The Germans started deporting civilians at the beginning of the war and began doing so at unprecedented levels following Operation Barbarossa in 1941.

These workers were often denied wages; when they did get paid, they received payment in a special currency which could only be used to buy specific products at the camps where they lived.

The Gastarbeitnehmer, the so-called "guest workers" from Germanic countries, Scandinavia, Romania and Italy, had the highest status.

Following the mobilization of men into its massive armies, the country faced a shortage of labour in support of its war industries.

To help overcome this shortage, Göring decreed to bring in people from the territories seized during Operation Barbarossa in Central and Eastern Europe.

By 1944, the policy turned into mass abductions of virtually anyone to fulfill the labour needs of the Organisation Todt among other similar projects; 40,000 to 50,000 Polish children aged 10 to 14 were kidnapped by the German occupational forces and transported to Germany proper as slave labourers during the so-called Heuaktion.

hay operation) was an acronym for allegedly homeless, parentless and unhoused children gathered in lieu of their guardians.

[8][13] After arriving in Germany, the children were handed over to Reich Labour Service or the Junkers aircraft works.

"On January 28 the first special train will leave for Germany with hot meals in Kiev, Zdolbuniv and Przemyśl", offered an announcement.

Word got back however, of the sub-human slave conditions that Ukrainians met in Germany and the campaign failed to attract sufficient volunteers.

[15] When the news about the terrible conditions many Ostarbeiter faced in Germany came back to Ukraine, the pool of volunteers dried up.

The Germans resorted to mass round-ups, often 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.

[18] 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.

Being ethnically Slavic, they were classified by German authorities as the Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), who could be beaten, terrorized, and killed for their transgressions.

[23] During the war, hundreds of Polish and Russian men were executed for their sexual relations with German women,[24][25] 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.

[31] During the German occupation of Central and Eastern Europe in World War II (1941–44) over three million people were taken to Germany as Ostarbeiter.

Kondufor wrote that 2,244,000 Ukrainians were forced into slave labor in Germany during World War II.

[11] Ostarbeiter were initially sent to intermediate camps, where laborers were picked out for their assignments directly by representatives of labor-starved companies.

[34] The rampant sexual abuse of Polish and Soviet female Ostarbeiters at the hands of their overseers led to tens of thousands of unwanted births.

[26] The earlier policy of sending them home to give birth,[6] was replaced by the Reichsführer-SS in 1943 with a special abortion decree.

[36] Occasionally, when the female worker and the baby's father were "of good blood" (for example, Norwegian), the child might prove "racially valuable."

[36] 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.

[38] 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.

On September 6, 1944 the Reichsminister of the Interior ordered the establishment of special units for Ostarbeiter in several psychiatric hospitals in the Reich.

[41] After the war many of the Ostarbeiter were initially placed in DP (displaced person) camps from which they were then moved to Kempten for processing and returned to their country of origin, primarily the USSR.

Those in the French and British zones of occupation were forced to return under the terms of the Yalta Agreement, which stated that "Citizens of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia were to be handed over to their respective countries, regardless of their consent".

As a result, many jobs were off-limits to anyone unlucky enough to carry such a status, and during periods of repression former slave labourers would often be ostracised by the wider Soviet community.

Many victims have testified that since the war they have suffered a lifetime of abuse and suspicion from their fellow countrymen, many of whom have accused them of being traitors who helped the Germans and lived comfortably in the Third Reich while Ukraine burned.

[11] Some Ostarbeiter survived the war and were forced to emigrate to the countries outside Europe, primarily to the United States, although a handful also made it to Argentina, Australia, Canada, and Brazil.

In comparison, Ukrainians from western Ukraine and the Baltic region were not forced to return to the Soviet Union, because the UK did not recognize those territories as part of the USSR.