The situation of Polish workers in the Reich was particularly bad. In the countryside, as the secret observers of the exiled German Social Democrats reported in February 1940, villagers were giving assistance to Polish labourers in all sorts of ways. Especially in eastern areas, Germans had been used to Poles as seasonal migrant labourers for many decades. The regime was appalled by such fraternization, and responded with propaganda detailing the atrocities supposedly committed by Poles and presenting evidence of their alleged racial inferiority and the threat that this allegedly posed.
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Building on the experience of dealing with Czech workers drafted into the Reich after March 1939,
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the Nazi regime, following discussions between Hitler, Himmler and G̈ring, issued a series of decrees on 8 March 1940 to ensure that the racial inferiority of the Poles was clearly recognized in Germany. Polish workers in Germany were issued with leaflets warning them that they risked being sent to a concentration camp if they slacked at work or attempted industrial action. They were paid lower wages than their German counterparts doing the same work, they were subject to special taxes, and they got no bonuses and no sick pay. Polish workers had to wear a badge designating them as such - a forerunner of the ‘Jewish star’ introduced the following year. They had to be housed in separate barracks and to be kept clear of German cultural institutions and places of amusement such as bars, inns and restaurants. They were not to use the same churches as German Catholics. Sexual liaisons with German women were to be prevented by recruiting equal numbers of both sexes from Poland, or alternatively where this was not possible by establishing brothels for the men. Polish workers were not allowed to use public transport. They were subject to a curfew. Sexual intercourse with a German was punishable by death for the Polish man involved, on the personal orders of Hitler himself. Any German women who had entered into a relationship with a Polish worker were to be publicly named and shamed, among other things by having their heads shaved. If they were not condemned to a prison sentence by a court, they were to be sent to a concentration camp anyway. The sexual double standard in operation under the Nazi regime ensured that similar punishments were not decreed for German men who had sexual relations with Polish women. During the first phase of the war, these decrees were widely distributed to local authorities and acted upon in a number of places, sometimes as a result of denunciations from members of the public, although ritual acts of humiliation such as the shaving of German women’s heads also caused widespread popular disquiet.
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A typical incident occurred on 24 August 1940 in Gotha, when a seventeen-year-old Polish worker was publicly hanged without trial in front of fifty Poles (who were forced to attend) and 150 Germans (who attended voluntarily). His offence was to have been caught having sexual intercourse with a German prostitute. Such incidents became more common from the autumn of 1940 onwards.
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In every way possible, the Poles were to be kept apart from German society. Small wonder, therefore, that many absconded, and that resistance to recruitment in Poland itself spread rapidly.
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Soviet prisoners of war working in Germany were treated even more harshly than their Polish counterparts.
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At a meeting held on 7 November 1941, G̈ring laid down the basic guidelines:
The place of German skilled workers is in the armaments industry. Shovelling dirt and quarrying stones are not their jobs - that is what the Russian is there for . . . No contact with German population, in particular no ‘solidarity’. German worker always basically the boss of the Russians . . .
Food provision
a matter for the Four-Year Plan. Russians to arrange own food (cats, horses, etc.). Clothing, housing, maintenance a bit better than what they had back home, where some still live in caves . . . Supervision: members of the Armed Forces during work, as well as German workers, acting as auxiliary police . . . Range of punishment: from cutting food rations to execution by firing squad; generally nothing in between.
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Part of the intention of these regulations was to co-opt the German working class into the ideology of the regime, from which many of its members still remained distant, by enrolling them as members of the master race in their dealings with the Russians. The broader compromise they represented, between the exterminatory racist impulses of the SS on the one hand, and the need for labour on the other, was expressed here as elsewhere by conscripting the supposedly subhuman as workers, but continuing to treat them as subhuman by denying them decent living conditions and imposing on them a draconian regime of supervision and punishment. On 20 February 1942, after weeks of negotiation, Heydrich signed a draft decree ordering that Soviet prisoners of war and forced labourers, who - it was claimed - had been brought up under Bolshevism and were therefore inveterate enemies of National Socialism, would be segregated from Germans as far as possible, made to wear a special badge, and punished by hanging if they engaged in sexual intercourse with German women.
