 2000.
Its principles were agreed after lengthy and difficult international ne-
gotiations, and it set about developing a scheme for scaled payments of
humanitarian aid.7 Thus, former concentration camp prisoners (‘slave
labourers’ of both sexes) had a claim to higher payments than ‘common’
forced labourers, and forced labourers in agriculture could receive com-
pensation only in the context of the so-called ‘openness clause’8 and
again received less money than forced labourers employed in industry
or the building trade. Prisoners of war had no claim for compensation
from Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, nor did the former Italian
military internees who tried but failed to enforce their claim in court (see
the chapter from Italy on this topic in this volume).
Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft in Berlin and its five partner
organisations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Czech Repub-
lic, as well as the Jewish Claims Conference (the partner in charge of pay-
ments to Jews) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM)
(responsible for beneficiaries elsewhere in the world, especially Roma),
8 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

continued to make compensation payments until June 2007. The process

is now complete. Former forced labourers received as much as DM5,000
(€2,556.38), former slave labourers as much as DM15,000 (€7,669.38)
each, in two instalments. In all, between the first payouts in June 2001
and the end of the programme in June 2007, some €4.37 billion was paid
to about 1.66 million beneficiaries in 100 countries.9 The partner or-
ganisations had discretion over the disbursement of about 95 per cent
of the funds allocated by the foundation, and they also had some funds
of their own. This made it possible to augment the total of DM8.1 bil-
lion (about €4.05 billion) that the law provided for this project, as well
to take into consideration a wider range of beneficiaries than originally
anticipated.10
However, in the light of the total of 8.4 million civilian workers and
1.7 million concentration camp prisoners pressed into forced labour, the
dimension of the payments needs to be considerably qualified. Even if
compensation payments have meant a certain degree of satisfaction for
most of the individuals we interviewed, it was too late for the bulk of
the deported and exploited. They did not live long enough to see its
benefits.
Apart from payments to former forced labourers, the foundation Erin-
nerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft has also funded various projects and
programmes in Germany and other countries with a total of €27 million
since its founding in the year 2000.11 Among these was the international
project on documenting the biographies of former forced and slave la-
bourers, whose results are presented here.

IV

It fits well into this history of late compensation payments that for decades
the history of forced labour has also been relatively neglected by research
historians. There were various reasons for this. First of all, the London
Peace Conference in 1953 had its effects in this field too, because, as
already mentioned, it postponed compensation until the conclusion of
a peace treaty and thus made debates on forced labour look less urgent
– particularly among members of those generations that had experienced
National Socialism and shrunk back from problems of ‘compensation’
in the Germany of the postwar period. Second, the self-image of most
entrepreneurs of the postwar period was almost entirely untroubled by
questions of responsibility, compensation or even personal guilt: war was
war, the ‘employment of foreign workers’ had been necessary for the war
effort, most forced labourers had been treated decently, and information
about killing, even killing through work, particularly of Jews, had been
Introduction 9

available only afterwards. Furthermore, neither the US nor France, and

definitely not the Soviet Union, had treated German prisoners of war as
combatants after the war: they too had been forced to work. The wide-
spread image of the ‘decent’ Wehrmacht, which had had nothing to do
with SS crimes, was echoed in the equally powerful image of the ‘decent
businessman’ who justified himself with sentences like: ‘We stayed de-
cent; crimes against forced labourers and against representatives of the
workers movement were committed by fanatical Nazis and the SS.’ One
entrepreneur, a relative of the well-known industrialist Vögeler and him-
self a shareholder in the ‘Union’ works at Auschwitz, defended himself
against accusations of guilt with a special kind of ‘domino theory’: any
concession to claims by former Jewish forced labourers, even in a single
case, he explained in 1989, would result in the collapse of the entire
(West) German postwar economy. And anyway, he stated, it was his ex-
perience that former forced labourers were only trying to make money
out of the case.12
A third reason for the dearth of historical research is that until the
early 1980s almost all big company archives remained closed to research-
ers seeking to study this topic. Most public archives, too, retreated behind
the sign reading ‘data protection’. The first scholars who nevertheless
succeeded in writing fundamental studies on ‘foreign workers’ or ‘dis-
placed persons’ in the early 1980s – notably Herbert and Jacobmeyer13 –
had to struggle against this policy of refusal.
But when the state and economic interests – notably the big banks
and industrial firms – began to worry that in the wake of globalisation
and international mergers they were in danger of being ‘handicapped’,
particularly in the United States, if compensation claims were not set-
tled, the already weakened levees broke. Some of the big companies,
such as Volkswagen or Daimler-Benz, some banks such as Dresdner and
Deutsche Bank, initiated scholarly studies on the history of their com-
panies during National Socialism and in particular on the question of
slave and forced labour. The public archives also changed their policy
towards such studies, most of them even earlier. Since then there has
been a whole host of general, regional and local research, most of it in
Germany. But in other countries, too, such as Russia, Ukraine, the US
and Austria, growing interest in this topic can be observed.14

As for the history and the tasks of the project, after talks in early sum-
mer 2003 between the representative of Erinnerung, Verantwortung und
Zukunft, Ralf Possekel (himself a historian with a doctorate), and the
10 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

head of the Institute of History and Biography at the Fernuniversität

Hagen, Alexander von Plato, the first application was made for fund-
ing an international video documentation on the biographies of former
forced labourers,15 which was basically accepted by the then board of
the foundation Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft. However, one
question remained unresolved: were these to be life-history interviews,
as proposed in the application, or were they to be restricted to the ex-
perience of forced labour? As a result, the project was put out to tender,
and in the end – more than a year later – the institute’s proposal for a
biographical documentation project was again accepted.16 In agreement
with the Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft foundation it was de-
termined that at least 440 biographical interviews were to be conducted
on an international scale, a goal that was clearly exceeded by the end of
the project, when nearly 600 interviews had been recorded. The original
hope of being able to videotape all interviews was abandoned during the
first phase of planning, in favour of a greater number of interviews. Thus,
it was decided that only one quarter of all interviews would be videotaped
(though in the highest possible quality, BETA SP), and the rest recorded
only on audio cassettes. Also there was an agreement that

– 80 interviews should be conducted in Ukraine

– 80 in Poland
– 60 in Russia
– 40 in Belarus
– 40 in the Czech Republic
– 30 in the US
– 25 in Israel, and
– the remaining ones in Western and Southern Europe, in some Eastern
European countries (the Baltic countries, the Balkans, Moldova) and
the ‘rest of the world’ (including those states that had been National
Socialist Germany’s allies), as well as non–country-specific interviews
with Roma and Sinti (about 5 per cent); and that
– about 80 interviews should be conducted with Jewish slave labourers.

