To carry out a total war and replace the men who have gone en masse to the front, manpower is needed, a lot of manpower, whether in the factories, the fields, the workshops, the building sites. , and even in some homes. Between 1938 and 1945, to keep their war economy running, the Nazi leaders used the strong method: 13 million young women and men from all over Europe were deported to Germany and the territories occupied by the Reich to work there.
Among these forced laborers, an estimated 2.5 million have died from mistreatment. A mass war crime, long forgotten, ignored, which this fascinating three-part documentary has the merit of meticulously deciphering with the help of unpublished filmed archives and numerous testimonies from children and grandchildren of victims, but also executioners.
Long after the war, the German population remained blind to the treatment inflicted on these forced laborers. Even today, some persist in believing that “after all, they weren’t treated so badly”, while the reality developed in this documentary comes to smash this thesis.
Broken youth
What the documentary also reveals is a hierarchy in suffering: a Polish agricultural worker was treated less better than a Soviet prisoner in a mine, but worse than a French worker in a workshop or a helper. Ukrainian housewife. Another aspect underlined: many German families benefited from forced labor, since nearly 200,000 households exploited domestic helpers from the east, in particular from Ukraine.
French from the STO (compulsory labor service), trapped Italians, rounded up Poles and Czechs, enslaved Soviets, the destinies are multiple, but all of them have seen their youth shattered by these years of compulsory labor in hostile territory. “We were 18, 19, 20. And we were robbed of our youth, ”summarizes Josef, then a young Pole working for a family of farmers in southern Germany and victim of ill-treatment.
To accommodate these millions of very special “guests” in German cities, all means are good: barracks in camps, but also boathouses or brewery cellars. The total number of labor camps during the war on the territory of the Reich is estimated at 30,000.
Some, like the Czech Jan Sefl, were sent to Norway on very trying construction sites (submarine bases) and his testimony constitutes a highlight of this documentary which specifies that, out of 13 million forced laborers, a third were women.
