Living Conditions
The living conditions of forced labourers varied greatly and depended on many different factors. To begin with, it mattered greatly what group they belonged to. Concentration camp prisoners suffered far worse living and working conditions than civilian forced labourers. The Nazis’ racist ideology also meant that it mattered greatly where people came from. Western Europeans were fundamentally treated better than people from Eastern Europe.
Concentration camp prisoners
Concentration camp prisoners were housed in camps guarded by the SS. They only left the concentration camps to work and were guarded by SS overseers on the way to and from work. Living conditions in the concentration camps were catastrophic, and there was a lack of adequate food. The concentration camps were sites of cruel torture by the SS and the Gestapo. Many of those interned died as a result of malnutrition, hard physical labour and a lack of medical care, or were murdered by guards.
Prisoners of the concentration camps were used for extremely dangerous and hazardous work in mines or quarries, building roads or underground mining, with no regard whatsoever for their health. People who were deemed “unfit for work” were placed in segregated sections of the concentration camps, where they were given hardly any food, and as a result, many died there.
Prisoners of war
Prisoners of war (POWs) were held in specially set-up camps known as Stalags. These camps were guarded by members of the Wehrmacht. Prisoners of war were sent from these camps to work in labour detachments in the surrounding area.
Living conditions in the Stalags varied according to where the POWs came from. While Western European POWs were not allowed to leave the camps and were often forced to work, the Red Cross had access to the Stalags. The POWs were able to organise leisure activities and the food rations allocated to them were usually adequate.
The living conditions of Soviet prisoners of war, on the other hand, were miserable, and the mortality among them was extremely high. Most of them were not paid at all for the work they were forced to do in the armaments factories. The food rations set for them by the Nazi administration were barely sufficient to ensure their survival. More than half of all Soviet POWs died in German captivity. Living conditions for Italian military internees were similarly catastrophic. For some time they were only allocated the same low food rations as Soviet prisoners of war.
Civilian forced labourers
The living and working conditions of civilian forced labourers varied enormously, depending on where they worked and where they came from. Those forced into domestic or agricultural work lived in the household or on the farm where they worked. As a result, their situation was very much dependent on the treatment they received from their employers. Some of the forced labourers who were housed on a farm have positive memories, while others report (sexualised) violence or particularly hard physical labour. They were often the only foreign workers on a farm and were kept segregated from other forced labourers.
By contrast, most of the forced labourers who worked in the factories in the big cities were regarded as an anonymous mass. Their individual stories were of little interest to their employers. They were housed in collective accommodation, initially in existing buildings such as large halls or gymnasiums; from 1942 onwards, more and more barrack camps were built to house them. These camps were often temporary in nature, consisting mostly of simple wooden buildings only affording the forced labourers inadequate protection from the cold or air raids. Many collective accommodation camps had their own washrooms, while others had no toilets or washing facilities.
People were usually segregated by gender and nationality. There were separate areas for different groups. Polish and Eastern European people were housed in camps or barracks, surrounded by fences and guarded. They were usually only allowed to leave their camps to go to work, and had to wear cloth badges that clearly marked them as forced labourers.
Forced labourers from France, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Belgium, on the other hand, were not as restricted as the Ostarbeiter and Poles, and were allowed to move relatively freely in towns and cities, go to the cinema, play sports or even earn extra money or a meal by doing odd jobs.
The Allied bombing of German towns and cities affected all groups of forced labourers equally. Unlike Germans, they were most often not allowed access to the air-raid shelters and public bunkers and were particularly vulnerable. In the camps, their only protection usually were the so-called “splinter protection trenches”.
The food supply for civilian forced labourers was regulated by the Nazi authorities. Again, people from Eastern Europe and Poland were discriminated against. It was almost impossible for them to survive on the rations they were given. It was only when companies complained that people were too weak to work that the rations were increased. But even then, many of the forced labourers suffered from malnutrition and starvation. The consequences of this difference in treatment were dramatic. The mortality among Eastern European forced labourers was much higher than among those from Western Europe.
Further Reading:
Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz. Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und Häftlinge im Deutschen Reich und im besetzten Europa 1939-1945, Stuttgart/München 2001.
Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter. Politik und Praxis des "Ausländer-Einsatzes" in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reiches, Berlin/Bonn 1999.