Essentially, these guidelines were met.17 Originally, in its application

the Institute of History and Biography had suggested selecting interview
partners at random on the basis of international databases. However, most
representatives of the organisations of forced labourers and the partner
organisations of Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft wanted the inter-
view partners to be chosen according to countries and groups of victims.
After the beginning of the contract in the autumn of 2004, qualified
interviewers had to be found quickly; they needed to be familiar with
Introduction 11

the existing research in the field and have some oral history experience,
good or very good English language skills (maybe also Russian), and ex-
perience with international projects. Also, it was intended that at least
some contributors to the project would be familiar with administrative
problems in different countries, as well as able to deal with databases and
problems of archiving. It proved possible to assemble the team that co-
ordinated the project from Germany very quickly.18
Given the short timescale of 24–30 months, it was necessary almost si-
multaneously to find qualified groups of interviewers in as many countries
as possible and as fast as possible. The project was advertised internation-
ally, and the International Oral History Association and existing contacts
with the contributors to the International Mauthausen Documenting
Project were also mobilised;19 50 groups from 29 countries responded
with applications. Based on the suggestions of the Institute of History
and Biography and with the help of an international jury of experts, 32
groups were finally chosen to conduct interviews in 27 countries.20 Basi-
cally, these 32 groups with about 72 staff members stayed together for the
entire time of the project. Those participants who had responsibility for
conducting the interviews and writing the interpretative essays attended
three seminars with us in Berlin, so that all the teams would be able to
conduct the interviews at the same level and using the same method. For
this purpose a set of training materials was produced in several languages.
Soon we agreed that the interviews should deal with the whole life story
of each interviewee, including their early lives, forced labour and perse-
cution during the Second World War, and subsequent lives, even though
the events during forced labour remained essential. Furthermore, we
agreed to write a record of the interview, a short biography, and a data
sheet after each interview, following common guidelines. Basic train-
ing regarding technological problems turned out to be quite important:
operating the recording equipment, being aware of problems of camera,
light and sound in the case of video recordings, and so on. Moreover, we
intended to create a comprehensive archive of the biographies, which
required that we standardise our terms and procedure in the data sheets
– something we were able to perfect in the course of the project.
The third and probably most essential step, of course, was the search
for interview partners. Apart from the above mentioned selection cri-
teria, it was agreed that interview partners for each part of the project
should comprise half men and half women, have worked in a range of
different economic sectors, represent a range of accommodation experi-
ences (private homes or farms, concentration or labour camps of vari-
ous kinds) and include forced labourers deployed with the Organisation
Todt (OT) and people imprisoned in detention camps. Their experiences
of homecoming and postwar treatment should also have been different.
12 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

Above all, as far as possible they should not have been interviewed be-
fore. We also intended to interview individuals who were not entitled to
compensation but nevertheless had been forced to do forced labour, such
as Italian military internees or prisoners of war.
In the course of the project some particular problems arose that should
at least be mentioned here, as they influenced the results. Some of the
problems were practical, and some arose from the nature of the subject
itself:
Our project teams found it most difficult to find so-called ‘Gypsies’
– Roma in Eastern Europe and Sinti in Germany – as interview partners.
One reason for this is the life expectancy of Roma in Eastern Europe,
which at an average of 65 years is relatively low. Another reason was
that they live and work in transnational contexts. Some had fled dur-
ing the Bosnian civil war, and quite a considerable number of them live
or are ‘tolerated’ in Germany, where their permission to remain has to
be regularly renewed. 21 Others could not be reached, as they were not
organised, while still others did not see any sense in interviews because
so much has happened to them since the war that they have little or no
specific memory of the particular experience of slave or forced labour – or
do not want to remember it.22
On the question of whether there should be interviews with Jewish
slave labourers in Eastern Europe or only in Western Europe, the US
and Israel there were differences with partner organisations from Eastern
Europe. They took the view that up to now only Jews – if anybody – had
been interviewed: in projects such as the Shoah Foundation interview
project, other victims, particularly Soviet prisoners of war, who also suf-
fered an enormous death rate (almost 60 per cent) in camps comparable
to concentration camps, had barely been taken into consideration at all.
This problem persisted throughout the project. Nevertheless, we decided
to conduct interviews with slave labourers, mostly Jews, in Eastern Eu-
rope, since for comparative purposes they could not be left out – leaving
aside the fact that they represented the group with the lowest chances
of survival.
Another problem was that some people who wanted to be interviewed
or had been suggested as interview partners qualified as victims of Nazi
persecution in a general sense but had not done slave labour. This was the
case with individuals who had been children at the time, but also with
many Roma who for various reasons had been able to evade the National
Socialist system of forced labour. Here, some interview partners found it
difficult to understand that this project was primarily about forced labour
and the international comparison of the experience of forced labour, and
that a person had to have experienced forced labour to be interviewed.
Introduction 13

VI

Of the objectives we pursued in this project, one of the key ones was
researching the ways in which experiences during National Socialism in-
fluenced the later lives of those deported to Germany for slave and forced
labour or subjected to forced labour in the occupied territories: in respect
of health, education or career, love and family, religious belief, political
orientation, finances as far as compensation for wrongful imprisonment
or pension, and much more. This was based on the assumption that the
situation might be different depending whether people had been in death
camps, as most Jewish slave labourers were, where labour, no matter how
brutal, often meant the only hope for survival; or had been accommo-
dated in camps attached to factories, in a town or in the country, or pri-
vately, with farmers who might have been brutal, compassionate or even
friendly; or whether or not there had been contact with Germans or
forced labourers from other countries. Obviously, there were differences
between men and women, especially since women in particular suffered
the threat of sexual harassment or rape. We also assumed that there would
be differences depending on whether the individuals had suffered pun-
ishment, whether they had survived by drawing on particular religious
or political convictions, whether they had been young or relatively old,
what personal and family circumstances they had been forced to leave
behind, and the like.
We were also interested in how people came to terms with the period
of forced labour in the respective countries, both individually and col-
lectively, and how this period ‘fitted into’ one’s own biography. We had
to question them about their education and training and their family
life, asking for example to what extent forced labour in Germany had
interrupted or even completely blocked their education. But there is also
the unavoidable question about how they were received by their ‘own’
states, their own immediate or wider community, and their own family.
Thus, homecoming played a significant role in our interviews. For ex-
ample, were our interviewees able to return to a family and an intact en-
vironment, or had the family been killed or scattered to the four winds?
Of course we knew that in the territories of the Soviet Union returning
forced labourers were generally suspected of having supported the Ger-
man war economy or of even having committed treason. In Moscow, for
instance, we had seen files or read reports about former forced labourers
who after 1945 had to embark on a new odyssey, being sent on to other
camps even after they had passed through the filtration camps where
the history and attitudes of all returnees were investigated. At the same
time it was clear that those who emigrated to Palestine or the US were
14 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

received differently in terms of the acknowledgement of their persecu-

tion and growing acceptance in the host society, but at the same time
faced the new difficulties of emigration. In what ways have ‘homecoming
experiences’ of so many kinds influenced today’s memory or narratives?
In what ways were ‘the Germans’ perceived afterwards? Or, to put it more
broadly, how have these differences shaped the remembrance cultures of
the respective countries up to now? Conversely, was the remembrance
culture of any particular individual’s country capable of representing his
or her own experiences adequately or offering help in coming to terms
with his or her personal history? What is the significance of these differ-
ences for the construction of one or many European cultures of remem-
brance? Could it be that a single international remembrance culture has
grown up in respect of the Holocaust, while there continue to be multiple
remembrance cultures around forced labour?
After such a long time – more than half a century, after all – we did
not assume that we would be able to fill significant gaps in the history of
forced and slave labour as such using the tools of oral history. It may be
presumed that the experience of the Second World War has been eclipsed
by new experiences, placing memories of those days increasingly out of
reach. It is more in elucidating this dialectic of experience and eclips-
ing, this processing of history, that oral history normally demonstrates
its strengths – and less in reconstructing ‘real’ history, precise dates and
sequences of events, names of places, companies, brutal bosses or camp
personnel. Nevertheless, our preliminary discussions and early interviews
had made it clear that some interview partners were astonishingly well
able to remember such dates and facts. Consequently, we included ques-
tions of this kind in our guidelines for the interviews.

