In August 1944, there were over 7.6 million Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers) officially registered on the employment rolls in the territory of the “Greater German Reich,” representing one-fifth of the total labor force.
.jpg)
Of those, 1.9 million were prisoners of war and 5.7 million were civilian forced laborers. Eastern Europeans made up the majority of civilian forced laborers, a term used to describe people who were involuntarily taken from their homes and deported to work in various places throughout the Third Reich during World War II.
Nazi labor policy in the occupied Eastern Europe was developed in response to the wartime circumstances with the Soviet Union, and became increasingly radicalized after the Wehrmacht faced setbacks in their quests to take Moscow and Stalingrad. Labor policy in Eastern Europe was also directly related to Nazi racial ideology, which viewed Slavic peoples as Untermenschen, or subhuman.
As Dr. Otto Bräutigam, a high ranking official in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, stated in a secret memorandum:
"With the inherent instinct of the Eastern peoples, the primitive man soon found out that for Germany the slogan: 'Liberation from Bolshevism' was only a pretext to enslave the Eastern peoples according to her own methods…With unequaled presumption, we put aside all political knowledge and treated the people of the occupied Eastern territories as 'Second Class Whites' to whom Providence has merely assigned the task of serving as slaves for Germany."
Nazi labor officials had always planned to utilize foreign labor from Eastern Europe during the war, but there was no masterplan for a comprehensive forced labor program. Instead, the combination of Nazi racial philosophy, labor shortages in Germany, and setbacks on the Eastern Front coalesced to create an extensive forced labor policy. This was characterized by “recruitment quotas,” increasingly violent methods to procure Eastern European workers, and involuntary deportations.