Detail

The nearly 600 biographical audio and video interviews with former forced laborers in the archive “Forced Labor 1939-1945. Memories and History," commemorate the more than twenty million people who were forced to work for Nazi Germany. 

Conducted between 2005 and 2006, the interviews were part of the “Documentation of Life History Interviews with Former Slave and Forced Laborers” project, coordinated by the Institute for History and Biography at FernUniversität Hagen and funded by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”. Thirty-two project teams conducted interviews in 26 countries, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe. Most of the testimonies were given in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia.

The interviewees included slave laborers in concentration camps, prisoners of war, and civilian forced laborers. In addition to prominent survivors like Jorge Semprún, testimonies of members of "forgotten" victim groups are included, such as Romani survivors and those who were forcibly Germanized. 

A total of 341 men and 249 women were interviewed. Of those, 134 were Jewish survivors and 46 were Sinti or Roma. The interviews were conducted in 26 different languages. Most of the testimonies were transcribed, translated into German, and indexed with tables of contents, indexes, and short biographies. Along with the interviews, the collection contains 4,800 scans of personal documents, as well as historical and contemporary photographs. All materials, including the testimonies, can be accessed in the online archive, "Forced Labor 1939-1945". The online archive is available in German, English, and Russian.

The archive provides its users with advanced search tools, including a combined full-text and filter search. This feature allows users to search the fully transcribed and translated interviews for terms of their choice. An index facilitates searching for specific companies, camps, and individuals. A map illustrates the scope of Nazi forced labor in Europe. 

The online archive is accompanied by the German online learning platform, „ Lernen mit Interviews: Zwangsarbeit 1939-1945. “ (Learning with Interviews: Forced Labor 1939-1945). In collaboration with international partner organizations, additional online applications have been developed for teaching in the Czech Republic, Russia, and Poland.

Since 2009, Freie Universität Berlin has carried out the academic editing of the collection, as well as the development of the online archive and learning platforms. The Digital Interview Collections team has incorporated the archive into the "Oral History.Digital" interview platform and is safeguarding, maintaining, and regularly updating the applications. Since 2006, the team has been dedicated to digital oral history and has carried out various interview projects, in addition to the "Forced Labor 1939-1945" archive.