VII

At the end of the project – and as intended right from the beginning – we
planned to publish a volume of reports on each country and some essays
on general questions. The main part of this book consists of twenty-eight
reports from twenty countries, principally in Eastern and East Central
Europe. There are more reports than countries because in some countries
there were several teams at work; in Russia, for example, there were four,
in Poland three, in Ukraine two. Those countries that provided most of
the forced labourers during the Second World War are represented, but
so are those that were allied to the German Reich, whether voluntarily,
under military threat or following occupation by the Wehrmacht: Slova-
kia, Hungary, and Bulgaria, among others. Some countries that experi-
enced forced and slave labour are not represented, either because it was
Introduction 15

not possible to conduct any interviews in the first place,23 or because the
project partners were prevented by other commitments from contribut-
ing a final report.
We have structured the section of the volume that includes the coun-
try reports to reflect the course of the war. Thus we begin with Germany,
the country where forced labour started with the onset of Nazi rule, and
then proceed to Spain and Czechoslovakia, followed by articles from Po-
land, the countries of Southeast Europe and Eastern Europe, and Italy.
This section concludes with reports from the countries of emigration:
Israel, the US, South Africa and Great Britain. The reports on countries
introduce the political-military background of forced labour and/or the
German occupation, and the interview partners are described in terms
of their experiences, memories and life histories; it was also our inten-
tion that each report would analyse the effects of occupation and forced
labour on the national remembrance culture.
In practice, the structure and content of the reports varies, reflecting
the peculiarities of the respective regional or national circumstances and
the division of labour within the team. We chose Spain primarily because
Spanish political activists, having taken part in the civil war or the fight
against Franco’s dictatorship, had been taken to Germany or Austria for
forced or slave labour (notably in Mauthausen) and thus formed a special
group of slave labourers who were indeed perceived as such at the time.
In cases where there was more than one report on the same country, the
authors avoided duplication by agreeing which topics would be covered
in each report, one emphasising the historical background and another
the biographical data.24
As indicated above, there were some problems with the Roma reports
that – thanks to the support of the International Organization for Mi-
gration (IOM) – were expected to come from those Eastern European
countries where Roma had to do slave or forced labour. At least we did
manage some interviews with Roma from these and other countries, such
as Poland and Bosnia. In Belgium we were not able to find partners for
the project, nor were we successful in Denmark or Sweden. Our Dutch
partners were able to conduct very impressive interviews with Jewish
survivors (interviews with other groups were not planned there), but
because of other obligations they were unable to write them up for this
volume.
The second section of the book deals with transnational themes, in
which comparisons between the memories of different national and eth-
nic groups play a significant role, as do the different meanings of slave and
forced labour for the respective national remembrance cultures. Alexan-
der von Plato introduces this section with an interpretative essay that sets
out some initial conclusions and propositions drawn from the totality of
16 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

the reports. The three contributions that follow deal with very different
topics, exemplifying the kind of scholarship that can be developed using
the interviews from the project. Dori Laub presents an analysis of the ex-
perience of meeting for a second time interview partners whom he had al-
ready interviewed and filmed for the Fortunoff Archive (Yale University)
twenty-five years before. He and Johanna Bodenstab locate the changes
they noticed in the interview partners and in themselves in the context
of a changed Jewish remembrance culture in the US. Christoph Thonfeld
pursues the question of how the very different ways of coming home and
the positive or negative reception and further treatment of returnees in-
fluenced their attitudes and orientations, their careers and family ties. In
this context, the comparison between individuals returning to the Soviet
Union, who were sometimes received negatively, and those who stayed
in Germany or emigrated to Great Britain is of particular significance.
Dagi Knellessen sought a comparison of completely different kind: she
asked witnesses at the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt (1963–1965) about
their persecution and slave labour, as well as about the significance of the
trials for them individually. The difficulties of temporarily returning to a
country where they had suffered from most terrible persecution, to which
they were now supposed to bear witness under the difficult conditions of
trials founded on the rule of law, are discussed. Almut Leh and Henriette
Schlesinger conclude this section with a description of the full set of the
interviews, and of their documentation. They provide examples of how
the content of the interviews can be analysed and develop questions and
proposals on the relationship between quantitative and qualitative strat-
egies for interpretation that are intended to stimulate readers to make
the most intensive possible use of this rich repository of data.
The third section of this book, an appendix, offers guidance on the
secondary literature and archival sources for study of forced and slave
labour and some aids to understanding the project and its results. These
include a timeline (assembled by Joachim Riegel) and the guidelines ac-
cording to which the interviews were conducted.

VIII

One experience that proved very positive – almost surprisingly so – in the

course of this international project was the stimulating and productive
cooperation of researchers in the fields of Holocaust and forced labour.
Although there were some differences of opinion, these could be used
productively and resulted in mutual appreciation particularly of East and
West, something we had hoped for but actually hardly expected. Among
the positive experiences in the context of this project we would also cite
Introduction 17

the fact that out of this heterogeneous Eastern and Western Europe, and
the US and Israel with their different remembrance cultures, it was pos-
sible to form an international group of researchers with a similar research
ethos and interest, something we hope will have resonance beyond this
project. It is clear that we share a common ground in respect of methods
and research ethos, and perhaps even of the history of scholarship, and
these may help to overcome what still divides us.

IX

We would like to express our gratitude to Erinnerung, Verantwortung

und Zukunft for funding this large-scale and complex study, and par-
ticularly this book. We are indebted to Ralf Possekel and Evelyn Geier,
our partners in the foundation, for the extremely fruitful cooperation in
negotiating the perilous terrain of two different bureaucracies. We also
thank the jurors who selected the project partners and the staff members
of the subprojects. Eve Rosenhaft (Liverpool) agreed to work as an editor
for the English manuscript and thus to take on the dual roles of a scholar
familiar with the topic and a native speaker with an educated eye for
content and style. For this too, we would like to express our profound
thanks.
Special gratitude, however, is reserved for our interview partners, the
former slave labourers and forced labourers. From the very beginning we
had hoped to be able to erect a ‘memorial of a different kind’ to them
through this project and this volume, a memorial made not of cement
and stone but of recorded and published memories. This was and still is
one of the main objectives of this project. We hope that they will be able
to recognise and accept the work in the spirit in which we offer it.

NOTES

1. According to the Geneva Convention the deployment of captured rank and

file for work was generally legal. However, there were a number of regulations
restricting this. These regulations were basically adhered to only in the case
of Anglo-American prisoners of war. In the case of Frenchmen and Yugoslavs
the regulations were partly adhered to, whereas they were simply ignored for
Poles, Soviet citizens and Italian military internees. As the Soviet Union had
not joined the Geneva Convention, Soviet prisoners of war could only hope to
be treated according to the much more general regulations of the Hague land
18 Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld

