Slave Labor in Concentration Camps in Nazi, Germany
Intro
Types of slave labor camps
Arbeitslager definition: Work camps for forced labor were guarded and movement of inmates restricted.
Arbeitsziehungslager definition: Workers' Education camps - for those who broke their contracts or didn't produce their quota, needed to be re-educated. Basically punishment. Death rate high.
Concentration camp definition:
1) a guarded enclosure for the detention or imprisonment of political prisoners, prisoners or war, aliens, refugees
2) an area for the assembly of military personnel. The Nazis established
15,000 camps in occupied countries.
Konzentrationlager - Under this heading, these camps were under the command of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) . All types of prisoners were committed: Nacht and Nebel (NN), political, Jehovah's Witness who refused to go into war labor, homosexuals, habitual criminals, Jews, and Ukrainians who helped the Jews. Later in the war workers and prisoners were treated equally poor. Death rate high.
Forced labor Zwangsarbeiter - Information from the Nuremberg trials estimated that there were 12 million forced laborers.
Prisoners from concentration camps and workers conscripted in occupied Poland, and Ukraine were compelled to work, on starvation rations, in agriculture, highway building and factories for the German state during World War II. Labor was also viewed as a form of killing by attrition. Forced labor was introduced for Sinti and Roma inside Nazi Germany in 1936, and after 1938.
The situation of the slave laborer
From the west they came from Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Franch, Denmark and Norway..From the east they came from Poland, Soviet Union, the Baltic states, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia. Die Situation der Zwangsarbeiter website in German, plus photos.
Dutch / Netherlands slave labour
http://www.documentatiegroep40-45.nl/dwangarbeid/missing.htm
Ostarbeiters (Workers from the East) / Arbeitsbuch (Workbook)
All Ostarbeiters had to have an employment identification document, called an "Arbeitsbuch" (work book) in German.
Persons from Ukraine were classified as subhuman or "untermenshen" under Nazi racial ideology. The Ostarbeiters were required to wear the 'OST' sign on the right lapel. Stefan Lemieszewski
Gemeinschaftslager - Civilian Worker Camps were unguarded communities, usually foreign workers.
Internierungslager - Civilian Internment Camps
Jews were not the only ones earmarked for death in Hitler's Plan. All
those labled at untermensch (subhuman) would be worked to death. The
death count was huge in most of the concentration camps. The Nazis would require
the slaves to dig ditches, trenches and the "undesirables" would be thrown in
and burned. Others were sent to crematoriums. Many died of illness. Many were
executed. Many starved. Some were buried alive.The undesirable were not just
Jews, but Ukrainians, Polish, gypsies,
homosexuals, aged, ill, intellectuals, and the list goes on. If you were of value
to the Nazi's; you weren't executed, but could be worked to death. If they didn't
kill you, hunger, the bitter cold, bad living conditions and typhus took its
toll.
Soviet prisoners of war: (computer translation) Of the 5.6 million Soviet prisoners
of war, approx. 60,000 were kidnaps to Schleswig-Holstein. They stood also
here in the lowest place, as in the entire Nazi ideology and in the German
Reich, . They were considered as Untermensch (subhuman) absolutely,
on an equal footing with the Jews, whose only existence authorization consisted
of if at all, the 'dominant race' to serve up to death (i.e, worked to death). From
the minutes of a general staff discussion of 13.11. 1941 over warfare against
the Soviet Union.
Prisons - Inmates were sent from the judicial courts, such as people's
court, Volksgerichtshof.
Sicherungslager / Security Camps - persons held while awaiting trial;
if not cleared would be rerouted to a concentration camp or prison.
Sonderlager /
Special Camps - segregated for special treatment. Sentences were supposed
to be short term; however, many prisoners served very long terms. Death
rate high.
Straflager and Strafgefangenenlager - penal or punishment
camps, such as Emsland camps, more severe, similar to Konzentrationlager.
Uniform
Identification tags
German and foreign political opponents of the Nazi regime were frequently arrested
and sent to jails, labor and concentration camps. Their prisoner uniform
had a red triangle, often with the initial for their country of origin (P
for Poland, I for Italy, OST for east, ).
Wohnlager - unguarded housing communities.