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Whether they had come voluntarily or not, Soviet forced labourers were all treated the same: herded into barracks, subjected to the humiliating rituals of delousing, and fed on bread and watery soup. ‘We’re no better off here than pigs,’ complained two young Russian women who had come voluntarily and were therefore allowed to write to their relatives at home early in 1942. ‘. . . It’s like being in jail, and the gate is shut . . . We’re not allowed to go out anywhere . . . We get up at 5 a.m. and go to work at seven. We finish at 5 p.m.’
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Tuberculosis and similar diseases were rife.
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Employers soon began to complain that the eastern workers were so malnourished that more than 10 per cent were absent every day due to sickness and the rest were barely fit to work. Some women collapsed from hunger as they worked. Reports of their treatment reached their friends and relatives at home and led to a rapid decline in the number of volunteers. Rosenberg’s Eastern Ministry demanded an improvement in their treatment; and when on 13 March 1942 Speer reported on the situation to Hitler, the Leader ordered that the civilian Russian workers should not be kept confined and that they should be given better wages, performance bonuses and improved rations. On the other hand, any insubordination was punishable by death. On 9 April 1942 these orders found expression in a new set of regulations which Sauckel immediately put into effect, dressing them up in brutal rhetoric designed to reassure Nazi ideologues that racially inferior Russians were not being treated in a humanitarian spirit. If they disobeyed orders, he said, they should be handed over to the Gestapo and ‘hanged, shot!’ If they were now being given decent rations, it was because ‘even a machine can only perform if I give it the fuel, lubricating oil and care it needs’. Otherwise the Russians would become a burden on the German people or even a threat to their health.
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Such rhetoric was able to overcome the hostility of the SS to the recruitment of Soviet civilians. However, it was regarded as vital for political purposes that their wages and conditions were not substantially improved at a time when rations for Germans were being reduced. This would have caused hostile reactions among the German population. Their standard of living in the east had in any case been lower, it was argued. On the other hand, it was just as important not to make their wages so low that employers would dismiss German workers in order to take them on. To prevent this, employers were made to pay a special surtax on eastern workers. And to improve work-rates, the workers were paid piece-rates and productivity bonuses, especially when it was realized that Stalin’s forced industrialization programme of the 1930s had equipped many of them with skills badly needed in German industry. Despite limited improvements of this kind, increasing numbers of them were now drafted. Sauckel nevertheless found it necessary to remind local Nazi officials in September 1942 that ‘flogged, half-starved and dead Russians do not mine coal for us, they are totally useless for making iron and steel’.
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By the end of 1942, therefore, foreign workers were becoming vital for industry as well as agriculture in Germany. At the same time, however, the SS and the law enforcement and Party agencies were becoming increasingly concerned about what they saw as the security threat posed by the presence of enormous numbers of men and women from conquered countries in the cities and towns of Germany and were trying contain it by any means possible. With the agreement of the Reich Security Head Office, Martin Bormann set up a special surveillance operation, with units of reliable Party members, ex-soldiers, SS and SA men, to monitor foreign workers, and report them if they broke regulations by, for example, using public transport, visiting bars, or riding bicycles.
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Not only were conditions poor for these workers, security was also in practice very lax, despite draconian punishments for infractions of the rules. In April 1942, as Sauckel’s programme of importing foreign labour was getting under way, just over 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war and civilian workers escaped from their camps and hostels; three months later the figure had multiplied more than tenfold. In August 1942 the Gestapo despairingly predicted there would be at least another 30,000 escapes by the end of the year. Even if their claim to be recapturing some three-quarters of the escapees was correct, the situation was clearly spiralling out of control. Taking charge of the situation the following month, Gestapo chief Heinrich M̈ller had road-blocks and cordons set up all over the country, instituted checkpoints at railway stations and posted men in inner cities to check the papers of suspicious-looking pedestrians. Thus the mass influx of foreign labourers was now having a drastic effect on the lives of ordinary Germans, as police checks and controls became more intrusive than ever before. There were so many foreign workers in Hamburg by the spring of 1943, Luise Solmitz noted in her diary, that there was ‘a confused babel of languages wherever you hear people speaking’.
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In the meantime, Fr.[iedrich Solmitz] saw a miserable procession of foreign workers in Ostmark Street: blonde girls, young people, amongst them unmistakeable Asiatics, old people, staggering under their burden, without an eastern smile, loaded down with their meagre possessions, close to dying from exhaustion. ‘Get down off the pavement, you bandits!’