war regulations. In most cases not even these were adhered to. Poland and Yu-
goslavia had signed the Geneva agreement; however, the German Foreign Of-
fice argued that after the defeat of Poland and Yugoslavia these states no longer
existed as subjects under international law, so their joining of the Geneva Con-
vention was invalid. See for details Mark Spoerer, ‘Die soziale Differenzierung
der ausländischen Kriegsgefangenen’, in Jörg Echternkamp (ed., im Auftrag des
Militärgeschichtlichen Forschungsamtes), Die deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939
bis 1945: Ausbeutung, Deutungen, Ausgrenzung (second semi-volume) (Munich
2005), 485–576, 502ff.
2. Figures from Spoerer, who has identified and removed 1.1 million double entries
from the total of 14.7 million (particularly prisoners of war transferred to civil-
ian status). Spoerer also takes an estimated margin of error of plus/minus 0.75
million into consideration. Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz
Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im
besetzten Europa 1939–1945, (Stuttgart and Munich 2001), 223.
3. On figure 2 and 3 see Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des ‘Auslän-
der-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches (Berlin and Bonn 1985),
270 (Table 41).
4. This was probably not always the case in private contexts, where forced labour-
ers had to work for families or on small farms and their presence was an inescap-
able part of everyday experience (see the concluding essay on the results of this
project).
5. Thus the FRG’s former Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. See Hans-
Dietrich Genscher, Erinnerungen (Berlin 1995), 692ff.; Alexander von Plato, Die
Vereinigung Deutschlands: ein weltpolitisches Machtspiel (Berlin 2002), 209ff.
6. Constantin Goschler: ‘“Sklaven” und “Agenten” zwischen Kaltem Krieg und
Globalisierung: Zwangsarbeiterentschädigung und Wiedergutmachungsrecht
in der Bundesrepublik’, lecture manuscript, n.p. (Berlin) und n.y. (2005), 1ff.
On the general question of compensation or so-called Wiedergutmachung here
and for the following, see his book: Constantin Goschler, Schuld und Schulden:
Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945 (Göttingen 2005),
passim.
7. On the history of Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft, see Lutz Nietham-
mer’s essay ‘Wahrheitskommissionen im Vergleich: Haben wir bei der Zwangsar-
beiterentschädigung den Wahrheitsauftrag verfehlt?’ in Hans-Christoph Seidel
and Klaus Tenfelde (eds), Zwangsarbeit im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts: Bewälti-
gung und vergleichende Aspekte (Essen 2007), 19–38.
8. The ‘openness clause’ gave the partner organisations the freedom to determine
the preconditions for compensation themselves, within the limits of the funds
available to them for distribution. Forced labourers in agriculture, who had not
normally worked or lived in prison-like conditions, were particularly affected by
this consideration.
9. Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft Foundation and Erinnerung und Zu-
kunft Fund: press release of 11 June 2007, on the twenty-first meeting of the
Board of Trustees on that same day.
10. Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft Foundation and Erinnerung und Zu-
kunft Fund: press release of 14 December 2006, on the twentieth meeting of the
Board of Trustees on 13–14 December 2006.
11. Ibid., 2.
12. Interview with Heinrich van de Loo by Alexander von Plato at the Institute of
History and Biography, Hagen 1989.
Introduction 19

13. Herbert, Fremdarbeiter; Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum Heimat-

losen Ausländer: Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland 1945–1951 (Göttingen
1985).
14. See references at the end of this volume.
15. Lebensgeschichten ehemaliger Zwangsarbeiter und Zwangsarbeiterinnen: Vor-
schlag für eine große internationale lebensgeschichtliche Video-Sammlung mit
Ausstellung, Institut für Geschichte und Biographie der Fernuniversität Hagen
(Alexander von Plato und Almut Leh), Lüdenscheid, 2003.
16. Internationales Dokumentationsprojekt Lebenszeugnisse von ehemaligen Zwangs-
arbeitern und Holocaustüberlebenden: Angebot des Instituts für Geschichte
und Biographie der Fernuniversität Hagen, 6 September 2004.
17. For details see the contribution by Almut Leh and Henriette Schlesinger in this
volume.
18. They were: Alexander von Plato, the head of the project, Almut Leh and Chris-
toph Thonfeld as research associates, and Henriette Schlesinger as expert on ar-
chives and documentation. Elena Danchenko was in charge of contacts mainly
with Russian-speaking partners, Joachim Riegel was in charge of the website and
archival and literature searches, and Marlies Wahnbaeck was responsible for the
secretariat.
19. In the two preceding years several members of the Institute of History and Biog-
raphy had already contributed to the international Mauthausen project headed
by the Viennese historian Gerhard Botz: e.g. Almut Leh, Julia Obertreis, Alice
von Plato and Alexander von Plato (being in charge of the German region and
also contributing to the training of the international interviewers).
20. Apart from one representative of the Institute of History and Biography, the
jury consisted of representatives of Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft
and its seven partner organisations, as well as the unaffiliated scholars Gerhard
Botz (University of Vienna), Joan Ringelheim (Holocaust Memorial Museum,
Washington, D.C.), Mark Roseman (University of Indiana, Bloomington), Frank
Stern (then University of Jerusalem, now Vienna), Wladyslaw Bartoszewski
(former Polish Foreign Minister and survivor of Auschwitz), Victoria Semenova
(Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) and Hermann Schäfer (then Haus der
Geschichte Foundation, Bonn). Once the 32 external groups were appointed,
the Institute of History and Biography itself as the 33rd group took over the task
of conducting interviews in Germany and Great Britain.
21. See the contribution by Birgit Mair in this volume.
22. See the contribution by Artur Podgorski on his interviews with Roma in Poland.
23. In Belgium, Sweden and Denmark it was not possible to find project partners.
24. For example the two contributions on Belarus.
 II 
 1
REPORTS FROM GERMANY ON
FORCED AND SLAVE LABOUR
Alexander von Plato

In the last more or less free parliamentary elections in Germany in No-

vember 1932, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP)
won only 33.1 per cent of the votes – 4.2 per cent, or two million votes,
less than in July 1932. However, on 30 January 1933 the party became
part of a coalition government, and President Hindenburg appointed
Adolf Hitler Chancellor of the German Reich. Hitler was barely in power
before the arrests began and the first concentration camps were erected.
It was from these camps that prisoners were selected for forced labour.
The subsequent burning of the Reichstag provided a motive for the ar-
rest of political opponents, especially communists. By 1935, the parties
and trade unions of the labour movement, as well as the Catholic Cen-
tre Party, had been driven underground, their infrastructure destroyed
or ghettoised, and many of their officials either arrested or forced to
emigrate.
From 1935 onwards, and again during the Second World War, the
Nazis intensified their racial policy in Germany and the occupied terri-
tories of Eastern Europe in particular: some 270,000 of the 500,000 Jews
in Germany were driven out of the country, and approximately 200,000
were killed (around 6 million altogether in Europe), mainly in concentra-
tion and extermination camps. It was in these camps that most prisoners
also had to perform forced labour (slave labour). Roma and Sinti suf-
fered a similar fate under National Socialist ‘gypsy’ policy. Estimates of
the number of Roma and Sinti killed by the SS, police task forces and

Notes for this chapter begin on page 35.

24 Alexander von Plato

Wehrmacht units in Europe range from 75,000 to 500,000.1 But the Na-
zis’ persecution policies were not only politically and racially motivated.
Jehovah’s Witnesses, artists like Erich Mühsam, homosexuals, disabled
people, criminals, ‘antisocial’ people, deserters and many others were also
arrested, put in camps, used for forced labour and even killed.
Forced labour in Germany predated the Third Reich. As early as 1931,
towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the Volunteer Labour Service
(FAD) had been introduced under Chancellor Brüning. A law passed
on 26 June 1935 made it compulsory for all men and women between
the ages of eighteen and twenty-five to complete Reich Labour Service
(RAD) for six months. The ‘duty year’ was also introduced and universal
conscription enforced, particularly during the war, when RAD was sub-
sumed to war aims and became increasingly important for tasks such as
trench digging. This kind of compulsory labour is only touched on here,
although in some cases it is not clear when compulsory labour ends and
forced labour in its stricter sense begins (see below).

