(Mirror.)

Although I intentionally wrote this for World Day Against Child Labour, as I was researching I learnt that it was 80 years ago today that the Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, proposed Heuaktion: the kidnapping and transporting of 40,000 Poles between the ages of 10 and 14 to the Third Reich as neoslaves. This dating is, as far as I can tell, purely coincidental. (Confusingly, some sources set the order’s date to June 14th. It seems that Rosenberg merely wrote the order on the 12th but hadn’t ratified it until the 14th, I’m guessing.)

In any case, I want to tell you about child labor under Fascism:

After [the Third Reich and the Slovak Republic] invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the Polish territory under [Fascist] control was divided into two zones. Whereas about 40% was incorporated into the German Reich, the rest was transformed into the General Government. Policies towards the inhabitants of these zones at first differed significantly, but with time practices converged. In the annexed territories, policies were targeted at Germanisation and discrimination against, or deportation of, undesired inhabitants.²

On 1 April 1940, a compulsory service regulation (Dienstpflichtverordenung) obliged everybody over the age of 12 to work.³ After a measure issued on 26 October 1939 had prescribed the employment of Polish citizens aged between 18 and 60 in the General Government, the minimum age threshold was lowered to 14 years on 14 December.⁴

The problem caused by these violations of the German Youth Protection Act (Jugendschutzgesetz) prohibiting labour for persons under the age of 18 was solved by a decree on 1 September 1941 calling the provisions inapplicable to Polish children.⁵ Practices went beyond the legal framework, as children aged between 13 and 15 in a weak state of health were also considered eligible, and children deported with family members could work from the age of 10 upwards.⁶

Unemployed Polish citizens in the annexed territories and in the General Government needed to register at the employment‐exchange service (Arbeitsamt) and could be called up for work.⁷ Later, the police also organised razzias in streets, at public gatherings and in schools⁸ and sent recruits to transit camps (Umsiedlerlager), also called Poles’ camps (Polenlager).⁹ After a race examination, children were divided into those entitled for Germanisation and those to be sent off for forced labour.¹⁰

In the spring of 1942, these policy measures resulted in the 10 to 14 year age cohort being massively recruited. East Prussian farmers complained that two 10‐year‐olds were not ‘a proper equivalent’ of one male adult.¹¹ Their complaint touches upon an important aspect of child forced labour.

Until the age of 12, children were entitled to limited schooling, but after that age no legal measure foresaw differences in the workload for children and adults.¹² The amount of work children needed to perform was arbitrarily set in an undocumented negotiation between trustees and employers.

Like their adult counterparts, Polish child workers needed to obey a long list of police orders. They had to wear a ‘P’ sign knitted on their clothes, could not leave their lodgings after the curfew, had limited access to public transportation, only received holiday in exceptional cases and suchlike.¹³ Disobedience was punished and could lead to being sent to a work re‐education camp (Arbeitserziehungslager) for children under the age of 16, or a concentration camp for teenagers.¹⁴

Whereas Zofia Bigorajska claims that 35% of the authors of autobiographies about forced labour, including adults and children, report having been sent to such camps, Feichtlbauer estimates it happened to one out of 20 workers.¹⁵ This discrepancy may indicate that those who were sent to camps later felt a stronger need to write down their experiences than other forced labourers.

Estimates about the number of Polish child forced labourers are necessarily imprecise. Herbert Ulrich states that 5.7 million foreign workers were active in [the Third Reich] in August 1944, of which 1,659,764 were Poles.¹⁶ In a more recent work, Mark Spoerer estimates that, out of a total of 13.5 million foreign workers, there were 1.6 million Polish Prisoners of War, forced labourers and concentration‐camp prisoners, and 1.5 million Soviet and Polish child forced labourers.¹⁷

Two‐thirds of the approximately 1.6 million Polish forced labourers were employed on farms, with the others working mainly in industry.¹⁹ Among the German provinces, Brandenburg was the most popular destination, with 162,391 Polish forced labourers on 30 September 1944. It was closely followed by Eastern Prussia, with 144,511, including about 20,000 children.²⁰

Decree (Anordnung) Nr. 51 from 1 October 1940 anticipated the employment of Polish women between the ages of 16 and 20 with some knowledge of German and an ‘acceptable racial appearance’.²¹ The age category was widened, with the result that in mid‐1944 9,519 Polish female domestic servants between the ages of 14 and 35 were officially registered.²² Whereas some domestic workers came to be treated as family members, practices we would nowadays labelled trafficking were also evident.²³

[…]

Polish former child forced labourers narrate their leaving of home for an often unknown destination as a painful rupture of their life path causing them to grow up in a world with unfamiliar social rules.⁵⁷

Czesław Łuszczyński, for example, was transported from his village Modlin in Mazovia to the transit camp in Działdowo. He recalls how he awaited his race examination in a dorm: ‘The night was just a frightening blur. Why did my mother ever give birth to me? How could someone as stupid as me be working for a German? I saw my whole life flash before my eyes.’⁵⁸

After children had been selected for labour, most were exhibited at a local market. Many narrate in detail the experience of being offered for sale like cattle, as this exemplified the humiliation that was to accompany their later labour experiences.⁵⁹

(Emphasis added.)

…wow.