61340 Vorabseiten_e - Unabhängige Expertenkommission Schweiz

The accommodation, care and treatment of forced labourers and prisoners of war
Prisoners and civilian foreign workers were allocated to companies only if their
accommodation and board were guaranteed. Prisoners of war were usually
accommodated in camps guarded by the Wehrmacht outside the company
premises, but the company had to contribute towards the costs of board and
lodging. For the «Eastern workers», the company provided its own enclosed
barracks. These were to be surrounded by «appropriate fencing, with barbed
wire if possible», and could «only be left to carry out the work allocated to them
[the forced labourers] in the businesses». The official occupation quotas in
themselves prevented forced labourers and prisoners of war from living in conditions
fit for human habitation. A barracks room of 48 square metres was
supposed to house 18 male or 12 female «Eastern workers», or as many as 36
Russian prisoners of war. At the Nestlé plant in Kappeln for example, 38 people
were packed together in an area of 59.4 square metres, and at Lonza in Waldshut
in the summer of 1944, nearly 800 foreigners lived in 17 barracks with a total
of 64 rooms. In addition, the barracks had to be constructed as quickly and
cheaply as possible, so that sound building techniques and adequate sanitary
facilities were dispensed with. Unlike the «Eastern workers» and prisoners of
war, Western European civilian workers enjoyed comparatively good living
conditions. They were often put up in guesthouses or private quarters, and were
free to leave their rooms at will when they were not working. 18
In general, forced labourers and prisoners of war complained much more vociferously
about their food than about their accommodation. It was evident right
from the start that these often under-nourished people were scarcely able to
make the desired contribution to the efficiency of the war and armaments
economy. This was particularly true of the Soviet prisoners of war. The fact that
the Soviet Union had not ratified the agreement on the treatment of prisoners
of war was used by the Nazi regime as a pretext for not granting Soviet soldiers
«food corresponding to this agreement as regards quantity and quality», 19 even
though the Wehrmacht Supreme Command saw «adequate nourishment» as a
precondition for the effective use of Soviet prisoners of war. 20 As the treatment
of «Eastern workers» had to be equivalent to that of the Soviet prisoners of war,
they too suffered in many cases from terrible under-nourishment and malnutrition.
One Ukrainian forced labourer recalled Maggi GmbH in Singen:
«The work was hard and the food was pitiful: there was soup swimming
with maggots. Begging for more bread or better food resulted in merciless
beating from the camp commander.» 21
The food must also have been very poor at the Singen-based plant of Georg
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