Life Stories

Merely selecting our interviewees proved difficult, the process serving

to highlight the unusual aspects of this German project. We conducted
nine interviews for the project2 but have access to more material in our
archive, which contains several hundred interviews.3 I spoke to the fol-
lowing interviewees in 2006 as part of the ‘Slave and Forced Labour’
project.
Jutta P., born in 1922, comes from an assimilated Jewish family that
did not follow a kosher diet or observe Jewish rituals and festivals. ‘Like
many others, we only became Jews when Hitler made us Jews.’ Her fa-
ther owned two cinemas but lost them to partners in the great depres-
sion after 1929. He then ‘managed artists’, and eventually the family
was able to struggle on only thanks to the help of relatives and the Jew-
ish community. They also had to keep moving to smaller and cheaper
apartments. Jutta’s older brother was able to emigrate to England shortly
before war broke out, but once there, he was detained because of his
German nationality and deported to Australia. In February 1939, Jutta
started work at a (Jewish) agricultural training centre in Gross-Breesen
near Berlin before moving to the Landwerk4 in Neuendorf. Her parents
were taken to the Theresienstadt camp in January 1943 and later mur-
dered in Auschwitz. In February 1943 all Jews still working in factories
in Germany were rounded up for deportation (Fabrikaktion).5 She should
have been arrested in this context, but the company she was now work-
ing for managed to retain her.
Reports from Germany on Forced and Slave Labour 25

However, she still ended up being transported with others to the

Hamburger Straße in Berlin (to a former old people’s home, which was
ill-equipped to accommodate so many people) and then to Auschwitz.
She was relatively lucky there, as she soon started to work as a seam-
stress along with many others from Neuendorf, in the cellar of the main
SS building, where she was looked after better and enjoyed more hygi-
enic living conditions than ordinary Auschwitz inmates. ‘I did not ex-
perience the real hell of Auschwitz … The worst time for me was the
death marches of 1945 from Auschwitz to Ravensbrück – three days and
nights on foot followed by three days and nights in goods wagons’ to the
overflowing punishment barracks, and from there to the Neustadt-Glewe
concentration camp near Ludwigslust in Mecklenburg. It was here that
she was liberated, two days before the Red Army arrived. During this
time she and others went looting, but she was separated from her friends,
who were scattered all over the world. First she went to Brussels with a
friend, then returned, stayed briefly in Hamburg, then worked in a biol-
ogy institute in Berlin (at which point she was refused entry to the US
because of protracted pulmonary tuberculosis) and ended up employed
by the Public Services and Transport (ÖTV) trade union in Stuttgart. In
1958 she met her (non-Jewish) husband, who was eight years her junior.
They had no children.
In her account of her life, Jutta consciously avoided dramatisation or
exaggeration: ‘I was lucky.’ For her, the most important thing was that so
many of her female friends from Neuendorf survived with her and gave
her strength in every way possible. ‘Without these friends, I wouldn’t
have made it.’ Some of them were very religious and – unlike Jutta – even
had the strength to help others on the death march. She encountered
‘other Germans’ too, including her former nanny, who took it upon her-
self (with the knowledge of her husband – ‘a minor post office official’) to
help Jutta’s family through the war, even offering to hide them. The same
offer of help also came from Jutta’s father’s boss.
When I asked whether she has been criticised for ‘playing down’ the
enormity of Auschwitz, she answered: ‘Yes, but I can only recount what
the experience was like for me.’ Presumably, her experience of ‘other, bet-
ter Germans’ was one reason – along with her pulmonary TB and desire
to find the nanny – why she stayed in Germany. Today, as a German trade
unionist, she is critical of Israeli policy, remains indifferent to her religion
and does not eat kosher food. Since the war, she has hardly spoken of her
Jewishness or her persecution. But she has become increasingly annoyed
with Germans who refuse to acknowledge the systematic extermination
of European Jews. And the memory of being freed by Soviet troops, along
with her trade union leanings, meant that she found herself at odds with
the anti-communist mood that prevailed in the 1950s.
26 Alexander von Plato

Hans F. (born 1926) and his older brother played down their Jewish-
ness much more than Jutta P. during the postwar years. They came from
a cattle-dealing family from a rural region in Southern Westphalia and
were taken to Auschwitz as adolescents with their parents. As they stood
on the ramp for selection, they claimed they were older than they were,
and were employed to work on dangerous structural engineering works
in support of the industrial activities of the concentration camp. They
were the only ones in their family to survive. After 1945, they returned to
their hometown, where they had problems obtaining the inheritance of
their murdered parents, married Christian women and had their children
baptised. However, relatively soon after the war, in the 1950s, they per-
sonally erected a memorial to the murdered Jews of their hometown. Not
until the 1970s did Hans become a major player in the fight against the
Federal Republic of Germany and the large companies that had exploited
him and his fellow Auschwitz prisoners, sending many to their death or
tacitly condoning such acts. He has focused his efforts on the subsequent
owners of the IG Farben6 conglomerate in particular.
‘Half-Jewish’ journalist Wolfgang R. also kept quiet about his Jewish
father, until he was contacted by a woman from Israel whom his mother
had saved from the Warsaw ghetto. Together, they arranged for his mother
to receive the honour of ‘Righteous among the Nations’.
Philipp W., born in 1910, falls into the category of ‘political’ individu-
als who were arrested very soon after 30 January 1933. He came from
a socialist working-class background. His father was the leader of the
Socialist Worker’s Party, a splinter group of the Social Democratic Party
(SPD). He completed an apprenticeship as a stucco plasterer and pattern
maker, but high unemployment during the Great Depression compelled
him to find work on the inland waterways. He became a sailor, working
mainly on Flemish and French vessels on the Rhine. This allowed him to
distribute leaflets and illegal materials from the International Transport
Workers’ Federation along the length of the Rhine in 1933. He came to
the attention of the Gestapo thanks to the carelessness of a ship’s boy,
who had time to warn Philipp, who then hid the material between the
decks. Nevertheless, the Gestapo beat the living daylights out of him.
The doctor was critical of the Gestapo (‘How can anyone do that to a
young man?’), who then warned him that things were going to be dif-
ferent from now on. But the doctor refused to be intimidated and kept
Philipp with him longer than necessary to nurse him back to health. This
helped him get through the next few months in the Osthofen concentra-
tion camp (near Worms in Rhineland-Palatinate). His fellow prisoners
included other ‘political’ individuals and many Jews, who suffered much
greater torture. Jewish lawyer T. hatched a ‘little plot’ with Philipp, who
had been detailed for construction work: ‘He “groomed” me.’ The idea
Reports from Germany on Forced and Slave Labour 27

was that when Philipp called out the type of worker he required each
morning (bricklayer, plumber etc.), Jewish prisoners would pretend to be
qualified. Philipp would then take them with him so that ‘Jewish fellow
prisoners could escape the constant, the constant [his repetition – AvP]
torture.’ He described, for example, how two ‘Jewish prisoners had to
climb into the latrine and scoop out the waste with cutlery.’
Philipp was released after a year, and he says he worked illegally again
for the International Transport Workers’ Federation. But in 1937 he was
taken to Albert Speer’s office premises in Berlin. He could give me no
explanation for this move, nor say who had recommended him. He then
avoided all political work (if he hadn’t already given it up – AvP). He said
he always wondered why he did this. In 1939, he was called up for service
in the Polish campaign. In 1940, he was ‘transferred’ to Penal Battalion
500 for one year to sweep for mines, for a ‘criminal offence’ he did not
commit. Two drunken comrades had pushed over a bust of Hitler from its
pedestal in the barracks. He was the only member of the corps to survive,
although he was severely wounded.
At the end of the war, he returned to Worms, where he had obvi-
ously been married (a fact he omitted to mention previously) as he was
divorced by his wife, who had met another man in the meantime. He re-
married, rejoined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and worked
as a city model maker for the city of Worms. In 1956, after the KPD was
banned, he lost his job and became self-employed. While in the KPD, he
became local secretary, a position that involved safeguarding party mate-
rial, including the membership list. He handed this material over to the
German Communist Party (DKP), which was founded in 1968.
Philipp W. stresses that in 1933, the conditions in the Osthofen con-
centration camp were much better than those in the wartime concentra-
tion camps, not to mention those of the extermination camps. But some
of the guards, particularly the camp commandant’s deputy, were brutal,
especially towards Jews. ‘Even then!’ he says. However, other guards were
‘just normal police officers’.
For Philipp, and his Jewish fellow prisoners especially, the work per-
formed outside the concentration camp was not forced labour: ‘No, it was
a rest. We liked working outside the camp. We worked on construction
sites or for farmers, and we ate really well.’ This is why he didn’t apply for
compensation. ‘We knew why we were there. I worked for the Party and
against Hitler. For that, I had to face the consequences.’
Elisabeth K., born in 1919, was an illegitimate child. Her mother and
stepfather were members of the KPD. Her stepfather was head milker,
responsible for farms and estates used for livestock farming; her mother
was ‘in service’ and helped in the house and on the farm as a maid, as did
Elisabeth, who joined the Communist Youth League (KJVD). In 1933,
28 Alexander von Plato

