Service du travail obligatoire

The Service du travail obligatoire (English: Compulsory Work Service; STO) was the forced enlistment and deportation of hundreds of thousands of French workers to Nazi Germany to work as forced labour for the German war effort during World War II.

The STO was created under laws and regulations of Vichy France, but it was used by Nazi Germany to compensate for its loss of manpower as it enlisted more and more soldiers for the Eastern Front. The German government promised that for every three French workers sent it would release one French prisoner of war. Those requisitioned under the STO were accommodated in work camps on German soil.

French forced laborers were the only nationality to have been required to serve by the laws of their own state rather than by German orders. This was an indirect consequence of the autonomy negotiated from the German administration by the Vichy government.

A total of 600,000 to 650,000 French workers were sent to Germany between June 1942 and July 1944. France was the third largest forced labor provider, after the USSR and Poland, and was the country that provided the largest number of skilled workers. 250,000 POWs also had to work for the Reich from 1943 onwards, having been "transformed", voluntarily or involuntarily, into civilian workers.

On 22 June 1942, Pierre Laval, Prime Minister in the Vichy regime, announced the enactment of the relève, whereby French workers were encouraged to volunteer to work in Germany to secure the release of French prisoners of war.Fritz Sauckel, dubbed the "slavemaster of Europe", was appointed Generalbevollmächtigter für den Arbeitseinsatz (General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment) on 21 March 1942 and charged with obtaining labor from across Europe. His appointment was roughly concurrent with the return to power of Pierre Laval. Until that time less than 100,000 French volunteers had gone to work in Germany. The refusal to send 150,000 skilled workers was one of the causes of the fall of the Darlan government.

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