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Forced exercises at Oranienburg, 1933. Traditionally, prisoners were often deployed in penal labor performing unskilled work. [1] During the first years of Nazi Germany's existence, unemployment was high and forced labor in the concentration camps was presented as re-education through labor and a means of punishing offenders.
The prisoners were stepped on and beaten during roll call. Forced labour partly consisted of pointless tasks and heavy labour, which aimed to wear down the prisoners. [4] Many of the concentration camps channeled forced labour to benefit the German war machine. In these cases the SS saw excessive working hours as a means of maximizing output.
The first was expulsion - forcing the Jews out of Nazi-occupied land and into Poland or the USSR. This made them easier targets for slave labor later and severed any connections they may have made at home. The first arrests of Jews were for their "protection", which quickly turned into the first detention camps in 1933.
The selection process was heavily dependent on the labor-force needs of the camp at that time. Approximately 1 in 5 of all transported prisoners survived selection and were thus enslaved. Selection was specific to the camps, such as Auschwitz or Majdanek, that served some kind of industrial function for the regime. As one article put it, "Like ...
At the peak of the program, the forced labourers constituted 20% of the German work force. Counting deaths and turnover, about 15 million men and women were forced labourers at one point during the war. [4] Besides Jews, the harshest deportation and forced labor policies were applied to the populations of Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.
During the early implementation of the plan, the Nazis set up a system of ghettos for Jewish civilians to use them as forced labor for the German war effort. The first forced labor camps were established for the Burggraben project intended to fortify the Nazi–Soviet demarcation line and to supply the local SS units at Lublin from Lipowa.
The main goal of the Holocaust was to eliminate the Jews. However, the Nazi regime maintained a large population of Jewish workers in the labor camps. To facilitate the Nazi goal of Jewish genocide, the labor camps conducted "selections," held at random intervals. Women were lined up to be killed or spared, largely at random.
Jews in labor battalions were sent on death marches into Germany and Austria. [256] Nearly one-tenth of the Holocaust's Jewish victims were Hungarian Jews, accounting for a total of over 564,000 deaths; some 64,000 Jews had already been murdered prior to the German occupation of Hungary. [257]