Forced labor of Germans after World War II

In the years following World War II, large numbers of German civilians and captured soldiers were forced into labour by the Allied forces. The topic of using Germans as forced labour for reparations was first broached at the Tehran conference in 1943, where Soviet premier Joseph Stalin demanded 4,000,000 German workers.

Forced labour was also included in the final protocol of the Yalta conference in January 1945, where it was sanctioned by UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The largest group of forced laborers in the Soviet Union consisted of several million German prisoners of war. Most German POW survivors of the forced labor camps in the Soviet Union were released in 1953. The last major repatriation of Germans from the Soviet Union occurred in 1956.

Estimates of German POW casualties (in both east and west and cumulative for both the war and peace-time period) range from 600,000 to 1,000,000. According to the section of the German Red Cross dealing with tracing the captives, the ultimate fate of 1,300,000 German POW's in Allied custody is still unknown; they are still officially listed as missing.

The capture and transfer of civilian ethnic Germans to the Soviet Union began as soon as countries with a German minority began to be overrun in 1944. Large numbers of civilians were taken from countries such as Romania, Yugoslavia, and from the eastern parts of Germany itself. For example, after Christmas 1944 between 27,000 and 30,000 ethnic Germans (aged 18–40) were sent to the USSR from Yugoslavia. Women made up 90% of the group. Most were sent to labor camps in the Donbass (Donez basin) where 16% of them died.

Many ethnic Germans living within the Polish pre-war borders, prior to their expulsion, were used for years as forced labor in labor camps such as that run by Salomon Morel. Among these camps were Central Labour Camp Jaworzno, Central Labour Camp Potulice, Łambinowice, Zgoda labour camp and others. The law authorising forced labour, Article 20 of the law on the exclusion of the enemy elements from society, also removed rights to Polish citizenship and all property owned.

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