her stepfather was held under arrest for a few weeks. In 1936, Elisabeth,
who had hitherto lived with her grandparents, moved in with her mother
and lost her political contacts. She was nonetheless arrested in 1940 and
transported to the Gestapo cellar in Weimar. When she arrived she faced
her worst nightmare. She was placed opposite a former KJVD member
whose face they had smashed in and whose fingernails they had torn out.
Despite her fear of being treated similarly, she didn’t ‘talk’ but was trans-
ported to the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück without fur-
ther interrogation. There, her hair was cut off (by Jehovah’s Witnesses),
which was just as upsetting as having to undress in front of men. She felt,
as did her fellow prisoners, that she was still very naïve for her age, which
was why some of the older women took her under their wing. This meant
a great deal to her.
To everyone’s surprise, she was given a conditional release in 1943.
After her release, she had to do forced labour on a farm near her par-
ents. She was given board and lodging and a small amount of pocket
money in return. ‘The old farmer gave me a bit of something now and
again, but his son’s wife was hard.’ She had to report to the police at 6
o’clock every third morning and was allowed to speak to no one – not just
about Ravensbrück but ‘to no one at all’. So great was her fear that she
managed to avoid speaking even to her own family and children. ‘It was
terrible – worse than in the concentration camp. At least there we had
solidarity. Now I had to shy away from anyone who wanted anything from
me.’ The solidarity she experienced in Ravensbrück had worked well on
the whole, even if there were some exceptions. She was particularly sorry
for Jewish and Polish women, especially ‘when they cut open their legs
and put stuff in them and sewed them up again. When they were dying
and screamed. … You can’t put that behind you. … I often dream about
it. I often scream in my sleep.’ She was never tortured herself.
After her release, she joined the KPD and was awarded the status of
victim of fascism. She was soon put to work for the communist cause in
the Soviet occupation zone, initially as the manager of the cowsheds and
livestock on a new farm (refugee farm). As more and more farmers left
for the West because of agricultural production cooperatives (LPGs) or
a fear of collective farming, it fell to her to take charge of an entire farm.
The role of mayor was later hers for the taking, but like other workers
who were expected to fill leading civil positions vacated by those leaving
for the West, she began to feel overburdened. In addition, her stepfather
became disabled after falling from a hay wagon and her mother had a
heart condition, which meant she had five people including her children
to support. So she refused. In 1974, she received the ‘honorary pension’ –
an additional 600 East German marks on top of the customary 300 marks
– for her victim status. When the East German regime collapsed, she was
Reports from Germany on Forced and Slave Labour 29

receiving 1,400 East German marks; after reunification these payments

continued, the amount being exchanged at a rate of 1 East German mark
to 1 deutschmark (DM). In 2000, she was awarded DM15,000 by the
Remembrance, Responsibility and Future foundation in recognition of
her deportation and forced and slave labour.
Hans-Jürgen S. is a special case for two reasons: he is ‘half-Jewish’,
and it is hard to ascertain exactly when forced labour began for him. He
was born in 1926, attended three primary schools and had to work for
a bookshop delivering newspapers and books in his spare time in order
to earn money. ‘Up to 1935, school was so-so,’ he says, although he felt
rejected by many teachers because ‘we were of mixed Jewish race.’ On
one occasion a teacher caned him so hard that he was barely able to
deliver his books. Eventually he was expelled from school, even though
his mother managed to get a priest to confirm him – without him hav-
ing been christened. ‘But it didn’t do me any good; I didn’t get anything
out of it, because from then on, I got the blame for the slightest thing.’
After leaving school, he was unemployed until the bookshop where he
had previously worked offered him an apprenticeship as a bookbinder.
He learned a lot there, but one day ‘the boss’s son said to me: “You can’t
take the apprenticeship examination, people of mixed Jewish race aren’t
allowed to.”’ After that, he worked on farms.
Later he was called up for essential service, firstly in a munitions fac-
tory in Dömitz, then in France for the RAD. Soon after being discharged
again, he was called up for military service and went to Schwerin to join
the infantry. But when the military passbooks were being handed out,
the platoon leader ‘shouted from the office across the hall: “The Jew
must report to the orderly room!” and the game was up, I was released.’
He was interrogated three times by the Gestapo, once on account of his
sister, who was wanted for refusing to work. ‘She was later arrested, and
spent virtually the whole of the rest of the war in the women’s prison in
Bützow.’ Hans-Jürgen mentions at this point that he joined a resistance
group in the camp belonging to the munitions factory in Dömitz. This
group comprised five men. When he complained on one occasion after
female forced labourers showed him meals containing green maggots,
he was promptly arrested and transported by goods train with others to
work in the mine near Neu Stassfurt (a satellite camp of the Buchenwald
concentration camp). The work was supervised by the SS, the camp by
the Gestapo. He later worked in a quarry, in road construction and in a
brick factory. Shortly before the end of the war, he was taken by truck to
a location near Quedlinburg, where he was liberated by the Americans
in May.
After 1945 Hans-Jürgen S. joined the KPD, which later became the
Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), and gradually rose in society
30 Alexander von Plato

until he became mayor of a town in the Harz Mountains. He strove for

recognition not only as a ‘victim of National Socialism’ but also as a
‘fighter against fascism’. In East Germany, where Hans-Jürgen lived, this
distinction made a big difference in terms of recognition, benefits and
pension entitlement. But his request was turned down, as the camp and
resistance group to which he belonged could not be traced. This rankled,
and even today he is still hopeful for support from former comrades in the
US. Nevertheless he remained a loyal citizen of East Germany.
Ludwig B., born in 1922, grew up in straitened circumstances in Ham-
burg, although his father achieved sporadic success as a tobacco whole-
saler and in the property business. His father had voted for the National
Socialists in 1932, a decision he came to rue in later years. In contrast to
his sister, Ludwig did not attend secondary school, instead embarking on
a bricklaying apprenticeship at fourteen. When he was fifteen, his mother
died. ‘I can hardly describe what a shock it was to me. … I stopped being
well-behaved and conformist. So I didn’t join the Hitler Youth, although
they really hassled me to join at the front door and at work. I became a
soldier in 1940. But even then I disobeyed orders; for example, when it
was my turn to polish my superiors’ boots, I refused to do it.’
He was eventually transferred to a naval unit in France. ‘It didn’t have
any bearing on the war, but for me it was my destiny.’ There, he came
into contact with French communists and deserted after Germany in-
vaded the Soviet Union. He was arrested and court-martialled. ‘We were
sentenced to death in Bordeaux, and – as I now know from the file – the
sentence was commuted seven weeks later to twelve years in prison.’
At the time however, he knew nothing of this.‘I spent 10 months in a
death cell. Hands and feet manacled day and night. Every morning, when
they changed the guard, I thought, they’ve come for me. And when they
walked past the cell, I knew I would live for another day. It was absolutely
horrific, I’m still traumatised by it now.’
Later, he was sent to a penal battalion. ‘We were just thrown in, un-
dernourished and badly armed, so hardly anyone survived.’ Finally, he
was transferred to the Esterwegen prison camp in Emsland, where he
was a forced labourer in the marshland alongside many ‘political’ prison-
ers. ‘After the war, we hoped that our actions would be recognised, but
this was not the case. We continued to be insulted and threatened and
treated as cowards, scum and traitors to the fatherland, until we ended
up feeling guilty ourselves.’ After his father died, ‘I drank away my entire
inheritance and became an alcoholic, because I couldn’t find a reason to
live any more.’
Ludwig married, and his wife bore him four children. She died giving
birth to his last child, which forced him to ‘find a reason to live.’ It also
led to his political awakening. He campaigned for deserters to be recog-
Reports from Germany on Forced and Slave Labour 31

nised as victims of Nazi persecution, and finally won his battle in 1989
– extremely late in the day. He became chairman of the Vereinigung der
Opfer der Militärjustiz (Association for the Victims of Military Justice).
A similar fate befell Fritz N., who was sterilised in Hamburg during
the war because he was diagnosed with a mental disease and forced to
work as a slave labourer in a concentration camp, living in constant fear
of death. He was not recognised as a victim of National Socialism after
the war, because the same medical officer who had condemned him to
sterilisation now testified against him. Albert L. of Thüringen, who was
also sterilised because of the same reason, did not wish to talk about
it and thus was not recognised by the former East German regime as a
victim of fascism.

