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<\/a>\n\t\tAgnes Kaposi, photographed on May 22, 2025. (Mike Stone)<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause it\u2019s linked to economic history, it can be quite a dry topic based on anonymous statistics, big numbers and faceless companies,\u201d Dijkstra told The Times of Israel. The exhibition thus sought to \u201cput a lot of faces and names\u201d to the victims.<\/p>\n
Reich built on the backs of slaves<\/p>\n
Those victims stretch back to the Nazis\u2019 earliest days in power. Newly established concentration camps required inmates to engage in heavy manual labor, with forced labor designed to punish and \u201creeducate\u201d the Third Reich\u2019s opponents.<\/p>\n
The annexation of the rump of Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland in 1939 marked a growth of, and shift in, the system. Economics, rather than punishment alone, became the focus, with groups of Czech and Polish civilians employed as voluntary laborers or conscripted to work in the Third Reich. As the exhibition states, forced labor was also \u201ca key part of early discriminatory policy against Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t Jews in Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia were dragooned into labor deployments and often sent to work in temporary labor camps. By the end of 1940, over 700,000 Polish Jews had been forcibly sent to work on construction sites in the Greater Germanic Reich. Their efforts were mocked by the Nazi press. A 1939 photo article entitled \u201cThe Jews must work\u201d in Illustrierter Beobachter (Illustrated Observer), for instance, featured images of Jews carrying out forced labor with captions such as: \u201cThe Jews have never worked so hard in their life\u201d and \u201cPolish Jews are not working hard enough yet; a German construction worker carries five times as many stones up a ladder.\u201d<\/p>\n From 1940, Jews forced into ghettos in occupied Poland were also exploited for their labor.<\/p>\n The Lodz ghetto, a one-and-a-half square-mile area in which 160,000 Jews were confined, became a center of textile production. Three years after the German invasion, nearly 74,000 poorly fed and clothed Jews were working 12-hour shifts in 90 small factories and workshops throughout the ghetto.<\/p>\n \t The exhibition features remarkable images of life in the ghetto taken by Mendel Grossman, a Jewish-Polish artist who worked in the photography section of the Lodz Jewish Council statistics department. Grossman, who was later murdered on a death march in the closing weeks of the war, was charged with documenting daily life in the ghetto, although he also secretly took pictures of the personal lives of inhabitants.<\/p>\n Meager wages were paid using a special currency that could only be used in the ghetto and which frequently wouldn\u2019t manage to feed a family. So important was the ghetto\u2019s output that it wasn\u2019t until August 1944 \u2014 nearly two years after other Polish ghettos were liquidated \u2014 that Lodz was destroyed and its inhabitants murdered.<\/p>\n As survivor Elsa Kafka, who was deported from Prague to the Lodz ghetto in October 1941, later recorded in testimony held by Wiener Library: \u201cEveryone was so occupied that there was no time, nor energy, nor sense for possible friendships. One was far too undernourished and exhausted\u2026 People worked hard in the ghetto. Only the old were exempt from this. The children had to be at the workplace at 7 a.m. already; the girls in the sewing rooms, the boys in a mechanical engineering workshop. There were countless factories.\u201d<\/p>\n \t In the west, the blitzkrieg through Belgium, the Netherlands and France in 1940 saw 1.6 million prisoners of war sent to Stalags, forced labor camps, in Germany. Civilians, too, soon found themselves subject to increasingly coercive methods at the hands of newly established German employment offices.<\/p>\n With Hitler\u2019s assault on the Soviet Union stalling in 1942, and the tide of the war turning, the Nazis engaged in the mass exploitation of Red Army prisoners of war and Soviet civilians. By 1944, nearly 2 million POWs, including prisoners from France, Britain and Italy, were working for the German war economy, which the previous year had been ramped up with the onset of Totaleinsatz or total deployment as industry was converted to arms production. August 1944 saw some 7.6 million foreign forced laborers working in Germany, constituting over one-quarter of the total labor force.<\/p>\n \t As the exhibition makes clear, while Soviet laborers, who were made to do particularly dangerous and demanding work, were treated especially badly, \u201cJewish prisoners were at the bottom of the slave labor hierarchy.