Kleine Ostarbeiter: Child Forced Labor in Nazi Germany and German Occupied Eastern Europe

It is well known that a great number of the estimated 30 million civilian forced labourers in Germany and National Socialist occupied Eastern Europe were children. Children were forced to work in ghettoes, concentration and labour camps; in National Socialist Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe they worked in all branches of industry, in agriculture and as domestics in German households. The Wehrmacht and SS also deployed children in construction work on fortifications, bridges, roads and airfields. Based on a wide range of archival documents and testimonies, my paper focuses in particular on Soviet children because – apart from Jewish forced labourers – workers from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia had to endure the worst working and living conditions. Moreover, German occupation policies in the Soviet Union were far more brutal than in any other country, and German deportation practices the most inhuman.

While the emphasis of my research is on the victims and their experiences, these will be placed within the broad and crucial context of the political and ideological imperatives of the National Socialist perpetrators. Therefore, the paper will broadly focus on the political, economic and ideological background, which led to the deportation of children during the Second World War. It will evaluate the participation of civil authorities, police and military units in the deportation process; and it will examine the extent to which the forced labour of children was linked with the National Socialist racist ideology and the NS Germanization programme. Additionally, consideration will be given to some aspects of the working and living conditions of these children, their treatment by employers and colleagues, their social contacts with the civil population and other forced labourers.