“Dear Papa! I have been conscripted into a living grave. . . .” So began a letter in the West Berlin newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat in March 1948. The young man had been sent to work in the Soviet occupation zone's uranium mines, near Aue in the Saxon Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains), and had written to his parents in despair.Footnote 1 The news article that accompanied the letter explained, “The uranium mines… are not in the Urals, but in the Erzgebirge. But reports from [the Erzgebirge] are as hard to come by as [ones] from the Urals.”Footnote 2 Other newspapers in Germany's Western zones of occupation also published reports of “slave conditions,” and “forced labor” in the mines.Footnote 3
Western accusations of forced labor and Eastern German responses to such claims vividly illustrate the forces shaping postwar Germany between 1945 and 1949. The press, occupation authorities, German officials, and German workers all vied to define Germany's immediate and future status through battles over labor and political legitimacy. Uranium mines in the Soviet Zone became a focal point in this struggle because they encapsulated the pressures shaping postwar German society: the importance of effective labor policies for economic and political recovery; the ideological battles of the emerging Cold War; and the challenges of administering territories in which populations, information, and political authority were fluid and fragmented.
The Soviet Zone's use of conscription labor fueled contemporary western accusations that it was violating human rights with forced labor. Further, historians have described coercive labor policies in the East through 1948, and a switch to volunteer labor thereafter, without either distinguishing between conscription and forced labor or acknowledging the role of volunteer labor in the mines. But although coercion played a real role in staffing the mines, it was not the entire story. Eastern German labor officials insisted that the political legitimacy of a new socialist system depended on workers' voluntary participation. Workers, on the other hand, insisted on having the right to choose whether to work in the mines as volunteers or to refuse to work when they saw the system as unjust and unpredictable. Officials and workers alike read and responded to western press accusations of forced labor as they navigated the postwar labor market. By the time the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded in 1949, postwar dynamics and Cold War politics had decisively influenced East German labor policy.
Forced Labor in Postwar Politics
Debates about forced labor emerged as part of a wider discussion about human rights after World War II. In the interwar period, German human rights activists had focused on defending civil rights and connecting with international human rights efforts.Footnote 4 International groups paid attention at the time to forced labor, but considered it a colonial, rather than a European, problem. The International Labor Organization (ILO), an agency of the League of Nations and later of the United Nations, produced the Convention Concerning Forced or Compulsory Labour in 1930.Footnote 5 Countries such as Britain and France had ratified the ILO convention on the understanding that it applied to their colonies, but had little relevance in Europe.Footnote 6 But World War II dramatically reshaped Europeans' understanding of forced labor. After 1945, condemnations of Nazi Germany's use of forced labor, as well as new western political interest in the Soviet Gulag, reframed forced labor as a European human rights issue. And whereas many interwar European governments had resisted linking minority and labor rights under a broader human rights umbrella, after World War II, governments around the world inundated the newly created United Nations with accusations of human rights abuses. Their accusations helped to undermine old colonial regimes, discredit Communist governments, and alter the international balance of power.Footnote 7
The Nuremberg trials made Germany “ground zero” for new international ideas about governments' responsibility to protect human rights.Footnote 8 But although Nazi crimes continued to shape international discussion about human rights and forced labor, by 1947, Western countries had taken control of that discussion as a way to condemn the Soviet Union and emerging East European communist regimes.Footnote 9 As early as 1946, the U.S. government and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) began publicizing Soviet use of forced labor in the Gulag to discredit Communism. Publications such as David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky's Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (1947), as well as Victor Kravchenko's defection memoir I Chose Freedom (1946), turned forced or “slave” labor into a potent international critique of the Soviet Union. Within Germany, Western German Social Democrats called forced labor a hallmark of dictatorship and tied it to both Nazism and the Soviet Union.Footnote 10 Germans in all of the occupation zones drew parallels between political prison camps in the Soviet Zone and Nazi concentration camps, reinforcing a sense of continuity between Nazi rule and Soviet occupation.Footnote 11 In short, forced labor had become a policy issue in the UN and a theme of the emerging Cold War by 1947.Footnote 12 The Gulag took on international significance as the prime example of forced labor, prompting the UN and ILO to form a joint investigatory committee in 1951.Footnote 13 By the mid 1950s, however, Western interest in forced labor as a Cold War politicial issue died down following Stalin's death and Soviet criticism of labor conditions in South Africa and the United States.Footnote 14
These broader developments provide the context for debates about labor policies in the German uranium mines in the late 1940s. Western critics of the Soviet Zone likened East Germany's forced labor to Nazism, condemning uranium mining in the Erzgebirge. British-American journalist Werner Knop claimed that for Germans in the Soviet Zone, the word “Erzgebirge” had become “what the names of Buchenwald and Belsen were to the anti-Nazis of Europe five years ago.”Footnote 15 Both the Eastern and Western German press used comparisons with the Nazis to discredit each other's administrations.Footnote 16 Because the ruling Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) had made antifascism a cornerstone of its legitimacy, these accusations were especially threatening in the East.Footnote 17 The campaign to expand uranium mining that had begun in August 1947, and the barrage of Western press attacks that followed, coincided, ironically, with new SED efforts to win popular support for its denazification policies. Accusations that the SED was behaving like the Nazis therefore undermined its claims to legitimacy both at home and in the West.Footnote 18
In a divided Germany steeped in Cold War dynamics, the Western German press—with the support of the Western Allies—asserted that forced labor was as much a Soviet crime as it had been a Nazi crime. The Western press suggested that the Eastern Zone was becoming a Soviet outpost distinct from the rest of Germany. When the Social Democratic Der Abend reported on the uranium mines' “massive” use of forced labor in February 1948, the paper claimed, “In this too, the Eastern Zone follows the Soviet Union . . . , which has used between 10 and 15 million people as forced labor since 1929, far exceeding any example of forced labor in human history, including that of the Hitler regime.”Footnote 19 Associations with the Gulag portrayed the Soviet Zone as an aberration. This, in the context of new international discussions about human rights, challenged the legitimacy of Soviet and Eastern German political authority.Footnote 20
Eastern German labor officials responded that Western press reports about the mines were “exaggerated,” “invented,” “bald-faced lies.” Eastern Zone newspapers such as the Thüringer Volk decried Western reports as hypocritical, because Western authorities were seeking miners for the Ruhr coal works—where, Eastern papers and officials claimed, conditions were similar to those in the uranium mines.Footnote 21
Conscription or Forced Labor?