\u201d Those not immediately selected for the gas chambers were instead subjected to \u201cannihilation through work\u201d \u2014 a process of overwork and underfeeding. Testimony by Peter, a Polish-Jewish survivor of the Majdanek extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, details how Jewish workers were exposed to poisonous fumes while making explosives. Not permitted to wear protective masks, they \u201cdied like flies,\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n Some of Germany\u2019s most powerful companies are implicated<\/p>\n On the order of SS head Heinrich Himmler, hundreds of slave labor subcamps were constructed in or around major concentration and extermination camps from 1942. The Auschwitz complex, for instance, had more than 40 slave labor subcamps. Autumn 1943 marked the beginning of the widespread system of \u201cleasing\u201d concentration camp prisoners \u2014 including Jews, political prisoners, Roma and Sinti, and \u201casocials\u201d \u2014 to private firms.<\/p>\n \t \u201cFar from being confined to the Nazi camps, the system of slave labor extended into factories and boardrooms, implicating some of Germany\u2019s most powerful companies. Bureaucracy enabled brutality, and profit became indistinguishable from persecution,\u201d the Wiener Library noted in a press statement accompanying the exhibition.<\/p>\n In all, over 1 million inmates became slave laborers, most forced to work for companies producing weaponry. Heavy labor, textiles and chemicals had the horrific distinction of offering both the worst living conditions and shortest life expectancy. Slave laborers were frequently housed in barracks, barns and small huts.<\/p>\n For German business \u2014 which included the likes of fashion house Hugo Boss, pharma giant Bayer and the engineering firm Siemens \u2014 camp slave laborers could be \u201crented\u201d from the SS at rates far lower than those commanded by ordinary civilian workers.<\/p>\n The notorious chemical, pharma and industrial synthetics cartel IG Farben, for instance, struck deals with the Nazis to exploit slave labor at multiple concentration camps. At its height in 1944, Farben\u2019s factory at the Buna-Monowitz subcamp of Auschwitz, which the company built in partnership with the SS in 1942, held more than 10,000 prisoners.<\/p>\n Similarly, arms company Krupps operated factories in subcamps at Buchenwald, Ravensbruck and elsewhere.<\/p>\n \t It wasn\u2019t just well-known industrial behemoths who, as more German men were called up, plugged labor shortages by tapping slave labor. The exhibition cites farms and tailors as examples of smaller businesses which were party to systematic mass exploitation. In 1943, half of the workers in German agriculture were foreign civilian workers, very often women and children.<\/p>\n Some relationships between perpetrator and victim were, as the exhibition suggests, less easy to define.<\/p>\n The Leitz family, who owned Leica cameras, helped some of their Jewish employees and friends escape pre-war Germany. But despite his liberal sympathies, Leica factory owner Ernst Leitz II opted not only to join the Nazi Party during WWII to protect his company, but also to use forced laborers, primarily young Ukrainian women. The company, which manufactured important items for the German war effort, such as periscope gunsights, employed 600-1,000 forced laborers from September 1942 until the end of the war. Stone\u2019s photographs of survivors in the exhibition were taken on a Leica camera produced in 1938 at the very Wetzlar factory that was later staffed by forced laborers.<\/p>\n Partial \u2014 and often fatally delayed \u2014 justice<\/p>\n But, for those who suffered grievously at the hands of the Nazis\u2019 slave labor program, justice was both partial and delayed.<\/p>\n \t<\/a>
\n\t\tExhibition curator Clara Dijkstra in 2026. (Wiener Holocaust Library\/ Adam Soller)<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n\t\tMendel Grossman and other Jewish men working in a textile workshop in \u0141\u00f3d\u017a ghetto, 1940. (Wiener Holocaust Library Collections)<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n\t\tIn Nazi-occupied Poland, Lodz ghetto inmates haul a bread cart for distribution inside the ghetto (Henryk Ross)<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n\t\tThe Lodz ghetto residential area sign reading, \u2018Jews. Entry Forbidden.\u2019 (Henryk Ross\/Art Gallery of Ontario, gift from the Archive of Modern Conflict\/Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts)<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n\t\tMendel Grossman working in a shoemaking workshop in \u0141\u00f3d\u017a ghetto, 1940. (Wiener Holocaust Library Collections)<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n\t\tJewish forced laborers in the Plaszow concentration camp in German-occupied Krakow, circa 1941. (Wiener Holocaust Library)<\/p>\n<\/a>
\n\t\tAlbert Speer examining a group of forced labourers in Mauthausen, 1943. (Wiener Holocaust Library)<\/p>\n