Death rate chart
From Univerisity of Hawaii
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.TAB1.1.GIF
Russians or Ukrainians? Stats are misleading:
Although the Nizkor Project lists 4 million Russians in slave
labor, it is well to remember that Ukrainians were listed as Russian while
under USSR rule. Hitler occupied Ukraine for 3 years (1941-1944) going door
to door, ordering Ukrainians into conscripted servitude, prior to any direct
invasion on Russia proper.
Statistics
from the Nizkor Project http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/imt/nca/nca-01/nca-01-10-slaves-04.html
Approximate number of foreigners put
to work for the German war effort in the Old Reich
January 1945
Nationality
---------------------
Russians
Poles
Italians
Dutch
Belgians
Yugoslavs
Czechoslovaks
Balts
Greeks
Luxembourgers
Hungarians
Rumanians
Bulgarians
Others 50,000
--------------------
Totals
|
Workers
----------------1,900,000
764,000
851,000
227,000
274,000
183,000
230,000
140,000
130,000
15,000
14,000
10,000
5,000
2,000
50,000
-----------------4,795,000
|
P/W's
---------------600,000
750,000
60,000
400,000
63,000
----------------1,873,000
|
Politicals
----------------11,000
2,300
8,900
1,000
--------------23,200
|
Total
------------------ 2,500,000
1,525,000
911,000
627,000
277,000
254,000
230,000
140,000
130,000
15,000
15,000
10,000
5,000
2,000
50,000
-----------------6,691,000
|
Other Lists:
Partial list of concentration camps: estimated prisoners and death rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concentration_camps_of_Nazi_Germany
Concentration camps chart:
http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/blchart.htm
Statistics Jews only:
http://www.shoaheducation.com/camps/statistics.html
Concentration camp list:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/cclist.html#intro
http://www.jewishgen.org/ForgottenCamps/
Nazis Recruiting Ukrainians:
Here is poster
calling Ukrainians to come work in Germany for the war effort. It
wasn't so difficult for Ukrainians to work for Germany because they hated
Stalin. Previously in 1932-33 Stalin killed off 10 million Ukrainians
in the orchestrated Famine-Genocide, denying the famine and not allowing
food to come in. Nazi's promised them an independent Ukraine. The posters
shows the Nazi army pushing back the Reds.
|
|
Archives of Europe: http://www.uidaho.edu/special-collections/euro1.html
About camplife in Nazi Germany
These poems are taken from my book, Language of Mules:
MY MOTHER TALKS ABOUT THE SLAVE LABOR CAMPS
By John Guzlowski
| 1. THE PLACES SHE LIVED
She has the peasants' view of the world:
Disorder and chaos, roads that end
In marshy fields, chickens that begin
To bleed from the mouth for no reason.
Nobody makes movies of such lives
She says, and begins to tell me the story
Of when the Americans first came,
Of the sergeant who stood with a suitcase
In the yard between the barracks.
He was shouting, screaming.
They didn't know what he wanted
And feared him. One of the women
Came out (first, she hid her children
Under the bed) and then another.
They knew he wasn't a German.
When fifteen of them stood in the yard,
He opened the suitcase, emptied
Its deutsche marks on the ground,
Said in broken German, "This is for you,
Take it, this is the money they owe you."
And then the British came,
And put them in another camp,
Where the corpses still had not been buried,
Where the water was bad, where my mother
Got sick, where her stool was as red
As the beets she had to dig everyday.
And my father worked hard, sawing
The wood, getting ready for winter,
Like he did in Poland. He knew this work
And did it for her and the children,
My sister and me. But the British
Moved them again, to another camp,
And they had to leave the wood, even though
My father tried to carry some on his back.
And it was cold in the new place, and some
Of the babies died, and my sister was sick,
Maybe from drinking the dirty water.
We were always being moved around.
|
2. HOW HER MOTHER AND SISTER
DIED
Sometimes, my mother says, her home
West of Lvov comes back to her in dreams
That open in grayness with the sounds
Of a young, flowered girl in white
Singing a prayer of first communion,
The dirt streets around the church pure
With priests and girls and boys.
