Nazi forced labor in the Berlin area

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French forced laborers at Siemens, Berlin 1943
14-year-old Ukrainian in the Wehrmacht repair shop, Berlin 1945
Memorial plaque church forced labor camp, Berlin-Neukölln

Nazi forced labor in the Berlin area served to maintain production there during the Second World War .

history

The illegal use of prisoners of war in Berlin began in June 1941 with the deployment of 1,673 prisoners of war of unknown nationality in armaments factories. In addition to Soviet prisoners of war, who were treated particularly badly as so-called Eastern workers and, like concentration camp prisoners, were not paid, from 1943 (declaration of war by the former ally) the Italian workers, originally recruited on a voluntary basis, were interned and used for forced labor. As military internees , they were given the same status as the Soviet workers and placed under special guard; The guidelines for the accommodation of the Italian military internees stipulated that even visits to the sanitary facilities were only allowed in the presence of a police officer.

The Siemens group (Siemens & Halske, Siemens-Schuckertwerke , Siemens-Reiniger-Werke ) particularly exploited the labor of concentration camp inmates in and around Berlin. After the construction of twenty production barracks for 800 women directly on the site of the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1942, concentration camp inmates were placed in the Siemens Kabel-Gemeinschaft (SKG) in Berlin-Gartenfeld in 1943/1944 and in the Siemens-Schuckertwerke in 1944/45 in Berlin.

From 1941, the number of forced laborers in Berlin skyrocketed. Their number, including prisoners of war, was already over 300,000 on September 1, 1944. At the end of the year there were already 350,000. The majority were citizens of the Soviet Union with 19.2 percent, followed by forced laborers from Poland with 14.5 percent and from France with 12 percent. In the Reich capital Berlin, which was the central armaments location, over 500,000 people were exploited by forced labor during the war, which corresponds to around 20 percent of all employees. The central transit camp, from which the labor office assigned workers to Berlin, was located on Nordmarkstrasse (today Fröbelstrasse ) in the Prenzlauer Berg district . The city's only labor education camp (only for men) was in Wuhlheide . Extremely hard forced labor had to be performed here (for example because of “non-compliance with the duty to work”) with the use of corporal punishment. The most famous prisoners in Wuhlheide were the athlete Werner Seelenbinder and the Berlin cathedral provost Bernhard Lichtenberg .

The parishes also used forced laborers, for example the “slaves of the church” in Berlin's Hermannstrasse , who had to carry out burials of the war dead.

In 1944, many Berlin companies relocated their production facilities to the surrounding area of ​​Berlin for fear of bomb attacks. For this reason, the number of forced laborers in Berlin no longer increased. At the end of 1944, the Siemens group, excluding its affiliated companies, employed 17,400 forced laborers of 65,400 workers, or 26.6 percent of the workforce. The Graetz Radio AG in Berlin-Treptow , Elsenstraße had indicated to replace the Jewish progressively from 1940 used in the extermination camps 1943 to removal by Russian (since June 1942), French and Dutch forced laborers. In total there were about 1100 people. While the Russian workers were considered prisoners who were also under constant surveillance at work, the Dutch forced laborers received the same piecework wages as German non-Jewish workers. In addition, they were not guarded, so they could move freely outside of working hours, whereas Graetz AG maintained its own “Russian camp” for internment at Köpenicker Landstrasse 208-218 in Berlin-Baumschulenweg . Accompanied by a guard, they were allowed, under certain conditions, to be "taken out" in groups of up to five people.

Between 1939 and 1945, there were over 1000 warehouse locations in Berlin within the Berlin motorway ring . Most of the camps had room for 100 to 200 people. The two largest camps with up to 3000 people were in Adlershof and Falkensee . In addition to community camps operated by the German Labor Front , there were various in-house camps. In Berlin's metalworking industry, the large production facilities of Siemens in Siemensstadt and AEG in Treptow ( Apparate-Werke ), as well as many small and medium-sized companies, most of which were located in Kreuzberg , benefited from massive forced labor during the Second World War .

In the Salamander shoe factory , women were mainly used as slave labor.

Appreciation

In 1997, the memorial plaque The Secret of Redemption is Remembrance was placed on one of the facades of the courtyard of the Siemens administration building in Berlin . The mosaic created by the artists Beate Passow and Andreas von Weizsäcker shows a Siemens express train (popular name for a tube receiver manufactured in 1924 ) in memory of the Siemens forced laborers against a broken background .

