Searching for
Traces of Forced Labour
An Online Exhibition
The Project
This exhibition presents the outcomes of two international study camps organized by the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre in cooperation with Action Reconciliation Service for Peace and Service Civil International Germany in July-August 2025.
Volunteers from Argentina, Belarus, Catalonia, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Serbia, Spain, Turkey, and the United States explored Berlin and studied the history of Nazi forced labour. Under the guidance of photographer Giovanni Lo Curto, they created a website with their personal visual stories. This exhibition presents a selection of their work, offering individual perspectives on the history and memory of Nazi forced labour in Berlin.
The project was organised by the International Youth Meeting Centre of the Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre in cooperation with different partners.
One Summer Camp was coordinated with Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste e.V. (ASF) and another Study Camp was coordinated with Service Civil International (SCI).
Nazi Forced Labour
Who were the forced laborers? Nobody could live in Germany during the Nazi era without encountering them at every turn: Forced labourers from all over Europe were omnipresent. Over 20 million people involuntarily worked for the Nazi state in the German Reich and the occupied territories. These included prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners, Jews, Roma and Sinti. The largest group, however, were the approximately 8.4 million civilian workers who were deported to the Reich – men, women and children from the occupied territories of Europe.
Forced laborers equal forced laborers?
In a total of 30,000 camps, the abducted people worked under the harshest conditions. Their everyday lives were marked by racism. Western Europeans were considered to be related to the German “master race” and were treated better than Eastern Europeans. The French, Belgians and Dutch were therefore subjected to the least harassment. The Czechs and Serbs had already suffered much worse. Poles were even lower in the racist hierarchy. The lowest level was made up of people from the Soviet Union, the so-called “Eastern workers”. According to Nazi ideology, they were considered inferior.
Where were they deployed?
In particular, the German war economy would not have been sustainable without the mass deployment of forced laborers. But in the end all areas of society profited from it. Above all industry and agriculture, but also medium-sized enterprises, crafts enterprises, municipalities, churches and even private households resorted to the cheap labour of the Nazi dictatorship.