Ostarbeiter

"Let's do agricultural work in Germany. Report immediately to your Vogt" from recruiting post

Initially a recruiting campaign was launched in January 1942 by Fritz Sauckel for workers to go to Germany. "On January 28 the first special train will leave for Germany with hot meals in Kiev, Zdolbunov and Przemyśl", offered an announcement. The first train was full when it departed from Kiev on January 22.

The advertising continued in the following months. "Germany calls you! Go to Beautiful Germany! 100,000 Ukrainians are already working in free Germany. What about you?" ran a Kiev newspaper ad on March 3, 1942. Word got back however, of the sub-human slave conditions that Ukrainians met in Germany and the campaign failed to attract sufficient volunteers. Forced recruitment was implemented,[7] although propaganda still depicted them as volunteers.[11]

With the news about the terrible conditions many Ostarbeiter faced in Germany the pool of volunteers soon dried up. As a result, the Germans were forced to resort to mass round-ups, often using the ploy of targeting large gatherings such as church congregations and crowds at sporting events, with entire groups simply marched off at gunpoint to waiting cattle trucks and deported to Germany.[12]

A Russian-language Nazi poster reading "I live with a German family and feel just fine. Come to Germany to help with household chores."

One special category was that of young women recruited to act as nannies; Hitler argued that many women would like to have children, and many of them were restricted by the lack of domestic help.[13] (This was one of many efforts made to promote the birth rate.)[14] Since the nannies would be in close company with German children as well as in a position where they might be sexually exploited, they were required to be suitable for Germanization.[15] Himmler spoke of thus winning back German blood and benefiting the women, too, who would have a social rise through working in Germany and even the chance to marry there.[13] They could be assigned only to families with many children who would properly train the nannies as well.[13] These assignments were carried out by the NS-Frauenschaft.[16] Originally, this recruitment was carried out only in the annexed territories of Poland, but the lack of women who passed screening extended it to all of Poland, and also to occupied territories in USSR.[15]

Within Germany Ostarbeiter lived either in private camps owned and managed by the large companies, or in special camps guarded by privately paid police services known as the Werkschutz.[17] They worked an average of 12 hours a day, six days a week. They were paid approximately 30% of German workers' wages; however, most of the money went toward food, clothing and board. The labor authorities, the RSHA Arbeitskreis,[17] complained that many firms viewed these former Soviet civilian workers as "civilian prisoners", treated them accordingly, and paid no wages at all to them.[1] Those who received pay got specially printed paper money and savings stamps, which they could use only for the purchase of a limited number of items in special camp stores. By law they were given worse food rations than other forced labor groups. Starvation rations and primitive accommodation were given to these unfortunates in Germany.

The Ostarbeiter were restricted to their compounds, in some cases labor camps. Being ethnically Slavic, they were classified by German authorities as the Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), who could be beaten, terrorized, and killed for their transgressions. Those who tried to escape were hanged where other workers could see their bodies. Leave without authorization or escape was punished by death.[2] The Nazis issued a ban on sexual relations between Germans and the Easterners.[18] On 7 December 1942 Himmler called for any "unauthorized sexual intercourse" to be punishable by death.[19] In accordance with these new racial laws all sexual relations, even those that did not result in pregnancy, were severely punished as Rassenschande (racial pollution).[20] During the war, hundreds of Polish and Russian men were executed for their sexual relations with German women,[21][22] even though the main offenders by far – wrote Ulrich Herbert – were the French and Italian civilian workers who were not prohibited from social contacts with them.[17]

Rape of female Ostarbeiter was extremely common and led to tens of thousands of pregnancies caused by rape.[5] The victims began giving so many unwanted births that hundreds of special Nazi birthing centres for foreign workers had to be created in order to dispose of their infants.[23][24]

Many Ostarbeiter died when Allied bombing raids targeted the factories where they worked and the German authorities refused to allow them into bomb shelters. Many also perished because the German authorities ordered that "they should be worked to death".

