The creation of the STO in France

On 16 February 1943 the head of the Vichy government, Pierre Laval, signed the law “establishing the compulsory labour service” – the Service du travail obligatoire, or STO. The law was countersigned by the Minister of Justice, Joseph Barthélemy, and published in the official journal the following day, together with an implementing decree. Under it all men born in 1920, 1921 and 1922 were to perform two years of labour service. In practice this meant being sent to factories in the Third Reich. The official communiqué spoke of “a fair distribution among all Frenchmen of the burdens arising from the needs of the French economy”, but it was the German economy that was meant.

Laval is often called prime minister. His official title was “head of government” (chef du gouvernement). Since November 1942, under Constitutional Act No. 12, Laval had been able to issue laws and decrees under his own signature. That is why the STO law does not bear the signature of the head of state, Marshal Philippe Pétain. Pétain, however, did not oppose it publicly, and his regime took full responsibility for it.

The second “Sauckel action”

The STO was the next step in the policy that had already produced the law of 4 September 1942. Laval had first tried recruiting volunteers and the Relève scheme, under which the Reich was to release one French prisoner of war for every three workers going to Germany. When that failed, the September law allowed skilled workers to be designated for departure at their workplaces. By the end of 1942 the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, Fritz Sauckel, had obtained some 240,000 people from France – roughly as many as he had demanded in the spring.

That was not the end of it, however. The war in the east was consuming ever more German soldiers. On 15 December 1942 Hitler ordered 300,000 workers from German factories to be drafted into the Wehrmacht, their places to be taken by foreigners. On 1 January 1943 Sauckel demanded another 250,000 people from France by mid-March. Meanwhile, in the Reich itself, a decree of 27 January 1943 obliged German men and women to register for work. After the defeat at Stalingrad the pressure on the occupied countries grew even stronger.

Laval now had less room for manoeuvre than a few months earlier. After the German occupation of the free zone in November 1942 the Vichy government had lost its armistice army, its fleet and most of its bargaining chips with the occupier. Laval haggled with Sauckel for several weeks, but once again chose the same course as in the autumn: it was better for the French state to introduce compulsion by its own law than for the Germans to impose it by their own decree. He hoped in this way to keep control of the administration and to win concessions, such as the release of more prisoners of war.

Whole age groups instead of skilled workers

The new law changed the principle of selection. The September law had allowed the authorities to take specific workers, usually skilled metalworkers, designated by the labour offices and the factories themselves. The STO covered entire age groups of young men, like military conscription, regardless of occupation or place of residence. Indeed, the authorities presented it as a substitute for military service, which France had been unable to hold since the armistice of 1940. The class of 1922, whose members had not yet had time to take up permanent jobs, was hit hardest. Some 24,000 young men from the latest intake of the Chantiers de la jeunesse, the youth organisation that took the place of the army in Vichy France, were also called up for departure.

On paper the new regulations, based on the September law, could also cover young women. Fearing the reaction of the public and the Church, however, the government did not send them to Germany; compulsory labour for women was applied, if at all, only in France itself. At first deferments and exemptions were promised, among others for farmers and some students. As early as 25 February students learned that they too would be called up at the end of the academic year, and in June 1943 the exemptions for farmers were also abolished.

Everything was done in haste, because Sauckel had set a deadline of mid-March. The prefects were to register the young men by 28 February. From 1 March medical boards sat in the district towns, with orders to examine all three age groups by 5 March. Summonses to the trains for Germany were handed out immediately afterwards, and the first transports left within days. Even then many of those summoned failed to appear.

The bishops did not take a common position. The Bishop of Lille, Cardinal Achille Liénart, in March 1943 first urged young men to obey, and a week later explained that the occupier was exceeding its rights and that refusing to go was not a sin. He added, however, that love of one’s neighbour might incline a man to go, since if he refused someone else would be sent in his place. Such wavering was typical of a large part of French society in the spring of 1943.

Taking to the woods

According to most studies, Laval achieved his first aim: in the spring of 1943 the required quota was largely dispatched. French researchers estimate that between June 1942 and August 1943 some 600,000 workers – volunteers and those compulsorily designated – left for Germany. Laval placed the labour inspectorate, the police and the gendarmerie at the disposal of the operation, and they rounded up the evaders. Thanks to this the Germans did not have to commit their own forces. On 5 June 1943 Laval announced on the radio that those who helped evaders would be punished, and a law of 11 June provided for heavy fines for anyone who hid them, family members included.

More and more young men, however, chose to flee. Officially a distinction was made between insoumis, those who had evaded registration, and réfractaires, who had registered but failed to answer the summons. According to Raphaël Spina’s research, some 200,000–250,000 of those called up went into hiding in all. Most of them worked under assumed names on farms, where labour was short and farmers were glad to take them in. Some 40,000–50,000 joined the guerrilla bands known as the maquis, which were just then forming in the Alps, the Massif Central and other mountainous and wooded areas. Some made their way across the Pyrenees to Spain and from there to North Africa to join the French forces fighting alongside the Allies.

Resistance grew month by month. By the summer of 1943 most workers who had been given leave from Germany no longer went back, and the police and gendarmerie showed less and less zeal. In the department of Lot the proportion of evaders was just over 12 per cent in the spring, and over 95 per cent in August and September. The Resistance stole and destroyed STO card indexes and issued false papers, and its people in government offices gave warning of round-ups. Compulsory labour did more for the French underground than the earlier appeals from London: thousands of young men who had until then kept away from politics suddenly found themselves on the side of the Resistance, if only to avoid being sent to Germany.

For the leaders of the Resistance this was both an opportunity and a problem. Thousands of men who had come to the woods without weapons or experience had to be fed, armed and trained. In London there were fears that premature guerrilla warfare would provoke the Germans into reprisals and into strengthening their occupation forces before the planned Allied landing in France.

Place in the war

The second “Sauckel action” was followed by others. On 23 April 1943 the Germans demanded 120,000 workers for May and 100,000 for June, and on 6 August another 500,000. These figures were never reached. In September 1943 the German Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, concluded an agreement with the French Minister of Industrial Production, Jean Bichelonne, under which factories in France working for the Reich protected their workers from being sent away. Speer preferred the French to produce for Germany at home. A law of 1 February 1944 extended compulsory labour to men aged 16 to 60 and women aged 18 to 45, but the fourth “Sauckel action” in 1944 ended in failure.

Historians estimate that between June 1942 and July 1944 a total of 600,000–650,000 workers went from France to work in the Reich, most of them under the STO. After the Soviet Union and Poland, France was the third-largest source of forced labour for Germany and supplied it with the most skilled workers. Many of them worked in armaments factories that were the targets of Allied bombing raids. After the war French veterans’ organisations claimed that 60,000 STO workers had died in Germany. Today’s historians consider this figure too high and put the deaths at 25,000–35,000, including several thousand in concentration camps.

Politically the STO was a disaster for Vichy. A regime that had promised to shield the French from the effects of the occupation was itself sending their sons to German factories. From then on, in the eyes of most of his compatriots, Laval was not only a collaborator but the man who had handed France’s youth over to the Germans. The maquis, swelled by those fleeing the STO, fought in 1944 against the Germans and the Milice (the French Militia), and after the Allied landings in Normandy helped to liberate the country.

After the war Laval was sentenced to death and shot in October 1945, and Sauckel was hanged at Nuremberg a year later. Barthélemy, arrested after the liberation, died of cancer in May 1945 before the proceedings against him were concluded. For decades former STO workers fought for recognition, because they were suspected of having gone voluntarily. They were never granted the status of “deportees”, but since 2008 they have officially been “victims of forced labour in Nazi Germany”.