Forced foreign labor produced a quarter of Nazi industrial output by 1944

Evidence

The Nazi regime recruited enormous numbers of foreign workers - mainly by force - to replace German men conscripted for military service. By the end of the war, there were 7.5 million foreign workers in the Reich, of whom 1.8 million were prisoners of war. It is estimated that a quarter of industrial production was carried out by foreign workers in 1944. The Nazi war machine would have collapsed far earlier without foreign labor. The basic principle for treating foreign workers was that “All the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure” (Homze, 1967:119). This meant housing workers in barracks under military control, the lowest possible wages (or none at all), appalling social and health conditions, and complete deprivation of civil rights. Many foreign workers died through harsh treatment and cruel punishments. The Nazis took exploitation of rightless migrants to an extreme which can only be compared with slavery, yet its legal core - the sharp division between the status of national and foreigner - was to be found both in earlier and later foreign labor systems (Castles and Miller, The Globalization of Migration Since 1945 After World War II, international migration expanded in volume and geographical scope. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3858

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how legal status hierarchies — citizen vs. foreigner — enable exploitation, mirroring the Milgrom law merchant material on how institutional categories shape economic behavior.