Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxiii:2 (Autumn, 2002), 169–204. Mark Spoerer and Jochen Fleischhacker FORCED LABORERS IN NAZI GERMANY Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany: Categories, Numbers, and Survivors One of the main characteristics of twentieth- century“total war” was that a large part of society, even those far behind the frontline, was massivelyinvolved in events, either passivelyas victims of air strikes or activelyas mem - bers of the workforce in armaments production. In the earlymod - ern era and the nineteenth century, conquering troops often forced the population of the defeated countryto supplyfood and other goods and to build fortiªcations. Prisoners of war (pows) would be exchanged shortlyafter their capture. The systematic deployment of enemy pows or even civilians, once common in antiquityand the Middle Ages, was not reintroduced until the late nineteenth century. Less than 10,000 Confederate powsinthe U.S. Civil War were put to work bytheir Northern captors. Dur- ing the Franco-German war of 1870/71, the German military’s plan to put French pows to work materialized onlyfor a small fraction of captured soldiers. On a similar scale, the U.S. Army made use of pow labor in the Spanish–American war of 1898. Not until World War I, however, were pows or civilians forced to work for their captors on a large scale.1 Mark Spoerer is Assistant Professor, Facultyof Economics and Social Science, Universityof Hohenheim. He is the author of Von Scheingewinnen zum Rüstungsboom: Die Eigenkapital- rentabilität der deutschen Industrieaktiengesellschaften 1925–1941 (Stuttgart, 1996); Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Dritten Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939–1945 (Stuttgart, 2001). Jochen Fleischhacker is Senior Research Scientist, Max Planck Institute for Demo- graphic Research, Rostock (Germany). He is co-editor, with R. Münz of Gesellschaft und Bevölkerung in Mittelund Osteuropa im Umbruch (Berlin, 1998). The authors would like to thank the following for providing historical and demographical data: Eva Blimlinger, Florian Freund, Frank Heins, Monika Herzog, Milena Ilic, Thomas Kucera, Andreas Leuchtenmüller, Bertrand Perz, Oliver Rathkolb, Voijka Sircelj, Valentyna Steshenko, Jacques Vallin, Ch. Vandeschrick, Petra Vojtechhovska, and the Estonian Statistical Ofªce. Theyalso gratefullyacknowledge the assistance of the following archives: the cityof Frankfurt am Main, the cityof Reutlingen, and the Ravensbrück Memo - rial Museum. Finally, they thank four anonymous referees for valuable suggestions. © 2002 bythe Massachusetts Institute of Technologyand The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 George Lewis and John Mewha, History of Prisoner of War Utilization by the United States Army, 1776–1945 (Washington, D.C., 1955), 77, 90; Howard S. Levie, “The Employment of Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/00221950260208661 by guest on 02 October 2021 170 | MARK SPOERER AND JOCHEN FLEISCHHACKER In World War I, between 7 and 8.5 million persons from all nations were captured. Since the war did not end with a quick victory, as both sides had expected, the common practice was to put pows to work—a strategythat was generallyin line with the Hague Convention of 1907. Germanydeployedat least 1.5 mil - lion pows in its economy; Austria-Hungary put to work more than 1 million Russian pows alone. Conversely, 2.1 million Aus- trian-Hungarian and 0.17 million German pows labored in Russia, and tens of thousands of German pows in France and Britain. Moreover, in clear violation of the Hague Convention, the Ger- man authorities made massive use of civilians from the verybegin - ning of the war. Theydid not allow Eastern European civilian laborers, who were working in Germanywhen hostilities broke out, to return to their home countries (German-occupied Russia and even Austria-Hungary). Two years later, in 1916, the German occupation forces deported 5,000 Polish workers from Lodz, mostlyJews, and 61,000 Belgian workers to Germany.Whereas the international public largelyignored the fate of the Poles, the deportation of neutral Belgians resulted in considerable damage to German foreign policy, and was stopped in early 1917.2 In World War II, most belligerent nations put pows to work, in accordance with the Geneva Convention of 1929. In outright violation of international law, however, Japan and Germany, the two main aggressors, established huge forced labor systems. The Japanese occupants deported 1 million Korean men and women and at least 40,000 Chinese to Japan. Within Korea, China, and Prisoners of War,” American Journal of International Law, LVII (1963), 320–321; Manfred Botzenhart, “French Prisoners of War in Germany, 1870–71,” in Stig Förster and Jörg Nägler (eds.), On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Uniªcation, 1861–1871 (Cambridge, 1997), 587–593; Rüdiger Overmans, “‘In der Hand des Feindes’. Geschichtsschreibung zur Kriegsgefangenenschaft von der Antike bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in idem (ed.), In der Hand des Feindes. Kriegsgefangenschaft von der Antike bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Cologne, 1999), 21. Coerced labor still occurred in colonies. See, for exam- ple, Martin A. Klein (ed.), Breaking the Chains: Slavery, Bondage, and Emancipation in Modern Africa and Asia (Madison, 1993). 