Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union
Soviet authorities deported German civilians from Germany and Eastern Europe to the USSR after World War II as forced laborers, while ethnic Germans living in the USSR were deported during World War II and conscripted for forced labor.
In 1940, it initiated Ostarbeiter, a massive project of enslaving the populations of Eastern European countries to use as forced labour in German factories and agricultural facilities.
The Soviet government proposed the use of German labor as reparations in 1943, and raised the issue at the Yalta Conference in February 1945.
[citation needed] The NKVD took the lead role in the deportations via its department, the Chief Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internee Affairs (GUPVI).
Recently declassified statistical data from the Soviet archives on the use of German civilian labor in the Stalin era were published in the book Against Their Will (Russian: «Не по своей воле», 2001).
Maisky's report of August 1944 proposed the employment of German civilian labor in the USSR as part of war reparations.
Consequently, 111,831 (61,375 men and 50,456 women) able-bodied adult ethnic Germans from Romania, Yugoslavia, and Hungary were deported for forced labor to the USSR.
[3] During the 1945 military campaign in Poland, the Soviet Union interned suspected Nazi party members and government officials in camps in the Soviet-occupied areas east of the Oder-Neisse line.
[4] By May 1945 the NKVD had selected for deportation to the USSR 66,152 German civilians who were considered suspected Nazi party members and government officials, as well as 89,110 able-bodied adults (mostly men) for forced labor.
For example, the records of Pauline Gölner reveal that she was born in 1926 in Wolkendorf in Transylvania, was arrested on January 15, 1945, and sent to forced labor in the coal mines of Chanchenkowo (Ukraine).
[20] The ethnic German minority in the USSR was considered a security risk by the Soviet government and they were deported during the war in order to prevent their possible collaboration with the Nazi invaders.
Life in the special settlements was harsh and severe; food was limited and the deported population was governed by strict regulations.
[25] According to J. Otto Pohl 65,599 Germans perished in the special settlements; he believes that an additional 176,352 unaccounted for persons "probably died in the labor army".
From 1953 to 1961, the Schieder commission made estimates of the numbers of German civilians who died in the expulsions and those deported to the USSR for forced labor.
The results of these West German efforts to trace the fate of those deported was detailed in the study Gesucht wird (lit.
As of 30 September 1964, the Search Service compiled information on 504,153 German civilians interned in the USSR (217,827 were still alive in 1964, 154,449 had returned home, 85,145 were reported missing, and 46,732 confirmed dead as forced laborers).
[35] Forced labor of German civilians - estimate by German Red Cross in 1964 Source of figures: Kurt W. Böhme - Gesucht wird - Die dramatische Geschichte des Suchdienstes Süddeutscher Verlag, München 1965 Page 275 Notes: These categories in the Red Cross figures for deportees are also listed above in the Russian archive statistics.
A. Reparations Deportees ("reparationsverschleppte") Ethnic German civilians conscripted for labor in the Soviet Union for damages caused by Germany during the war.
[36] E. "Forced Service" ( "Zwangsverpflichtete") -In the latter part of 1946 6,000 skilled workers mostly from the Soviet occupation zone accompanied by 20,000 family members were conscripted for work in the USSR under contract for five years.
The study estimated a total of 600,000 deaths caused by what they call 'crimes and inhumanites' in the eyes of West German law, including 200,000 in forced labor in the USSR.
[41] However, in Poland and Czechoslovakia, during the Cold war, these charges were viewed as an attempt to seek revenge and revert to pre-war borders.
The report mentioned that ethnic German citizens from pre-war Poland were considered "traitors of the nation" and sentenced to forced labor.
Dr. Kurt Horstmann of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany wrote the foreword to the study, endorsing the work of Reichling.
Source of figures: Dr. Gerhard Reichling, Die deutschen Vertriebenen in Zahlen, Teil 1, Bonn 1986 (revised edition 1995).
In October 1946 the Soviet NKVD forcibly deported from East Germany "a few hundred" selected German experts to work in the USSR.
A selected few remained in the USSR until the early 1950s including German scientists who worked in the Soviet Union on the development of ballistic missiles, Helmut Gröttrup was among this group.
Richard Overy in The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia puts total number of German POWs captured by the USSR at 2,880,000 of whom 356,000 died.
[56][57] Overmans also believed it was possible, although not provable, that 700,000 German military personnel reported missing actually died in Soviet custody;[58] Overmans estimates the "maximum" death toll of German POWs in the USSR at 1.0 million, he maintains that among those reported as missing were men who actually died as POWs.
