Country: Germany

Group: Jewish

Date Finalized: 12/4/2020

Team: Colleen Clauss (lead), Michael Demangone, Maya Shrikant, Natasha Chandra

Content Warning: slavery, genocide, concentration camps, lethal violence

Approximate Time Period: 1938-1945

There is strong and consistent evidence from reputable sources that Jewish people have been subjected to forced labor in Germany.

Currently, there are approximately 200,000 Jewish people living in Germany (Webb, 2018). After 1938, during World War II and the Nazi regime in Germany and the territories it controlled, the German government forced many civilians, prisoners of war, and people detained in concentration camps to work (Jewish Virtual Library, n.d.b; Spoerer & Fleischhacker, 2002). Jewish people experienced among the very worst treatment, forced into “less-than-slave labor” with no option of ending their service, and no ability to voice their complaints (Spoerer & Fleischhacker, 2002). Nazi Germany established over 44,000 camps including those dedicated to forced labor (The Holocaust Encyclopedia, n.d.). One of these concentration camps notorious for its brutality was Auschwitz, built in 1940, where an estimated 1.1 million Jews were sent (Webb, 2018). Forced labor included agriculture, mining, industry, and enlargement of military infrastructure, including “several ten thousands of German Jews [being] forced to work in factories, especially in Berlin” (Jewish Virtual Library, n.d. B; Spoerer & Fleischhacker, 2002). The German government’s system of forced labor included Jewish people being forced to work in, or exported from Germany to, other countries under German control, such as Poland and Ukraine (Spoerer & Fleischhacker, 2002).  Jewish people were also brought into Germany for forced labor, such as when hundreds of thousands of Jews from Hungary were brought in then selected for forced labor or killed in gas chambers (Webb, 2018). The working conditions were brutal, and were even used as an attempt to kill Jewish people (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d.). One case involved Nazi soldiers forcing emaciated prisoners to carry heavy boulders 186 steps out of a stone quarry (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d.). Jewish people were forced to work while being severely threatened by starvation and violence, because the German government was killing the Jewish people on a mass scale at the same time (Spoerer & Fleischhacker, 2002). Beginning in 1941, the Holocaust decimated the Jewish ethnic group, dwindling the Jewish population in Germany from over 500,000 people in the 1930s to 15,000 by 1945 (Minority Rights Group, n.d.). Nearly 300,000 Jews survived forced labor in Germany or German occupied territories from 1940-1944.

The data quality is rated as a 3, because detailed information was found in a scholarly article (Spoerer & Fleischhacker, 2002), a reliable source (Minority Rights Group), and many other sources.

Sources

  1. Frost, N. (2020). Horrors of Auschwitz: The Numbers Behind WWII’s Deadliest Concentration Camp – HISTORY. https://www.history.com/news/auschwitz-concentration-camp-numbers
  2. Jewish Virtual Library. (n.d. a). Germany Virtual Jewish History Tour. Retrieved November 20, 2020. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/germany-virtual-jewish-history-tour.
  3. Jewish Virtual Library (n.d. b). The Holocaust: Forced (Slave) Labor. Retrieved November 20, 2020. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/forced-labor.
  4. Minority Rights Group. (n.d.). Germany. Retrieved November 18, 2020, from https://minorityrights.org/country/germany/
  5. Spoerer, M., & Fleischhacker, J. (2002). Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany: Categories, Numbers and Survivors. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33(2), 169-204. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/16436.
  6. The Holocaust Encyclopedia. (n.d.). Nazi Camps. Retrieved November 18, 2020, from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps
  7. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, W. D. (n.d.). Forced Labor: An Overview | The Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 18, 2020, from https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/forced-labor-an-overview
  8. Webb, C. (2018). The auschwitz concentration camp : History, biographies, remembrance.    ProQuest Ebook Central https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu
  9. Wikipedia. (2020). Forced labour under German rule during World War II. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Forced_labour_under_German_rule_during_World_War_II&oldid=986492357
  10. World Jewish Congress (n.d.). Germany. Retrieved November 20, 2020. https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/about/communities/de.