Summary
Unique Aspects of the German Situation
The human (and inhuman) face of persecution and slave and forced la-
bour is international, particularly at the extremes. Our interviews, like
those carried out in other countries, show that those in the death or
extermination camps saw forced labour as a chance of survival, a means
of escaping the lethal camp regime, if only temporarily. But the German
context had particular features that shaped the experience and profile of
the victims.
The persecution of political opponents, Jews, Sinti and Roma began
in Germany immediately after 1933, much earlier than in the territories
occupied by the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. By this time,
these groups of people were being subjected to the greatly intensified
form of persecution that had developed under the National Socialists’
regime of terror, the system of forced and slave labour for the ‘war effort’,
and martial law. The number of people forced to emigrate from Germany
was proportionately higher than that emigrating from the occupied ter-
ritories, whereas the number of people murdered in Eastern Europe was
proportionately higher than the number forced to leave the region.
An analysis of German slave and forced labourers further reinforces the
unique nature of their experience. This analysis must begin with the dif-
ficulties encountered in simply finding interviewees, as this reveals some-
thing about how the victims of persecution related to postwar Germany.
The majority of Jews who survived the Holocaust emigrated in 1945/46.
Those who remained in Germany, from among whom we wanted to se-
lect our interviewees, did not necessarily consider themselves Jewish, or
at least were not practising Jews, but were ‘made Jews by Hitler’. Some
of them later went in search of their Jewish roots and traditions, joining
32 Alexander von Plato

Jewish communities after decades of considering themselves ‘non-Jews’,7

with some subsequently emigrating to Israel. A third group ‘hid them-
selves away’ in Germany after the war, practised ‘mimicry’ and concealed
their Jewish origins and persecution (such as Wolfgang R. or the F. broth-
ers). For us, this meant that they were hard to find and obtain for an
interview. Many ‘half-Jews’ also stayed in Germany at that time, some
being placed in hostels or orphanages where they were obliged to work,
sometimes on a forced labour basis (like Hans-Jürgen S.). Some of them
also emigrated, while others concealed their origins and persecution for
many years.
Also subjected to racial persecution were hundreds of thousands of
Sinti and Roma (especially Sinti in Germany), who had already been per-
secuted before the war and a high number of them murdered. Not until
the beginning of the 1990s were they officially recognised as ‘racially per-
secuted’ groups. In 1992, they established the Documentation and Cul-
tural Centre of German Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg, which houses an
exhibition about their persecution under the National Socialists. Many
were also afraid of revealing themselves as ‘gypsies’ or victims of National
Socialist gypsy policy, including another of our interviewees Reinhard F.,
who after his liberation from Mauthausen was initially classified as state-
less. This would later present him with problems when he tried to claim
compensation, even though he was one of those who reached the Musel-
mann8 stage during his time at the brutal Mauthausen quarry.
The experiences of the politically persecuted were just as varied. The
first concentration camps were erected in 1933 to silence political oppo-
nents, particularly those on the left, to intimidate them through acts of
violence and torture, or even to kill them. Nevertheless, there is no com-
parison between the type of early forced labour required in these camps
and the forced labour carried out in the later concentration and extermi-
nation camps during the war. The guard squads were less homogeneous
(i.e. they did not just comprise SS and SA members and Nazi police) and
less brutal compared to those in the later concentration camps, there
was less control, the labourers could move more freely while working
and there was more contact with ‘normal workers’ (Philipp W.). This
shows once again how important it is to distinguish between different pe-
riods when examining forced labour experiences and their impact on the
subsequent lives of the POWs. Since the politically persecuted Germans
were already active before 1933, they are mostly relatively advanced in
years. Thus, older people were more prevalent among the politically per-
secuted than young people. Accordingly, younger people do not feature
as frequently in our archive or among our interviewees. Two of the few
younger forced labourers are the ‘half-Jew’ and subsequent communist
Hans-Jürgen S. and Elisabeth K., who was arrested in 1940. She was, and
Reports from Germany on Forced and Slave Labour 33

still considers herself today, a communist. Communists were the largest

politically persecuted group, followed by socialists and social democrats.
It may sound unlikely, but the politically persecuted also included for-
mer National Socialists who came into conflict either with the party or
their superiors during the Second World War, or who committed (or were
alleged to have committed) crimes. For instance, one of our interviewees,
Wilhelm N., who joined the Waffen-SS (Armed SS) early on, had an
argument with his superior. Accused of stealing a uniform from company
stores in Russia, he was sent to Dachau, but survived to become a baker
in Ravensbrück.
Deserters from the army were mostly shot, but the few who survived,
including Ludwig B., clearly experienced severe problems in later life as
a result of their early traumatic experiences, as well as because of self-
doubt. Their recognition as victims of National Socialism persecution
was extremely slow in coming; only in 1997 they were rehabilitated by
the German parliament, and they had to contend with particularly vi-
cious accusations in West Germany. Some of them emigrated. Along
with their self-doubt, there is another reason why relatively few of them
put themselves forward for interviews: they wanted to avoid going public
with their stories if at all possible.
The same applies to disabled people, as they are called today, who
were sterilised by the National Socialists, often incarcerated in concen-
tration camps and forced to do slave labour. Fritz N. was the only one
of our interviewees to have been sterilised – one of the few to break his
silence and allow himself to be interviewed.
Jehovah’s Witnesses were and still are persecuted in virtually all dic-
tatorships, including that of Nazi Germany, one reason being that they
refuse conscription. However, it was also precisely because of their adher-
ence to religious principles that they were entrusted with special duties
by the SS in concentration camps or employed as cleaners in the houses
of SS officers. In addition, Jehovah’s Witnesses were less likely to assault
anyone.
Another probable reason for the particular difficulty encountered in
finding interviewees for the project in Germany is that the number of
‘criminals’ or ‘antisocial’ people was significantly higher among German
concentration camp prisoners. Even disregarding the classification of
prisoners by the SS, many of those who were assigned to these categories
may have had reservations about putting themselves forward for inter-
view. One such person whom we were able to interview, Mr. O. was more
interested in a hot meal and payment for the interview than relating his
story or taking part in the interview itself.
For language reasons alone, comparatively more of the prisoners en-
trusted with special duties were from Germany than from other countries.
34 Alexander von Plato

Having performed such tasks still appears to pose problems for those who
were not communists, because they could not view their duties in the
camps as party work or even as part of the party’s mission. But after 1945,
even the communists could not be sure that their work would not affect
them negatively, as the Buchenwald example shows.9
A further group can obviously only be found in Germany, namely the
foreign forced labourers who remained in the country after the war – the
same land where they had been forced to work or where as members
of the former Vlassov army they found refuge from Soviet retribution.10
Some foreigners (mostly Jews) also subsequently came to Germany as im-
migrants, and are now German citizens. However, I have not interviewed
them in any depth. Some of them appeared as witnesses at the Auschwitz
Trials.11

