The deportation of Polish workers to Germany as forced labour was the largest single labour-deportation programme of the Second World War. Around 1.5 million Polish civilians were deported from occupied Poland to work in the German agricultural and industrial economy between 1939 and 1945. They worked in conditions designed by the regime to be punitive: they wore distinctive identifying patches (a purple “P” on a yellow background), were forbidden contact with the German population beyond what their work required, were paid less than other foreign workers, and faced execution for any sexual contact with Germans. They were the second-largest national group in the wartime German forced-labour economy after Soviet citizens. Around 200,000 of them died in Germany.
The legal and operational framework
The deportation began in October 1939 immediately after the German occupation of Poland. The legal basis was the Reich Labour Service Law as extended to occupied territories, supplemented by Heinrich Himmler’s “Polish Decrees” (Polenerlasse) of 8 March 1940 which established the special restrictions on Polish workers in Germany. The Polenerlasse required Polish workers to wear the purple-P patch, prohibited them from using public transport, prohibited them from attending German cultural events, prohibited them from attending church services with Germans, and made any sexual contact with a German a capital offence punishable by hanging.
The recruitment process was nominally voluntary in 1939 and 1940 but was supplemented from 1940 onwards by systematic round-ups. The German occupation administration in Poland conducted street round-ups (łapanki) in Polish cities, particularly Warsaw, Kraków and Łódź, in which the German police would seal off a public area and detain everyone present until the requisite number of workers had been collected. The round-ups continued throughout the occupation. Substantial supplementary recruitment was conducted in the rural districts where the German civilian administration had a more direct presence.
The work and the conditions
The deported Polish workers were distributed across the German economy in proportions that shifted across the war. In the early years (1939 to 1941) the substantial majority worked in German agriculture, replacing the German farmers who had been conscripted. From 1942 onwards, as the German labour shortage in industry deepened, the proportion in industrial work rose sharply. By 1944 around half of the Polish workers in Germany were in industrial employment and half in agricultural, with the industrial workers concentrated in the Ruhr, in Saxony, in Bavaria and in the Berlin region.
Conditions for the Polish workers were systematically worse than for any other Western European foreign labour group, and were exceeded in severity only by the conditions imposed on Soviet civilians and Soviet prisoners of war. Polish workers were housed in segregated barracks, fed substantially below the German civilian ration (around 1,800 calories a day against around 2,400 for Germans), and required to work eleven-hour days with limited rest. Medical care was minimal. The mortality rate among Polish workers in Germany was around 13 per cent across the duration of the programme.
The capital-offence prohibition on sexual contact with Germans was actively enforced. Around 1,500 Polish workers were hanged in Germany during the war for documented or alleged sexual contact with German women; the executions were conducted publicly in front of the local Polish workers and were documented in the Reich Security Main Office records as deterrent measures.
What happened after
The surviving Polish forced labourers were liberated by Allied forces in the spring of 1945. The substantial majority chose to return to Poland; a minority remained in displaced-persons camps in the Western occupation zones and emigrated subsequently to Western countries. The post-war Polish state did not formally recognise the forced-labour deportees as a distinct category of war victim until the late 1990s. The reparations programme of the Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, which paid surviving slave labourers from 2000 onwards, included Polish forced labourers; the substantial majority of the original deportees were by then dead or very elderly. The Foundation paid around 4.4 billion euros across all categories; the share that went to surviving Polish forced labourers and their heirs was approximately 1.8 billion euros, the largest single national share.
The historiographical recognition of the Polish forced-labour programme as a substantial Holocaust-era atrocity has been slow. The post-war German treatment of the programme as essentially a wartime labour question rather than a racial-persecution programme persisted into the 1990s. The work of Ulrich Herbert from the late 1980s onwards substantially reshaped the historiographical position; the regime’s treatment of Polish workers is now understood as part of the wider racial-ideological programme of which Generalplan Ost and the killing of Polish civilians in the General Government were the larger components.
See also
- Heinrich Himmler
- Soviet Prisoners of War
- The Foundation Remembrance Responsibility and Future
- Generalplan Ost: The Plan to Erase Poland
- Polish Victims
- Auschwitz and the Polish Prisoners
- Polish Children Stolen for Germanisation
Sources
- Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, 1997 (English translation of the 1985 German original)
- Czesław Łuczak, Polscy robotnicy przymusowi w Trzeciej Rzeszy podczas II wojny światowej, Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1974
- Jochen August, “Sonderaktion Krakau”: Die Verhaftung der Krakauer Wissenschaftler am 6. November 1939, Hamburger Edition, 1997
- Ulrich Herbert (ed), Europa und der “Reichseinsatz”: Ausländische Zivilarbeiter, Kriegsgefangene und KZ-Häftlinge in Deutschland 1938-1945, Klartext Verlag, 1991
- Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weißrußland 1941-1944, Droste, 1998 (comparative material)
- Heinrich Himmler, “Erlasse über die Polen im Reich” of 8 March 1940 (the Polish Decrees), Reich Security Main Office records, Bundesarchiv Berlin
- Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (Stiftung EVZ), final report on the slave-labour compensation programme, 2007, https://www.stiftung-evz.de
- USHMM, “Forced Labor: An Overview”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org