Among the many disturbing aspects of the Holocaust is the issue of forced labor. That six million Jews and many others were murdered in Nazi death camps is well known; much less frequently recognized is the dehumanizing forced labor imposed at concentration camps as well as at German businesses. After 1942, when the tide of World War II was turning against Germany, the concentration camps became an indispensable part of the war economy. Forced labor emerged as essential to the war effort, and the number of people enslaved exceeded seven million.
Camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravensbrueck, and Flossenbuerg became administrative centers for massive networks of subsidiary forced-labor camps. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and killed hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, labor shortages led to an alternative policy; many Soviet prisoners of war were put to work, mainly in armament construction projects. In German occupied areas, Jewish laborers were singled out for particularly cruel and humiliating treatment.

In addition to being a first step to extermination, the Nazi ghettos used Jewish labor. In the ghetto of Lodz, Poland, the Nazis opened 96 factories. The ability to work staved off death only temporarily. Ultimately, the Nazis' goal was to exterminate every Jew in Europe. The second a worker was seen to be working below the accepted level of productivity, his fate was a bullet to the head or "deportation to the East," where the death camps waited. In Vilna, Lithuania, every Jew who lived in the "small ghetto" (made up of Jews without work permits) was shot by the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile killing squads sent in by the Nazis after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 whose goal was to kill every Jew they could find) in October 1941.

Working conditions were horrific in the concentration camps. Slaves often worked shifts of up to eleven hours, in conditions of almost no food or warmth and with a minimum amount of sleep. They were literally worked to death. In 1943, 8,491 deaths were recorded in the Mauthausen concentration camp forced labor system which had an average population of 21,100. Slave laborers understood their situation. In The World Must Know by Michael Berenbaum, Michael Vogel recalls his experience:
Another thing was to see when you went to work, when you went to slave labor, who was no longer there. Who's left. And it became like an animal. Oh, I'm living another day, or he's no longer. And you know the worst part, that you couldn't cry for it. You couldn't cry in Auschwitz. You cried, you died. If you showed even more weakness than you already had, you didn't survive the day.

In 1942, when the Soviet POWs were put to work rather than starved to death due to the labor shortage, SS chief Heinrich Himmler for a while considered using Jews for labor rather than destroying them immediately. But this idea was dismissed. No Jewish laborer was indispensable; nothing could impede the "Final Solution," not even economic utility. However, this policy of mass killings damaged Germany's war effort. Racism precluded sending the Jews to Germany as foreign laborers, even at a time when Germany was suffering from a severe manpower shortage. Large numbers of Jews who were forced laborers were even taken from their places of work and deported to the death camps. The Nazis regarded the slave laborer as an easily replaceable product, not as a capital investment. If a Jew died on the job, there were many more Jews who could fill the empty spaces. As a result, Jewish workers couldn't show any weakness. Fritzie Fritshall, an Auschwitz survivor, recalls this in Berenbaum's The World Should Know:
. . . we would carry huge rocks from one side to another. Now you need to know that we were undernourished. We were all weak. And to carry a big rock like that was a lot of weight and a lot of work. By the time they took us to the barracks at night we could barely crawl. But we needed to show that we could still walk, and we were strong enough to give one more day.

A disturbing and little-known aspect of the Nazi slave labor system was the involvement of big business. Many of the most respected German corporations had no scruples about using concentration camp labor. A company's decision to use slave labor was voluntary. By the end of 1944, one half a million ghetto and concentration camp inmates were chained to hundreds of corporations. The greatest offenders were either state-owned enterprises - such as BRABAG, the Herman Goring Works, and Volkswagen - or munitions and arms makers, such as Junkers, Messerschmitt, Heinkel, Krupp, Dynamit Nobel, and Rheinmetall-Borsig. By 1943, almost every major private corporation was complicit, including BMW, AEG-Telefunken, Siemens, Daimler-Benz, Schering, and the component firms of IG Farben, namely Bayer, BASF, Hoechst, and Agfa. German divisions of American firms were equally guilty, such as Ford and General Motors' Opel.

"Primitive," "deplorable," and "catastrophic" were adjectives used to describe conditions at these camps and factories. Weekly reports in the summer of 1942 from the new Farben plant at Auschwitz were filled with comments about the lack of washing facilities and the pitiful hygienic conditions. Circumstances in the Krupp plants were equally as bad. Dr. Wilhelm Jaeger, Krupp's chief physician, reported that the eastern workers arrived in the Third Reich half-starved and then were subjected to beatings and other cruel treatment. Conditions in the barracks were deplorable. There was massive overcrowding, causing great discomfort and disease. In some camps there were twice as many workers in barracks as health standards would have allowed. In many camps, only a few toilets served thousands of workers, and excrement covered floors.
All of these industrial enterprises had put Jewish prisoners to work in existing factories and new ones near the ghettos and concentration camps. These workers were not paid even a pittance. Their "wages" of 3-8 marks per 11-12 hour day went directly to the SS or to the national treasury. Nazi officials "earned" quite a sum of money while these companies were voluntarily engaging in vicious maltreatment of slave laborers. One example of this barbarity was the IG Farben facility, located only three miles east of Auschwitz. Historian Peter Hayes has documented that the wretched conditions and routine brutality inflicted on the enslaved Jewish construction workers there cost nearly 25,000 lives while earning the SS some 20 million marks (wartime value). When Soviet troops closed in on the site in January 1945, more than 9,000 barely-surviving Jewish laborers were sent on a death march west, on which one-third of them died or were killed by their guards.

Today more than two million survivors of forced labor at such companies as Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, Ford, and Bayer await just compensation for their work and suffering. The corporations that used slave labor profited from it. Many are today multi-billion dollar multi-national leaders in their industries. But the obligations, moral and material, arising from the use of forced labor, have never been met. At the same time, Nazi overseers receive their pensions, even some convicted as war criminals and serving prison sentences. Time is running out. The survivors are dying. Those companies that used slave labor have a moral and legal obligation to pay these victims for their work and suffering now.