SLAVE LABOUR UNDER THE THIRD REICH

German government pays for shocking Holocaust survivor testimonies to be published online

By Allan Hall


The videotaped testimony of Nazi slaves has been published online for historians and students to learn of their ordeal.

Six hundred forced labourers pressed into the service of the Third Reich’s war machine give their testimony in a multi-million pound project paid for by the German government.

They form a small part of the 12million enslaved by the Nazis to toil for the state while Germany’s male population fought in the armed services.

The Nazis were different from other slave-owning societies, like the ancient Romans or the plantation owners of the deep south in America, in that their slaves were not valued commodities but units to be abused, starved and often worked to death.

The 341 men and 249 women featured in the videos tell of working in concentration camps or munitions plants under gruelling conditions for little or no pay, miserable living conditions and exposure to hunger and disease.

'Their suffering should not be forgotten,' said Guenther Saathoff, the head of the Remembrance, Responsibility And Future foundation managing the £4.1billion fund.

Some 1.66million people from nearly 100 countries received compensation from a German government fund between 2001 and 2007.

Saathoff said the online video project was launched because the former forced labourers were seeking more than reparations.

'The victims did not want only money that was owed to them - they also wanted to tell about things that no one wanted to hear about for decades,' he said.

In one account, a Hungarian Jew called Henry Friedman in his 80s who has lived in Atlanta, Georgia, since the war's end said he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.

Friedmann told of being beaten and how he was forced to work at a huge arms factory in Budapest in 1944, before he was assigned to transports for German troops fighting the Russians in the countryside.

'We were taken by the Germans to an outpost, and we were given orders that every day we would assemble at 3am and would climb the mountain and would be over there from between three till five, six the next morning,' he said.

'At that time, in the mountains, it was maybe 40 below zero. No clothing, not the right clothing. When we finished supplying the hot food, we brought down on stretchers the wounded or dead Germans to the base of the mountains. That would be our job.'

He said Jews suffered particularly brutal treatment among the workers.

'In case someone gets hurt, don't even ask for any kind of bandage or anything because you're a Jew - you're not entitled to - which meant that if you're lost or hurt, you have to freeze to death or bleed to death,' he said.

The documentary project began in 2005.

Survivors ranging in age from 65 to 98 were recorded on video primarily in Eastern Europe but also in the United States, Israel and South Africa.

A third of them, mostly Jews or Roma, were forced to work in concentration camps in particularly degrading and frequently life-threatening conditions.

A former slave labourer, Felix Kolmer, said the online archive would make increasingly rare personal accounts of the Nazi programme available to researchers, teachers and students.

'Victims will finally get the public recognition and attention for which they have often waited in vain over the last decades,' said Kolmer, who is also vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, a Holocaust survivors group.

The project can be viewed at: www.zwangsarbeit-archiv.de

taken from : Mail Online (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1126971/German-government-pays-shocking-Holocaust-survivor-testimonies-published-online.html)