Forced labor. The Germans, the forced laborers and the war

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The exhibition Forced Labor. The Germans, the Forced Laborers and the War is the first in public space to tell the entire story of this collective National Socialist crime and its consequences after 1945 in the Federal Republic of Germany . It was opened in 2010 in the Jewish Museum Berlin . The patron of the exhibition is the German President Joachim Gauck . The exhibition was developed by employees of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and funded by the “ Remembrance, Responsibility and Future ” Foundation (EVZ). The curators of the exhibition are Jens-Christian Wagner and Rikola Gunnar Lüttgenau. Jens Imig, Stefan Rothert and Birgit Schlegel are the artistic directors.

The importance of the exhibition lies in the fact that, according to a survey published by the Foundation EVZ in mid-September 2010, the extent of the various forms of forced labor during National Socialism was still greatly underestimated by most Germans.

The exhibition concept

The exhibition concept wanted to present the history of Nazi forced labor comprehensively. 20 million people from almost every country in Europe were exploited for the German warfare and to secure the living standards of the Germans. The forced labor of non-Germans took place in labor camps , e.g. B. the Organization Todt under the Reich Ministry for Armaments and Ammunition, or in concentration camps of the SS ( SS Economic and Administrative Main Office ) in the occupied countries or, from 1942, to an increasing extent directly in the area of ​​National Socialist Germany : in armaments factories or other branches of industry , but also on construction sites and in agriculture. Many Germans therefore met forced laborers almost everywhere. The foreign women, children and men had very different legal status as civil workers in forced labor: prisoners of war , concentration camp prisoners , prisoners of police and “labor education camps”, were Jewish forced laborers or Sinti and Roma . In addition, visitors can look at examples of the racist and ideological roots of National Socialist forced labor; The key words are: “master race”, work as a means of degrading people to work as an instrument of destruction , forced labor as a mass phenomenon, the relationships between Germans - forced laborers and the massacres of forced laborers at the end of the war.

The history of National Socialist forced labor thus becomes recognizable as a social crime. The beneficiaries were large (armaments) companies as well as millions of craftsmen, farmers and church institutions. The exhibition does not want to speak of collective guilt. There were also (usually secret) concern, the added piece of potato stuck, even refusal or resistance (z. B. Border Crossing ).

The core of the exhibition are 60 representative case histories that are intended to make the complex subject three-dimensional. They were each researched in a large number of archives across Europe specifically for the exhibition. Examples include the degrading work of politically persecuted people in Chemnitz , the labor camps in Munich , the slave labor of Jews in occupied Poland, and the exploitation on a farm in Lower Austria. The representative character of the case histories is also intended to make clear the radicalization of exploitation in the armaments industry and elsewhere during the course of the war (e.g. in the case of the underground relocation of German armaments factories).

The fourth part of the exhibition covers the period after the liberation / the end of the war in 1945 up to the present. Among other things, displaced persons , approaches to legal punishment / processing, long denial or silence and individual reports / testimonials from former forced laborers are dealt with.

Design, organization

A surprise for the organizers during the compilation was the extensive and dense photographic tradition of significant events. In this way, entire series of photos could be reconstructed, which enable scenic access to various aspects of concrete forced labor (including the authors, situations, people depicted and the history of use or transmission of the recordings).

The exhibition “Forced Labor. The Germans, the Forced Laborers and the War ”was conceived as an international traveling exhibition from the start . Its current exhibition location is the Steyr Work World Museum in Austria , where it can be seen under the title "Forced Labor under National Socialism".

Stations of the traveling exhibition

1st station: Jewish Museum Berlin (September 28, 2009 - January 30, 2010)

2nd stop: Central Museum of the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 Moscow ( Russia ) (June 22 - November 21, 2011)

3rd station: LWL-Industriemuseum Zeche Zollern Dortmund (March 8 - October 14, 2012)

4th stop: Royal Castle in Warsaw ( Poland ) (January 9th - March 8th 2013)

5th station: Belvedere in Prague Castle ( Czech Republic ) (July 2 - October 31, 2014)

6th station: Museum of Labor Hamburg (November 5, 2015 - April 3, 2016)

7th station: Museum Arbeitswelt Steyr ( Austria ) (May 12 - December 18, 2016, title: "Forced Labor under National Socialism")

See also

literature

Reviews

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Survey on the subject of Nazi forced labor ( Memento from October 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ 3sat report of September 28, 2010