UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe Symposium Presentations W A S H I N G T O N , D. C. Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe Symposium Presentations CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM 2004 The assertions, opinions, and conclusions in this occasional paper are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council or of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. First printing, April 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Peter Hayes, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Michael Thad Allen, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Paul Jaskot, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Wolf Gruner, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Randolph L. Braham, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Christopher R. Browning, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by William Rosenzweig, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Andrej Angrick, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Sarah B. Farmer, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Rolf Keller, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Contents Foreword ................................................................................................................................................i Paul A. Shapiro PART I: FORCED AND SLAVE LABOR IN GERMANY Forced and Slave Labor: The State of the Field..............................................................................1 Peter Hayes The Business of Genocide .....................................................................................................................9 Michael Thad Allen Cultural Policy and Political Oppression: Nazi Architecture and the Development of SS Forced Labor Concentration Camps .........................................................................................................21 Paul B. Jaskot PART II: JEWISH FORCED AND SLAVE LABOR Jewish Forced Labor as a Basic Element of Nazi Persecution: Germany, Austria, and the Occupied Polish Territories (1938–1943) ..........................................................................................................35 Wolf Gruner The Hungarian Labor Service System (1939–1945): An Overview...............................................49 Randolph L. Braham The Factory Slave Labor Camps in Starachowice, Poland: Survivors’ Testimonies .......................63 Christopher R. Browning Retelling the Jewish Slave Labor Experience in Romania ............................................................77 William Rosenzweig PART III: FORCED AND SLAVE LABOR ACROSS EUROPE Forced Labor along the “Straβe der SS”...........................................................................................83 Andrej Angrick Foreign Labor in Vichy, France: The Groupements de Travailleurs Etrangers................................93 Sarah B. Farmer Racism versus Pragmatism: Forced Labor of Soviet Prisoners of War in Germany (1941–1942)109 Rolf Keller Appendix: Biographies of Contributors.......................................................................................125 Foreword Civilians, including concentration camp prisoners, deportees, foreign nationals, and Jews, as well as prisoners of war were forced into the sprawling forced and slave labor system that encompassed Europe and supported the war efforts of the Nazi regime and Germany’s Axis allies. Forced and slave labor was used in road-building and defense works; the chemical, construction, metal, mining, and munitions industries; in agriculture; at installations working at the highest levels of technology; and to perform menial tasks. Such labor was integral to concentration camps and their sub- camps, farms, ghettos, labor battalions, church institutions, prisoner-of-war camps, and private industries in Germany, other Axis countries, and Axis-occupied territories east and west. The pervasive and in some instances undisguised nature of this system is striking. Forced and slave labor took place not only in closed facilities, such as concentration and prisoner-of-war camps hidden from public eyes, but in many instances was a visible presence in the fabric of daily life: in the countryside on farms; in towns and cities across Europe when members of localized labor battalions assembled in the early morning and returned to their homes at dusk; and in ghettos, where Jews, often segregated only by barbed wire and therefore highly visible to their non-Jewish neighbors, hoped that labor might mean life. The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies organized a symposium Forced and Slave Labor in Nazi-Dominated Europe in October 2002 to present new research into key elements of that system. The symposium was part of an ongoing series of programs organized by the Center to bring to bear the knowledge and insight of experienced Holocaust scholars regarding topics of major significance, and to provide an outlet for cutting-edge research being carried out by new scholars who will ensure the field’s future. The mission of the Center is to promote and support research on the Holocaust, to inspire the growth of the field of Holocaust studies, and to ensure the ongoing training of future generations of Holocaust scholars. Nine scholars presented their work at the symposium, as well as a Romanian survivor, whose descriptions of his ghetto forced-labor experiences added a profoundly personal perspective to the scholars’ presentations. The symposium itself was preceded by three days of intense deliberation among the presenters, who discussed one another’s work in detail, debated the major new scholarly findings stimulated by recent ii • FOREWORD public interest in Holocaust-era slave labor issues, and traced out the opportunities for potentially important future research on this topic. The symposium itself was organized into three sessions. In the first, Forced and Slave Labor in Germany, Peter Hayes of Northwestern University, a member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, assessed the challenges confronting scholars researching the field—these challenges a consequence of the topic’s enormity, heterogeneity, and profundity, and offered suggestions for improving our grasp of the full historical record. Michael Thad Allen of Georgia Technical University described the nature of the SS’s “corporate adventures” during the 1930s, concluding that they represented a mix of “economic aspirations and disciplinary predilections.” Paul Jaskot of DePaul University closed the session with an examination of the link between German National Socialist architecture and the punitive concentration camp system. At the second session Jewish Forced and Slave Labor, Wolf Gruner, the 2002– 2003 Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, took a comparative approach, analyzing forced labor both as a basic element of Nazi persecution of German Jews after 1938 and as one of the first anti-Jewish measures initiated in countries under German occupation or in the Axis orbit. Randolph Braham of City University of New York, a member of the Center’s Academic Committee and a survivor of the Hungarian Labor Battalions, provided an overview of the Hungarian labor service system from 1939 to 1945 in the context of a wider series of antisemitic policies pursued by Hungarian governments from the mid-1930s. Christopher Browning of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, relied heavily on extensive Jewish survivor testimony as a primary source base in his examination of a complex of slave labor camps in the town of Starachowice in the General Government of occupied Poland, bringing an experiential perspective to the symposium. Professor Browning was the 2003 Ina Levine Scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. The uniquely compelling nature of survivor memory was underscored in William Rosenzweig’s account of his deportation east from his native Czernowitz, Romania, and his slave labor experiences in Romanian-occupied Transnistria. The final session Forced and Slave Labor Across Europe, began with Andrej Angrick’s (institution, place) discussion of the use of SS-assigned slave labor in the construction of DG-IV, a main transit road built by the Germans and essential to their assault on Stalingrad and the Caucasus. Sarah Farmer of the University of California– FOREWORD • iii Irvine then addressed the use of foreign labor (“Groupements de Travailleurs Etrangers”) in Vichy France. Finally, Rolf Keller of the Niedersächische Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung examined the contradictory “racism-versus- pragmatism” policy applied to Soviet prisoners of war used as forced and slave laborers in Germany in 1941/42. The articles in this collection are not verbatim transcriptions of the papers as presented. Some authors extended or revised their presentations by incorporating additional information and endnotes, and all of the contributions were copyedited. Although the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum makes every reasonable effort to provide accurate information, the Museum cannot guarantee the reliability, currency, or completeness of the material