See also

literature

General (selection):

  • John Authers: The Victim's Fortune. Inside the Epic Battle over the Debts of the Holocaust . Harper Perennial, New York 2003, ISBN 0-06-093687-8 . (English)
  • Klaus Barwig u. a. (Ed.): Forced Labor in the Church. Compensation, reconciliation and historical processing . Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-926297-83-2 .
  • Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (ed.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 9: Labor education camps, ghettos, youth protection camps, police detention camps, special camps, gypsy camps, forced labor camps. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 (on the "special" bearings).
  • Ulrich Herbert (Hrsg.): Europe and the 'Reich use'. Foreign civil workers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates in Germany 1938–1945 . Essen 1991.
  • Ulrich Herbert (Ed.): Foreign workers. Politics and practice of the "deployment of foreigners" in the war economy of the Third Reich . New edition, Bonn 1999.
  • Jochen-Christoph Kaiser : Forced Labor in Diakonie and Church 1939–1945 . Kohlhammer-Verlag, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-17-018347-8 .
  • Hans-Eckhardt Kannapin: Economy under pressure. Comments and analyzes on the legal and political responsibility of the German economy under the rule of National Socialism in World War II, especially with regard to the use and treatment of foreign workers and concentration camp prisoners in German industrial and armaments companies. Deutsche Industrieverlags-Gesellschaft, Cologne 1966
  • Felicja Karay: Women in Forced Labor Camps. In: Dalia Ofer, Leonore J. Weitzman (Ed.): Women in the Holocaust. New Haven / London 1998, ISBN 0-300-07354-2 , pp. 285-309.
  • Gabriele Lotfi: Aliens in the Reich deployment. An introduction to the subject of Nazi forced labor . In: Sheets for German and international politics . Issue 7/2000, pp. 818-822, ISSN  0006-4416 .
  • Alexander von Plato , Almut Leh , Christoph Thonfeld (eds.): Hitler's slaves. Biographical analyzes of forced labor in an international comparison. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna / Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-77753-3 . (Almost 600 former victims from 27 countries were interviewed. Review. In: FAZ . November 24, 2008, p. 8).
  • Mark Spoerer: Forced labor under the swastika. Foreign civilian workers, prisoners of war and prisoners in the German Reich and in occupied Europe 1938–1945 . Stuttgart / Munich 2001.
  • Carola Sachse (eds.), Bernhard Strebel , Jens-Christian Wagner : Forced labor for research institutions of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. 1939-1945. An overview (= Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism preprints… = Research program History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in the National Socialist era. Issue 11) (PDF; 620 kB), ed. on behalf of the Presidential Commission of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science e. V., Berlin: Research program "History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society under National Socialism", 2003.

Regional (selection):

  • Helga Bories-Salawa: French in the "imperial deployment". Deportation, forced labor, everyday life. Experiences and memories of prisoners of war and civilian workers . Lang publishing house, Frankfurt am Main / Bern / New York 1996.
  • Felicja Karay: Death Comes in Yellow - Skarzysko-Kamienna Slave Labor Camp. Amsterdam 1996.
  • Oliver Kersten: Hostels as marshalling yards. New research results on the use of foreign and forced labor in diaconal institutions in the Berlin-Brandenburg region during World War II. In: Erich Schuppan (ed.): Slave in your hands. Forced labor in church and diakonia Berlin-Brandenburg. Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-88981-155-8 , pp. 251-278.
  • Bernhard Strebel: "Damned are my hands": Forced labor for the German arms industry in the satellite camps of the Ravensbrück concentration camp. In: Contemporary history regional: messages from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Volume 4.2000, 1, ISSN  1434-1794 , pp. 4-8.

Victim groups (selection):

  • Preserving memories: slave and forced laborers of the Third Reich from Poland 1939–1945. Catalog for the exhibition of the same name in the Documentation Center Berlin-Schöneweide. Warsaw / Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-83-922446-0-8 .
  • Total deployment: Forced labor for the Czech population for the Third Reich. Documentation and catalog for the exhibition of the same name in the Documentation Center Nazi Forced Labor Berlin-Schöneweide. Prague / Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-80-254-1799-7 .
  • Johannes-Dieter Steinert: Deportation and Forced Labor. Polish and Soviet children in National Socialist Germany and occupied Eastern Europe 1939–1945. Klartext Verlag, Essen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8375-0896-3 ; review

Contemporary witness reports (selection):

Legal aspects of the compensation issue (selection):

Web links

Commons : Nazi Forced Labor  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Tanja von Fransecky: Forced Labor in the Berlin Metal Industry 1939 to 1945 (PDF; 453 kB), p. 12 f.
  2. ↑ Tanja von Fransecky: Forced Labor in the Berlin Metal Industry 1939 to 1945 (PDF; 453 kB), p. 17.
  3. ↑ Tanja von Fransecky: Forced Labor in the Berlin Metal Industry 1939 to 1945 (PDF; 453 kB), p. 17 f.
  4. ↑ Tanja von Fransecky: Forced Labor in the Berlin Metal Industry 1939 to 1945 (PDF; 453 kB), p. 32.
  5. ↑ Tanja von Fransecky: Forced Labor in the Berlin Metal Industry 1939 to 1945 (PDF; 453 kB), p. 67 f.
  6. ↑ Tanja von Fransecky: Forced Labor in the Berlin Metal Industry 1939 to 1945 (PDF; 453 kB), p. 6.
  7. ↑ Vera Friedländer reports on her forced labor at Salamander in Berlin.
  8. ↑ a b 100 years of administration building - Siemens AG. In: vg100.de. August 1, 2014, accessed May 27, 2017 .
  9. ↑ An early justification for forced labor from an official industrial publisher in the Federal Republic of Germany. The author names a "badly shaped National Socialism" as the cause. The protagonists, u. a. He describes Todt, Speer and many others as "opponents" of forced labor and as "humanitarian". List of names of industrialists, etc. p. 255.