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On 16 March 1943, an official in the labour administration in Nazi-occupied eastern Ukraine sent out orders to the local labour recruitment teams. In order to meet the targets of the latest crash programme to deport Soviet civilians as labourers to the Reich, each local district under military administration was with immediate effect to 'recruit' and dispatch to the Reich 500 workers per week, 'primarily women' ('in erster Linie Frauen'). 1Why, one might wonder, would the recruitment teams have been told to recruit 'primarily women'?
The coercive and violent recruitment of labour in occupied Ukraine was one strand in the vast history of forced labour under Nazi rule, involving not just mass deportations of prisoners of war and civilians to work in Germany and other countries under Nazi rule, but also forms of forced labour within the occupied countries themselves. 2To talk of forced labour entails definition, as Mark Spoerer and others have discussed: there were gradations of forced labour, and in wartime Nazi Germany, with its highly regulated labour regime applying also to German men and women, it would be inaccurate to talk of German workers being free of coercion. 3But for the purposes of the following discussion of foreign forced labour working in the Reich, it is helpful to refer to the criteria outlined by Spoerer that a forced labourer is unable to terminate their employment of their own accord and has little or no control over their conditions of living and working.4
On the basis of that definition, forced labour in Nazi Germany was predominantly foreign: labour was a fruit of conquest. Spoerer estimates the accumulated total of foreign workers (civilians and POWs) deployed in the Reich over the course of the Second World War at around 12 million, of whom 80-90 per cent could be regarded - according to his definition - as forced labourers. 5Statistics for September 1944 showed 5.97 million foreign civilians working in the Greater German Reich, who at that point constituted 26 per cent of the Reich's (civilian) labour force.6Forced labour comprised not only foreign civilian deportees plus prisoners of war (the latter totalling 2.19 million at the start of 1945), but also concentration camp prisoners (including foreign Jews...