Labor conscription was used in both the Eastern and Western Zones in the early postwar period, in keeping with Allied occupation policy and, to some degree, with ILO guidelines.Footnote 22 Moreover, the legal basis for conscription had roots in Weimar- and Nazi-era law, as well as in occupation policy.Footnote 23 The mere fact of its use neither made the Soviet Zone distinct, nor automatically defined its labor practices as forced labor.
At issue was a distinction between conscription or compulsory labor, and forced or slave labor. “Conscription labor” was understood as short-term compulsory service. German, occupation, and international law considered it legitimate when used for the common good in times of crisis. But the ILO and later the United Nations declared “forced labor” a human rights violation. It was assumed to be neither limited nor in the service of workers' interests. Western charges of forced labor suggested that the methods used to staff the uranium mines were uniquely Eastern and violated international norms.
Historical accounts have tended to reinforce this sense of Eastern distinctiveness, with many historians agreeing that the uranium mines initially used conscripted labor, switching to majority volunteer labor only in late 1948.Footnote 24 In June of that year, the German Economic Commission (Deutsche Wirtschaftskommission, DWK), the leading German-run administrative authority in the Soviet Zone, issued new rules restricting conscription to exceptional cases and limiting the service obligation to six months; this was part of a wider effort to centralize labor policy in the Zone.Footnote 25 Nevertheless, portraying the transition from conscription to volunteer labor as a simple shift independent of the larger German and European context reinforces the narrative that until June 1948, “forced labor” was the only game in town. It suggests that the mines' use of conscription labor was uniquely “Eastern”; that workers had no choice about working in the mines; and that German administrators cared little about working conditions or workers' opinions. This narrative also makes it easy to assume that coercion ceased completely by 1949. None of these claims is true. Archival sources show that coercion and abuse were pervasive in the uranium mines and consistent with aspects of forced labor. But they also show that the combination of a porous East-West border, material interests, Western press coverage, and political leverage enabled Eastern German workers and labor officials to make real, albeit sub-optimal and officially unsanctioned, choices about working in the mines.Footnote 26
Eastern German labor officials were well aware of their policies' political implications beyond the borders of the Eastern Zone. “Forced labor” was dangerous: not just because of internal resistance, but because it focused intrazonal and international attention on negative distinctions between Germany's Eastern and Western Zones. Western press coverage, labor models, critiques of Soviet forced labor, and the still permeable border between occupation zones offered alternatives to Eastern German policies.
Eastern German authorities did use conscription labor far more, and far longer, than officials in the West.Footnote 27 Soviet demands for uranium created a corresponding demand for laborers to mine it. Conscription shaped Eastern German workers' views of uranium mining and of the Soviet Zone as a whole. In turn, workers' reactions eventually pushed Eastern German officials to switch to an all-volunteer mining operation. By 1949 new miners were almost all volunteers. Despite this, Western rhetoric persistently described the East as a land of forced labor. To counter this narrative, Eastern German authorities honed and rehoned their recruitment strategies. Their endeavors were aimed not just at sending warm bodies to the mines: they were central to creating a positive image of the Eastern Zone in the early days of the Cold War.
