61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

the decision to order Soviet civilians into forced labour as well. Voluntary
enlisting took place only in the beginning and to a very limited extent. It was
far outweighed by forced conscription, with the German occupying forces
regularly resorting to terror in order to round up sufficient «Eastern workers»
(«Ostarbeiter»). 12 The Nazi regime also began to use compulsion against Western
Europeans, not allowing workers who had signed up voluntarily to return home,
or sending the population of occupied areas to work in Germany. In France, the
Vichy Regime introduced two years of compulsory service, the «Service de
Travail obligatoire» (STO). The last group of forced workers to be conscripted
were Italian «military internees», who were deported to Germany after Italy’s
capitulation and about-face in September 1943. At that time, many Italian
civilian workers who had gone to Germany as volunteers also became de facto
forced labourers, as they were no longer permitted to leave the country. In
August 1944, German was home to 7.6 million foreign workers − men, women
and also children − consisting of 5.7 million civilian workers and 1.9 million
prisoners of war. This total corresponded to 26.5% of all those employed by
industry. 13
It is impossible to say how many forced labourers and prisoners of war were
employed in Swiss subsidiary companies. On the one hand, the number of
subsidiaries based in Germany is not known, on the other, quantitative information
is only useful in respect of certain cut-off dates, since the number of
foreigners fluctuated widely in terms of time, business sector and area. 14 As far
as the Swiss subsidiaries are concerned, if we base our assumptions on the fact
that in July 1944 the four largest companies in Baden (today Baden-
Württemberg) alone – Aluminium-Walzwerke Singen, Aluminium GmbH in
Rheinfelden, Georg Fischer in Singen, and BBC Mannheim – employed far in
excess of 4,000 foreign workers, 15 we can probably conclude with a clear
conscience that the figure quoted in the media – a total of over 11,000 forced
labourers and prisoners of war employed in Swiss subsidiary companies
throughout the Reich – is likely to be on the low side. 16
In armaments companies and their suppliers in particular, the proportion of
forced labourers and prisoners of war was well above the average number of
forced labourers employed in the German Reich as a whole, and this also applies
to Swiss branches:
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