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Such sympathy was not uncommon, even though, as Luise Solmitz’s reference to ‘Asiatics’ suggests, German people frequently felt a sense of racial superiority over Soviet prisoners and forced labourers.
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When, a few months later, he gave some food to a starving forced labourer, Friedrich Solmitz was denounced anonymously to the police and arrested by the Gestapo; he was lucky to escape with nothing more than a warning.
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III
A major reason for the mass recruitment of foreign labour to the German arms industry lay in the fact that, for a variety of reasons, the regime did not bring a sufficient number of German women into the workforce. The possibilities here were indeed rather limited. For many decades, women’s participation in the workforce had been much greater in Germany than in the more advanced industrial economy of Britain. By 1939 just over half of all women between the ages of fifteen and sixty in Germany were in work, compared to only a quarter in the UK. Thanks to a considerable effort, the British participation rate increased to 41 per cent by 1944; but it never reached that of Germany. Women’s share of the German labour force was also greater than the equivalent in the USA, which stood at 26 per cent. The basic reason was that the small farms so characteristic of many agricultural regions in Germany depended heavily on female labour, the more so as men departed for the front or were sucked into the munitions industry. In 1939, no fewer than 6 million German women worked on farms, compared to a mere 100,000 in Britain. As men were drafted into the army, or into arms production, the proportion of women in the native German agricultural labour force increased from 55 per cent in 1939 to 67 per cent in 1944; such work was a vital part of war production, and the women engaged in it were helped at crucial times such as the harvest months by the drafting-in of additional temporary female labour, involving, for example, nearly 950,000 women in the summer of 1942. Above and beyond this, hundreds of thousands of women worked as unpaid family assistants on farms or in shops. 14 million women were in employment by 1941, constituting 42 per cent of the native workforce (there were already substantial numbers of foreign women workers in Germany before the war, and their numbers increased too). How much higher could the rate go?
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Economic managers considered that even with the most vigorous efforts to mobilize women for war production, it would not be possible to recruit more than about 1.4 million extra pairs of hands in this way. This was a mere fraction of the numbers actually needed.
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When the war began. Germany actually experienced a fall in female employment as half a million women left the labour market between May 1939 and May 1941. This was largely because of cutbacks in the textile, footwear and consumer goods industries in general, which employed very large numbers of women. Some 250,000 women workers had been transferred from such areas into war industries by June 1940. Between May 1939 and May 1942 the number of women working in producer goods industries rose from 760,000 to just over 1.5 million, while in the consumer goods industries it fell from just over 1.6 million to just under 1.3 million. The German Labour Front therefore lobbied strongly for an improvement in conditions for women workers in order to attract more to the arms industry. In May 1942 it succeeded in getting an increase in government funding for crèches for married women workers, and an improved allowance for women workers for the weeks before and after they gave birth, as well as new restrictions on the working hours of expectant and breast-feeding mothers. But the effect of such inducements was more than countered by the generous allowances provided to the wives and widows of men on active service; in some cases these added up to as much as 85 per cent of the men’s wages in their previous civilian occupations. Hitler himself was also personally opposed to the conscription of German women into the war industries because he thought working in munitions factories might damage their childbearing prospects or indeed discourage them from having children altogether. He personally vetoed the idea of conscripting German women between the ages of forty-five and fifty for labour service in November 1943, declaring that this would affect their ability to look after their husbands and families; the previous year, he had also intervened to try to ensure that German women who volunteered for war-related employment were given relatively undemanding office jobs. Mobilizing women with young children was not considered acceptable in any belligerent country, and in any case by 1944 more than 3.5 million such women in Germany were in part-time jobs, which was four times the number in the UK. More fundamentally, perhaps, Hitler was obsessed, as always, with the precedent, as he saw it, of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ that he considered had caused Germany’s defeat in 1918. Women on the home front had been discontented because they had resented being forced into poorly paid, dangerous and exhausting factory work, and some had taken part in the strikes that Hitler thought had undermined morale on the home front. Inadequate welfare support had led women to take part in food riots and spread anti-war sentiment among the population more widely. He was determined that was not going to happen in the Second World War.
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