Irreconcilable Memories and Divergent Cultures of Commemoration

It is all too apparent and also well documented that the experiences of
former slave and forced labourers in Germany contrasted sharply with
how most Germans perceived these experiences in the first few decades
after the war. It is also extremely clear that the position of the racially
persecuted was similar to that of the politically persecuted in West Ger-
many; all had to find out the hard way that their persecution was not
taken seriously. Another consequence of this was that many of our inter-
viewees who were persecuted under National Socialism and lived in the
West were initially extremely well disposed towards the Soviet occupation
zone. And considering the fact that many former concentration camp
prisoners saw the Red Army as their liberators, it is hardly surprising that
scores of them (along with other, former exiles) chose East Germany as
their new home. However, growing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union in
the wake of the Slansky trials, the Cold War in general and the increasing
anti-Zionism also taking hold in East Germany all made it increasingly
difficult for people to keep crossing the border in this way. Many Jews
emigrated from East Germany and moved to the Federal Republic in the
West, or abroad.
But in West Germany, the tension remained over the experiences of
forced labourers and how they were perceived by the majority of Ger-
mans. It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that people began to
sympathise with the victims of National Socialism, invite them to talk in
schools and feature them in radio and television reports. Even so, there
remained a gulf between these victims and those who wanted to draw a
line under the whole affair, even if the latter were diminishing in number.
Until the late 1960s and early 1970s those persecuted under National
Socialism tended to be accorded less respect and attention than, for in-
Reports from Germany on Forced and Slave Labour 35

stance, German POWs, refugees, exiles and the former inmates of Soviet
camps in the Soviet occupation zone. However, this ‘apportionment of
respect’ was reversed at the beginning of the 1970s: the latter in particu-
lar were now seen as Nazi perpetrators, while people like persecuted Jews
or resistance fighters were treated with growing sympathy – especially
by the younger generations. The depth of the struggle for possession
of the high ground in the cultures of commemoration right up to the
1990s is revealed by the furore surrounding the exhibition ‘Crimes of the
Wehrmacht’. In the Soviet occupation zone and East Germany, the ra-
cially persecuted were accorded less importance than victims of political
persecution, and among the persecuted a distinction was made between
victims of fascism and fighters against fascism. In both states of divided
Germany, therefore, different victim hierarchies and even competition
among victims prevailed.
The forced labourers were also denied recognition and material com-
pensation until well into the 1990s. In addition, historians were largely
denied access to archives relating to the labourers’ history, especially
company archives. It was not until the end of the century that the con-
ditions governing the labourers’ recognition were changed, one of the
reasons undoubtedly being the fear of class action lawsuits being brought
by former forced labourers against major banks and conglomerates par-
ticipating in the US market. Efforts have since been made to establish a
compensation fund supported by businesses and the public sector; the
archives have also since been opened.
Germany thus provides compelling evidence that there is no such
thing as a single culture of commemoration pertaining to the postwar
period that is accepted by the majority. There have been divergent, hotly
disputed and even irreconcilable cultures of commemoration that have
driven a wedge between East and West, different generations and politi-
cal camps. These divisions persist to this day, albeit in diluted form, and
have been manifested most recently in debates over the comparability
of the repressive measures exercised by the National Socialist and SED
dictatorships.

NOTES

1. Cf. the various relevant works by Michael Zimmermann, including his early, de-
finitive work on the subject, Verfolgt, vertrieben, vernichtet: Die nationalsozialisti-
sche Vernichtungspolitik gegen Sinti und Roma (Essen 1989).
36 Alexander von Plato

2. Including seven on video, all on audiocassette.

3. Including a project for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.,
material from interviews with former prisoners of the Ravensbrück and Mau-
thausen concentration camps, material about the Wehrmacht justice system
(deserters) and the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and individual inter-
views for the ‘Children of the Resistance’ project by the University of Wuppertal.
Interviews with Sinti and Roma were made available by Michael Zimmermann.
4. An organisation, in this case Jewish, whose aim was to help people learn about
country life and offer appropriate training.
5. ‘Fabrikaktion’, or in the SS language ‘Großaktion Juden’: at the beginning of 1943
about 15,000 Jews were still working in factories in Berlin, and more than 5,000
outside of Berlin. In the early morning of 27 February 1943 the Gestapo (Ge-
heime Staatspolizei) arrested nearly all of them at home, on the streets or in the
factories. During the first week of March 1943 they were transported to Ausch-
witz or to Theresienstadt. It is assumed that nearly two thirds of them were
murdered at once upon their arrival. The ‘Fabrikaktion’ led to the demonstration
in the Rosenstraße.
6. IG Farben was the biggest German chemical conglomerate of the period, formed
in 1926 through the fusion of the principal individual firms in the sector. Af-
ter the victory in the Second World War the Allied Control Council decided
to dissolve IG Farben because of its complicity and involvement in the crimes
of National Socialism, especially in the system of concentration camps and
forced labour. Some ‘smaller’ firms emerged from it, including Hoechst, Bayer
Leverkusen, and BASF. The rest was called IG Farben in Liquidation and was
the legal successor in law of IG Farben; this fact became important for all claims
for compensation. All the component firms of the former IG Farben mentioned
above were absolved of liability.
7. This intensified after the collapse of East Germany. Cf. Robin Ostow, ‘Helden
und Anti-Helden: Zwei Typen jüdischer Identität in der DDR’, BIOS 4 (1991):
191ff.; on Jews in East Germany in general: Karin Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt: Die
Geschichte der jüdischen Kommunisten in der DDR (Cologne 2000).
8. German term used among Nazi concentration camp inmates to describe prison-
ers who had reached a near-death state due to starvation, exhaustion and fear,
and had lost all capacity to respond to their situation.
9. Lutz Niethammer (ed.), Der ‘gesäuberte’ Antifaschismus: Die SED und die roten
Kapos von Buchenwald. Dokumente (Berlin 1994).
10. See the essay by Christoph Thonfeld in this volume.
11. Some were interviewed by Alice von Plato. See her essay ‘Witnesses of the
Auschwitz-Trial in Frankfurt (West Germany) in 1963 to 1965’, Fondation Ausch-
witz, Cahier International sur le témoignage audiovisual 5 (2000): 41–52). Others
were interviewed as part of this project by Dagi Knellesen (see her essay in this
volume).
 2
WORK, REPRESSION AND DEATH
AFTER THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
Mercedes Vilanova

T he eleven life histories included in this project introduce us to people

who faced severe repression in Spain, France or Germany as a result of
General Franco’s victory in 1939. Their testimonies are an example of
how the combination of Hitler’s and Franco’s policies resulted in the
cruellest of fates: execution in Spain or in German concentration camps.
Spain did not take part in either of the two world wars of the twentieth
century, but nevertheless the course of Spanish politics had a very strong
impact on the lives of the persons interviewed. In April 1931, after cen-
turies of monarchy, the Spanish Republic was proclaimed, but the new
regime came to an end five years later as a consequence of a coup d’état
that was the start of a long civil war. Spain was the last European democ-
racy to succumb to fascism. The Republican government was defeated
in April 1939, but the retreat of its army had begun in January that year
with the fall of Barcelona. Accompanying the troops were hundreds of
thousands of people, including leading politicians and military officers,
some of them with their entire families. Most of them crossed the frontier
over the passes in the Pyrenees in an appalling exodus, and in some cases
their exile lasted until Franco’s death in 1975.
The long period of dictatorship, very soon supported by the United
States in the new context of the postwar years and of the Cold War, gave
added significance to the repression that many Republicans suffered, their
memories of the Civil War and their role as sacrificial victims. During the

Notes for this chapter begin on page 46.