Compulsory labour in the Reich

At the end of January 1943, as the encircled Sixth Army was in its death throes at Stalingrad, the authorities of the Third Reich announced a general obligation to register for work. The decree of Fritz Sauckel, the Plenipotentiary General for Labour Deployment, dated 27 January 1943, required all men aged 16 to 65 and all women aged 17 to 45 who were not yet in employment to register at labour offices. Evasion was punishable. The aim was to find the last reserves of manpower for the armaments industry, which had to replace workers called up into the Wehrmacht.

Popular chronologies describe the event as a “new conscription law” under which men aged 16 to 65 and women aged 17 to 50 could be mobilised. This needs two corrections. First, it was not military conscription but an obligation to register in order to be assigned to work for “tasks of Reich defence”; no one went into the army on the strength of it. Second, the upper age limit for women was 45, not 50. The decree is dated 27 January. Its content was published in the press over those days, and on 29 January a supplementary order on the closure of businesses not needed for the war effort was issued.

The Reich at the limit of its reserves

During the first years of the war the leaders of the Third Reich avoided full mobilisation of society. Adolf Hitler remembered the winter of 1918 and feared that privations on the home front would undermine support for the regime. Rationing was milder than in Britain, luxury shops and restaurants stayed open, and women’s employment hardly grew at all. In 1939 some 14–15 million German women were in work; according to the available data the figure in 1943 was almost the same. Nazi ideology saw woman above all as a mother, and soldiers’ wives received allowances that discouraged them from looking for work.

The regime filled the gap in its workforce in a different way: with forced labour. From 1939 workers were deported to the Reich from occupied Poland, then from France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia, and from 1942 on a massive scale from the occupied territories of the USSR. In March 1942 Hitler appointed Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, as Plenipotentiary General for Labour Deployment, with the task of recruitment – in practice round-ups – abroad. Within a few months more than a million so-called Eastern workers had been deported from the occupied Soviet territories alone. In countries with governments collaborating with Germany, regulations were introduced to make deportation easier, such as the French labour law of September 1942. By the beginning of 1943 several million foreigners and prisoners of war were already working in the Reich.

Even so, the front was swallowing ever more men. The losses of the winter of 1941/1942, the summer campaign of 1942 and the unfolding catastrophe on the Volga and the Don meant that the Wehrmacht had to call up workers who had until then been protected by industrial exemptions. At the same time the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, was demanding more and more hands for the arms factories.

The Committee of Three and Sauckel’s decree

On 13 January 1943 Hitler signed a decree on the “comprehensive deployment of men and women for tasks of Reich defence”. He entrusted its implementation to the so-called Committee of Three: the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, and the chief of the Wehrmacht High Command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. The committee was to comb through the administration, the economy and the party for people fit for work or military service. In practice it became an arena of rivalry: Bormann and Lammers guarded access to Hitler, while the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who had been left off the committee and had long been demanding radical mobilisation, tried to seize the initiative together with Speer.

On the basis of the decree Sauckel issued, on 27 January, an order on the registration of men and women for tasks of Reich defence. The obligation to register applied to everyone not yet employed or employed only part-time: men aged 16 to 65 and women aged 17 to 45. There were numerous exemptions. Those exempted included pregnant women, mothers of a child below school age or of at least two children under 14, pupils and students, the sick and those unable to work, as well as farmers and their families, who were already working to feed the country. The labour offices were then to direct those registered to armaments plants, businesses important to the war, the railways, the post office or the administration, where they could replace men called up to the front.

On 29 January a supplementary order appeared on releasing manpower for tasks important to the war. Businesses deemed superfluous were closed or merged: luxury shops, fashion salons and jewellers, some restaurants and bars, places of entertainment, and many small craft workshops and trading firms. Their owners and employees were to go into the armaments industry. The closures dragged on through the spring of 1943 and caused marked discontent among small business owners and the middle classes, the NSDAP’s traditional base.

Limited effects

According to most historians the registration produced results far below expectations. More than three million women registered, but far fewer were assigned to work – estimates speak of several hundred thousand, often part-time. Many women from better-off families found ways of avoiding assignment: medical certificates, fictitious employment with friends, work in the family business. Reports of the SS Security Service (SD) noted the bitterness of women workers who had been working in factories for years and saw that the “better classes” were still being spared. Hitler would not agree to extend the obligation to mothers of small children or to raise the age limit for women, fearing public opinion and damage to population policy. The limit of 50, given in popular chronologies, was introduced only in 1944.

The closure of shops and premises yielded little manpower, since it largely concerned older people or those unsuited to industrial work. Foreigners remained the real source of labour. In 1943 and 1944 Sauckel stepped up deportations from occupied Europe – from Poland, from the occupied eastern territories, from France, where compulsory labour service was introduced in February 1943, and, after Italy’s surrender, also interned Italian soldiers. By the summer of 1944 some 7–8 million forced labourers and prisoners of war were working in the Reich – according to some estimates more than a quarter of all those employed.

“Total war”

Sauckel’s decree was the first step in the campaign that Goebbels called “total war”. The Propaganda Minister believed that the defeat at Stalingrad, of which Germans learned at the beginning of February, offered an opportunity to mobilise society through frankness: admitting the gravity of the situation and calling for sacrifice. As early as 30 January, the tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, speeches in Berlin announced a “supreme effort”. On 18 February 1943 Goebbels gave his famous speech at the Berlin Sportpalast, in which he put to a hand-picked audience the question: “Do you want total war?” In the same hall, in September 1942, Hitler had spoken, assuring his listeners that Stalingrad would be taken.

Rhetoric ran ahead of deeds, however. Throughout 1943 Hitler, Bormann and Lammers held back the most far-reaching plans of Goebbels and Speer, and the Reich’s civilian economy was never curtailed to the extent that Britain’s was. The growth in armaments production in 1943–1944 was due above all to Speer’s reorganisation of industry, the exploitation of the occupied countries and the labour of millions of forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners.

Place in the war

The January decree amounted to an admission that the Third Reich, prepared for short campaigns, had to wage a long war of attrition against a coalition with far greater resources. It was also one of the first signs of the change of mood after Stalingrad: from then on propaganda spoke less of victories and more of defending Europe against Bolshevism and of the need for sacrifice.

In the years that followed, mobilisation went further. From February 1943 secondary school pupils born in 1926–1927 were sent as auxiliaries to man anti-aircraft batteries. After the 20 July 1944 plot Goebbels, as Plenipotentiary for Total War, closed the theatres, lengthened working hours and raised the age limit for women subject to compulsory labour to 50, and in the autumn of 1944 the Volkssturm was formed, into which men aged 16 to 60 were drafted. To the end, however, the burden of the Reich’s war economy rested not so much on German women as on forced labourers from the conquered countries. For their deportation and conditions of work Fritz Sauckel was sentenced to death after the war by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and executed in October 1946.