The singing prayer leads her to the grave
Where her mother and her sister Genja
And her sister's baby daughter lie,
The marshy grave where the hungry men
Dropped them after shooting them
And cutting them in secret places.
My mother says, these men from the east
Were like buffaloes: terrible and big.
She wonders if God will remember
Her labors. She wonders if there is a God.
She waves the dreams away with her hand
Starts again, talking of plowing the fields
Of cutting winter wood, of that time
When the double-bladed axe slipped
And sank a wound so deep in her foot
That she felt her heart would not
Jar loose from its frozen pause.
|
3. THE BEETS
She tells me of the beets she dug up
In Germany. They were endless, redder
Than roses gone bad in an early frost,
Redder than a big man's kidney or heart.
The first beet she remembers,
She was alone in the field, alone
Without her father or mother near,
No sister even. They were all dead,
Left behind in Lvov. The ground was wet
And cold, but not soft, never soft.
She ate the raw beet, even though
She knew they would beat her.
She says, sometimes she pretended
She was deaf, stupid, crippled,
Or diseased with Typhus or cholera,
Even with what the children called
The French disease, anything to avoid
The slap, the whip across her back
The leather fist in her face above her eye.
If she could've given them her breasts
To suck, her womb to penetrate
She would have, just so they would not
Hurt her the way they hurt her sister
And her mother and the baby.
She wonders what was her reward
For living in such a world. It was not love
Or money. She can't even remember
What happened to the deutsche marks
The American sergeant left that day
In the spring when the war ended.
|
4. WHAT THE WAR TAUGHT HER
My mother learned that sex is bad,
Men are worthless, it is always cold
And there is never enough to eat.
She learned that if you are stupid
With your hands you will not survive
The winter even if you survive the fall.
She learned that only the young survive
The camps. The old are left in piles
Like worthless paper, and babies
Are scarce like chickens and bread.
She learned that the world is a broken place
Where no birds sing, and even angels
Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.
She learned that you don't pray
Your enemies will not torment you.
You only pray that they will not kill you. |
I've started a blog about my parents and their experiences
in the slave labor camps in Germany, and later their experiencs in the US
as DPs. I've posted about why I write about them, about how they came to
America, about what it was like in the DP camps after the war.
I thought you might like to see the blog. Here's the link: http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/
Dr. John Z. Guzlowski
Professor Emeritus
Eastern Illinois University
jzguzlowski@eiu.edu
Nazi Records Given to Holocaust
Groups
By MATT MOORE – Mar 25, 2008
BERLIN (AP) — The names of some 3.5 million people displaced after World
War II have been provided to Holocaust memorial groups and museums in the United
States, Israel and Poland by a recently opened archive of Nazi-era documents.
The International Tracing Service of the International Committee of the Red
Cross said Tuesday that it had handed over a third round of digitally copied
documents to the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in Washington and the Warsaw-based National Institute of Remembrance.
The archive, based in Bad Arolsen, Germany, said the transfer involved copies
of index cards that feature the names of people who were freed from Nazi concentration
and labor camps as well as prisoners of war.
"It is essential that we can share, thanks to the opening of the archives,
our documentation on the fate suffered by the victims of the Nazi regime," said
Reto Meister, the ITS director. "This will facilitate access to the information
that is of such great value to the victims and their families, irrespective
of whether they live in Europe, Israel or America."
There are millions of index cards, documents and files in the ITS archive,
some of which contain detailed family histories. The archive made its first
distribution of copied documents late last year, to make access easier for
family members, friends and now researchers.
For more than 60 years, the information was locked away in the secretive archive,
which houses records scooped up by Allied troops from concentration camps,
Nazi SS offices and postwar displaced-persons compounds.
It will take the ITS two more years to finish copying onto hard drives the
16 linear miles of papers that fill a half dozen buildings. So far, around
67 million images of documents have been transferred to the memorials and museums.
Sharing the files will allow survivors and victims' relatives to see true
images of documents — transportation lists, Gestapo orders, camp registers,
slave labor booklets, death books — that demonstrate their tortures and
that may have determined whether they lived or died.
On the Net:
* International Tracing Service: http://www.its-arolsen.org
* U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org
* Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org
* Institute of National Remembrance: http://www.ipn.gov.pl/wai/en/10/5
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