2 Gerald H. Davis, “Prisoners of War in Twentieth-CenturyWar Economies,” Journal of Contemporary History, XII (1977), 623–634; Gérard Canini, “L’Utilisation des prisonniers de guerre comme main-d’oeuvre 1914–1916,” in Les Fronts invisibles: nourrir-fournir-soigner (Nancy, 1984), 247–259; Overmans, “In der Hand des Feindes,” 12–13; Ulrich Herbert, “Zwangsarbeit als Lernprozeß. Zur Beschäftigung ausländischer Arbeiter in der westdeutschen Industrie im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, XXIV (1984), 287– 294; idem, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany Under the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1997), 30–32; idem, Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des ‘Ausländer-Einsatzes’ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reichs (Bonn, 1999; orig. pub. 1985). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/00221950260208661 by guest on 02 October 2021 FORCED LABORERS IN NAZI GERMANY | 171 other occupied parts of Southeast Asia, the Japanese put many more million civilians to work. The German occupants also mobi- lized an unknown number of civilians in the occupied territories. But to a far larger extent than the Japanese, theylured or deported several million foreign civilians, pows, and concentration-camp inmates into the Reich to support the German war economy. Onlya small fraction of these men and women worked volun - tarily.Theyfaced a highlydifferentiated regulatoryframework that determined their conditions of life—a system that was a hy- brid of racial prejudice and political consideration. At the top of this hierarchywere citizens from Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Flanders, who were considered Germanic. Most other for- eigners were divided into Axis and non-Axis aliens. At the bottom of the scale were Poles, Soviet citizens, Gypsies, and Jews. Among the Polish and Soviet citizens, tens of thousands died of malnutri- tion, disease, and violence. The Jews and Gypsies were facing an- nihilation. Onlythe German economy’surgent need of man- power retarded their immediate and complete destruction.3 The historyof forced labor in Nazi Germanyhas been re- searched extensivelyin the past two decades. Following Herbert’s pioneering study, published in 1985, a great deal of it has been de- voted to qualitative aspects. However, when compensation for forced laborers emerged as a serious issue in 1998, the lack of quantitative data became painfullyobvious. Herbert’s statistics showed that 7.6 million foreign civilian laborers and pows were working in the German economyin mid-August 1944. However, since these ªgures referred to a speciªc reporting date, theydid not account for foreign laborers who had left Germanyor perished bythen, or were taken to Germanythereafter. Moreover, theydid not include concentration-camp and other interned laborers. Esti- mates of all foreign laborers—civilians, pows, and inmates—range from 10 to 15 million. All these estimates are ad hoc. No studyhas 3 David A. Schmidt, Ianfu: The Comfort Women of the Japanese Imperial Army of the Paciªc War (Lewiston, 2000), 83, cites an estimate of 4.5 million Koreans mobilized bythe Japanese in the country. Van Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese in World War II (Jefferson, N.C., 1994), 141– 146, counts 193,000 allied pows and at least 600,000 native forced workers in Burma, Siam (Thailand), and Indonesia. There are no estimates of the number of forced laborers in occu- pied China. Germanyannexed formally,or de facto, Austria in 1938, parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938/39; large parts of Poland from 1939 to 1942; Alsace, Lorraine, Luxembourg, and a small part of Belgium during or after 1940; and a small part of Lithuania and parts of northern Yugoslavia in 1942. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/00221950260208661 by guest on 02 October 2021 172 | MARK SPOERER AND JOCHEN FLEISCHHACKER ever compiled and calibrated the statistical evidence scattered in archives and publications.4 This article’s primaryinterest is to estimate the number of foreign laborers in the German war economyand the number of those who survived until mid-1945, thus enabling an estimate of how manysurvived until mid-2000 when the German