The forced labour law in France

On 4 September 1942 the head of the French State, Marshal Philippe Pétain, and the head of government, Pierre Laval, signed a law “on the use and direction of the labour force”. Every man aged 18 to 50 and every unmarried woman aged 21 to 35 could henceforth be required to perform “any work that the government deems useful in the interest of the Nation”. The law did not mention Germany at all. In practice, however, it became the basis for the compulsory dispatch of French workers to labour in the Third Reich.

Some listings state that on this day Pétain and Laval created what was to become the Service du travail obligatoire (STO), the Compulsory Labour Service. That simplification needs correcting: the STO itself came into being only under the law of 16 February 1943, which made whole age groups of young men subject to compulsion. The law of 4 September 1942 was its direct forerunner. It introduced the principle of compulsory labour in both zones of France and remained in force even after the creation of the STO, which formally supplemented it.

Germany’s hunger for labour

The war against the Soviet Union was swallowing ever more German men, whom the Wehrmacht took from factories and farms. Their places were filled by forced labourers: Poles, rounded up and deported from their occupied country since 1939, prisoners of war, and people from the occupied Soviet territories. On 21 March 1942 Adolf Hitler appointed the Gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, General Plenipotentiary for the Employment of Labour, with the task of bringing workers to the Reich from all over Europe by any means. His methods earned Sauckel the nickname “the slave trader of Europe”.

France, with its skilled metalworkers, was particularly valuable to him. By the spring of 1942 fewer than a hundred thousand people from France had volunteered to work in Germany. According to some historians, the refusal to send 150,000 skilled workers was one of the reasons for the fall of the government of Admiral François Darlan. In April 1942, under German pressure, Laval became head of government once again. In May Sauckel demanded 250,000 workers from France, including 150,000 skilled men, by the end of July.

The “Relève”

Laval, as usual, tried to negotiate and play for time. He proposed a scheme called la Relève, “the relief”: for every three workers who went voluntarily to Germany, the Reich was to send home one French prisoner of war. More than a million Frenchmen captured in 1940 were still held in German prison camps, so the promise of their return was meant to win over public opinion. Laval announced the Relève in a radio broadcast on 22 June 1942, in which he uttered a sentence that weighed on his entire subsequent reputation: “I wish for the victory of Germany, because without it Bolshevism would tomorrow take hold everywhere.” The same day, in a letter to Joachim von Ribbentrop, he presented the dispatch of workers as France’s contribution to Germany’s struggle against Bolshevism.

Vichy propaganda did what it could. On 11 August 1942 Laval welcomed at Compiègne the first train carrying prisoners released under the Relève. Volunteers, however, were few. The figures given by historians differ depending on what was being counted: by some calculations only some ten to twenty thousand skilled workers had come forward by the end of August, by others some 50,000–60,000 people in all had left for Germany. Either way, it fell far short of Sauckel’s demands. The Resistance portrayed the Relève from the outset as a swindle: the prisoners were released in small numbers, often older farmers, while the workers left to work for the German war machine.

From volunteers to compulsion

On 22 August 1942 Sauckel concluded that the recruitment of volunteers had failed and issued an ordinance on compulsory labour service for the occupied western countries. He threatened to introduce it in France by German occupation decree. Such a decree, however, would have applied only in the occupied zone, and for Laval it would have meant losing what little control remained over what happened to French workers. He therefore negotiated that, instead of a German ordinance, the French government would itself pass a law covering both zones, including the free zone in the south. In this way the French became the only nation in occupied Europe obliged to work for the Reich by the law of their own state rather than by a German order. This was the price of the autonomy that the Vichy government had won for itself after the Armistice of Compiègne and guarded so jealously. Laval had used a similar mechanism a few weeks earlier, when the French police carried out the Vel d’Hiv round-up: collaboration was meant to preserve the appearance of French sovereignty, while in practice it handed the Germans what they demanded.

The law bore the date of 4 September and was published in the official gazette on 13 September 1942. Its provisions required those it covered to show proof of permanent employment; anyone without it could be directed to work assigned by the state. In practice the deportations affected above all skilled workers in metalworking, steel and construction, who were selected for departure at their workplaces, often with the participation of the employers themselves. Women, although the law provided for it, were in principle not sent to Germany – the government feared the reaction of society and of the Church. According to some accounts, four ministers in the government spoke out against the law.

The first deportations and the first resistance

Compulsion met with open opposition. On 13 October 1942, when a list of workers selected for departure was posted in the railway workshops at Oullins near Lyon, the railwaymen downed tools. The strike spread to other works around Lyon, Saint-Étienne and Chambéry, and “Laval murderer!” was chalked on the carriages of the trains carrying the workers. The government had to give ground for a time in the southern zone: according to French research, by 1 December 1942 only about 2,500 workers had left from there under the compulsory levies. In the occupied zone compulsion worked more effectively, and by the end of the year Sauckel had received from France the 250,000 men he had ordered, counting volunteers and workers designated under the law together.

Significance

The law of 4 September 1942 opened the way to even more sweeping compulsion. When in December 1942 Hitler ordered hundreds of thousands more German workers to be drafted into the Wehrmacht, Sauckel demanded another 250,000 men from France by mid-March 1943. Laval responded with the law of 16 February 1943, which established the Service du travail obligatoire: instead of skilled men being selected at their workplaces, compulsion now covered whole age groups of men born in 1920–1922, as a kind of substitute for military service. According to historians’ estimates, between June 1942 and July 1944 a total of 600,000–650,000 workers from France went to work in the Reich; France gave Germany more skilled workers than any other occupied country.

Compulsory labour also proved to be one of the Vichy government’s greatest mistakes. More than 200,000 young Frenchmen who failed to report for departure went underground. Roughly one in four of them joined the guerrilla bands known as the maquis, which in 1943 grew in the mountains and forests of southern France precisely thanks to those fleeing the STO. The Resistance, still small in 1942, gained a mass base, and Pétain’s regime lost what remained of its support among workers and in the countryside, which had previously accepted it with resignation.

The question of the forced labourers returned after the war in the courtrooms. Fritz Sauckel was convicted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and hanged in October 1946, largely for the forced labour programme. Laval, tried in France for, among other things, his policy of collaboration, was shot in October 1945. For decades the former forced labourers fought for recognition of what they had endured, since in post-war France they were sometimes suspected of having gone to Germany of their own free will. Only by a decree of 2008 were they officially designated “victims of forced labour in Nazi Germany”.