VOLUNTARY AND FORCED LABOR OF THE FRENCH POPULATION IN THE THIRD REICH

Abstract

The study is devoted to the analysis of the prerequisites for the occupation of France by Nazi Germany during the Second World War and the peculiarities of the involvement of labor resources from the occupied French territories in the economy of the Third Reich.

The author provides an overview of the official and real policy pursued by the Third Reich towards neighboring France, as well as the position of the French political forces, which legalized the formation of the puppet Vichy Government in the French territories under the control of the Reich. Thanks to this government and local collaborators, the German administration established the Nazi «New Order» in France to integrate France’s raw, food, industrial and labor resources into the Reich economy.

After the signing of the armistice, numerous French war prisoners were turned into cheap labor for Germany in violation of the Geneva Convention. As for the recruitment of the civilian population to work in Germany, at first the main attention was paid to the voluntary recruitment of workers, but with the beginning of the military campaign against the Soviet Union, the need for new workers increased sharply and the Vichy government, at the request of the German administration, started the organization «Labor Conscription Service», which forcibly sent French workers to Germany.

The policy of the Vichy government was supported by the continuous development of legislation in the field of French labor requisition, which progressed from volunteerism to the three «Sauckel’s actions». However, the fact that the French state was the only one in occupied Europe that formally lived by its own laws, rather than by German decrees, created an impression of relative independence compared to other occupied countries that no longer had their own government, and also provided an opportunity to shift the responsibility for mass violence onto the puppet government, when attempts at voluntary mobilization of the population had failed.

Thus, France was the third supplier of forced laborers to the Reich, after the Soviet Union and Poland, and the country that mobilized the most qualified laborers to Germany.