Nazi authorities attempted to reproduce such conditions on farms, ordering farmers to integrate the workers into their workforce while enforcing total social separation, including not permitting them to eat at the same table, but this proved far more difficult to enforce.[25] Sexual relationships in particular were able to take place despite efforts to raise German women's "racial consciousness".[26] When Germany's military situation worsened, these workers' conditions often improved as the farmers tried to protect themselves against a defeat.[27]

Native German workers served as foremen and supervisors over the forced labour in factories, and therefore no solidarity developed between foreigners and German nationals. The German workers became accustomed to inequalities raised by racism against the workers and became indifferent to their plight.[28]

Ukrainians from Cherkashchyna depart to Nazi Germany to serve as labor force, 1942

During the German occupation of Central and Eastern Europe in World War II (1941–44) over 3 million people were taken to Germany as Ostarbeiter. Some estimates put the number up to 5.5 million.[2] Between two-thirds and three-quarters of the over 3,000,000 Ostarbeiter were Ukrainians. Prof. Kondufor's statistic is that 2,244,000 Ukrainians were forced into slave labor in Germany during World War II. Another statistic puts the total at 2,196,166 for Ukrainian Ostarbeiter slaves in Germany (Dallin, p. 452). Both of these statistics probably exclude the several hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from Halychyna, so a final total could be about 2.5 million.[7]

There were slightly more female than male Ostarbeiter. They were employed in agriculture, mining, manufacturing armaments, metal production, and railroads.[7] Ostarbeiter were initially sent to intermediate camps, where laborers were picked out for their assignments directly by representatives of labor-starved companies. Ford-Werke in Cologne and Opel in Russelsheim and Brandenburg each employed thousands of such Ostarbeiter at their plants.

Some Ostarbeiter worked for private firms, although many were employed in the factories making armaments. These factories were prime targets for Allied bombing. The Ostarbeiter were considered to be quite productive and efficient. Males were thought to be the equivalent of 60-80% of a German worker, and women — 90-100%. Two million Ukrainians worked mostly in the armaments factories including the V-2 rocket factory at Peenemünde.[7]

According to Alexander Dallin, as of December 1944, the numbers of deployment were such:[29]

To prevent Rassenschande (violation of German racial laws by the native Germans), the farmers were given propaganda leaflets about miscegenation, which were completely ineffective.[30] The rampant sexual abuse of Polish and Soviet female Ostarbeiters at the hands of their overseers led to tens of thousands of unwanted births.[5] A staggering 80 percent of rapes occurred on the farms where the Polish girls worked.[31] The newborns were secretly euthanized in Nazi birthing centres.[23] At Arbeitslagers the infants were killed on site.[31] The Western factory workers had brothels. Easterners did not. They were supposed to be recruited in equal numbers of men and women, so brothels would not be needed.[30] Female labourers were always housed in separate barracks. Nevertheless, they were suspected by the SS of "cheating their way out of work" by conceiving.[23] The earlier policy of sending them home to give birth,[2] was replaced by the Reichsführer-SS in 1943 with a special abortion decree. Contrary to the Nazi law against German abortions, the Ostarbeiter women were usually forced to abort.[32]

Occasionally, when the female worker and the baby's father were "of good blood" (for example, Norwegian), the child might prove "racially valuable." In such cases, the parentage was investigated and both parents tested. If they passed, the woman would be permitted to give birth, and the child was removed for Germanization.[32] If the woman was found particularly suitable, she might be placed at a Lebensborn institution.[32] However, when the born children did not pass, they were put in the Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte facilities, where up to 90 percent of them would die a torturous death due to calculated abandonment.[23][33]

In some rural areas, the authorities found that the German farm-wives were inclined to care for children born to their workers, along with their own children.[34] Attempts were made to segregate these children and use ruthless propaganda to establish that if a worker of "alien blood" gave birth in Germany, it meant immediate and total separation from the child.[35] Repeated efforts were made to propagate Volkstum (racial consciousness) in order to prevent Rassenschande between Germans and foreign workers,[20] nevertheless, the arrival of trains with Polish girls in German towns and villages usually turned into sex slave markets.[36]

As a result of their abusive treatment Ostarbeiter suffered from high levels of psychological trauma, and those who were admitted to psychiatric hospitals were often the victims of abuse and murder. The Nazi regime also sanctioned the use of Ostarbeiter in medical experiments.

On September 6, 1944 the Reichsminister of the Interior ordered the establishment of special units for Ostarbeiter in several psychiatric hospitals in the Reich. The reason given was: "With the considerable number of Ostarbeiter who have been brought to the German Reich as a labour force, their admission into German psychiatric hospitals as mentally ill patients has become more frequent ... With the shortage of space in German hospitals, it is irresponsible to treat these ill people, who in the foreseeable future will not be fit for work, for a prolonged period in German institutions. "The exact number of Ostarbeiter killed in these psychiatric institutions is as yet not known. 189 Ostarbeiter were admitted to the Ostarbeiter unit of the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Kaufbeuren; 49 died as a result of the starvation diet, or from deadly injections.[37]