ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of several central aspects of the deployment of forced labourers in the Third Reich. It focuses on three issues. The first is the area of conflict between racial ideology and economic policy in which the forced labourers were placed. The second concerns the impact of this dilemma on the experience of forced labour, including several areas of daily life. The third addresses the consequences of their deployment as forced labourers for former Soviet civilian workers and prisoners of war, who were subjected to decades-long discrimination in the Soviet Union. The conflict between economic interests and ideological principles is demonstrated with particular clarity by the example of the Soviet prisoners of war in the Third Reich. The system was based on the National Socialist racial scale, at the summit of which stood the German ‘master race’, followed by Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Romance and Slavic peoples.