Uranium Mining Begins
In 1945, American nuclear testing and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted the Soviet Union to begin aggressively developing its own atomic bomb.Footnote 28 The Soviets had not yet found significant domestic sources of uranium, but they occupied both Czechoslovakia, with known uranium mines around Jachymov, and the Saxon Erzgebirge, a mining area famous for its radioactive springs. Soviet and German investigators began exploring the Erzgebirge in search of radioactive material in 1945. They hit pay dirt in 1946 and began mining that July, sending the ore to the USSR as reparations. Miners included both conscripted workers and volunteers.Footnote 29
The Soviet military administration decided to accelerate uranium production in August 1947. The Soviets controlled the mines and rarely allowed German officials in, but they depended on Eastern German labor authorities—especially the German Administration for Labor and Social Welfare (Deutsche Verwaltung für Arbeit und Sozialfürsorge, DVAS), along with state labor ministries and local labor offices—to recruit workers and provide them with housing, food, and transportation. They gave the DVAS until October to send another 20,000 able-bodied workers to the mines.Footnote 30 Local employment offices across the Zone were to recruit miners under the guidance of the DVAS. The Free German Trade Union Federation (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, FDGB), regional labor ministries, and other authorities were also expected to help. Even so, Eastern German officials agreed that it was impossible to find that many workers within a few weeks.Footnote 31 Occupied Germany was still besieged with displaced persons and returning POWs. The Eastern Zone had labor shortages in agriculture, coal mining, and other critical economic sectors. These shortages had worsened since mid-1946, when the Soviets began siphoning thousands of workers from other industries to staff the uranium mines.Footnote 32 Labor officials feared they would undermine an already blighted economy and lose public support. But unwilling to refuse the Soviets, they looked for ways to deliver bodies to the mines.
Conscription and coercion were crucial to staffing the uranium mines from 1946 to 1949. Order Nr. 3 of the Allied Control Authority laid out the occupation employment system in January 1946. It allowed occupation authorities to use employment offices to place people in jobs, link ration cards to employment office registration, and make work assignments compulsory.Footnote 33 The American, British, and Soviet occupation authorities all used this order to deal with labor shortages in mining.Footnote 34 Initially, the Soviet demand that German labor authorities find miners seemed in line with practices in other zones. Occupation authorities believed that compulsory labor was necessary given the challenges they faced with rebuilding, unemployment, and economic disruption. But conscription sparked widespread resistance from the beginning. By mid-1946, the British Zone's Ruhr coal mines had switched strategies, using wage and food incentives to boost volunteerism.Footnote 35 Such incentives proved effective: within a year, the Ruhr mines had attracted thousands of young men fleeing conscription in the Soviet Zone.Footnote 36
Volunteers were also important in the Soviet Zone. From the moment they received the August 1947 order, Eastern German labor authorities argued that although, in the short term, Soviet labor quotas could only be met through conscription, their long-term goal had to be to attract volunteer miners, since volunteers would show that workers understood and embraced the political and economic importance of the mines.Footnote 37 Labor officials claimed in an August 1947 press release that, contrary to Western press claims, “labor conscription is not peculiar to the Eastern zone. [In the postwar context] it is usual and unavoidable in Berlin and in the Western occupation zones as well.”Footnote 38 Meanwhile, the FDGB also assured its branch offices that recruiters were finding volunteers, which meant that conscription would only be short-term policy.Footnote 39 Further, as the incentive system in the Ruhr region of the British Zone began to attract volunteer labor, Eastern authorities pointed to it as a model that they, too, should adopt.Footnote 40
In the months that followed, the FDGB and the East German labor administration worked at recruiting a volunteer workforce and winning support for the mines, designing posters, running newspaper and radio advertisements, and organizing speakers to address expellees and returning soldiers.Footnote 41 They brought miners to speak to potential recruits, hoping that direct experience would be more persuasive than government propaganda.Footnote 42 They continued efforts begun in April 1947 to improve miners' working conditions and legal protections.Footnote 43 Before the launch of a big recruitment campaign that October, the FGBG wrote that “it would be a great moral victory . . . to succeed in finding the necessary labor without conscription.”Footnote 44
Workers, Rumors, and Insistence on Choice
Popular responses to the campaign to recruit uranium miners—for compulsory service or as volunteers—vividly portray the Soviet occupied zone as a still fluid political and social landscape in which ordinary people based their choices on rumors, first-person reports, Western press stories, and the dictates of their stomachs, as well as on German and Soviet policy. Potential miners faced coercion, from formal labor conscription to less official arm-twisting. But labor officials also courted workers with promises of material goods, social privilege, and a brighter future. Moreover, workers used the still permeable intrazonal border, the threat of emigration, administrative chaos, and a strong sense of their own rights in responding to conditions in the mines, often forcing Eastern German and Soviet officials to adjust to their demands.Footnote 45
Eastern German workers' responses to mine recruitment campaigns reflected a range of views about the mining project, as well as about political and social developments in the Soviet Zone. Some potential miners fled the Eastern Zone in response to stories of horrific conditions, whereas others accepted conscription, at least for a time. Still others volunteered for mine work. Especially for returning soldiers or expellees, gainful employment, however difficult, was a means of gaining a foothold in postwar society.Footnote 46 Those who fled before ever seeing the mines likely viewed conscription as “forced labor.” But miners who went to work either as draftees or as volunteers seem to have been willing to work as long as they believed they were being treated fairly. They embraced the view that the postwar setting made hard work and difficult conditions inevitable. But they also accepted mine work in anticipation of the benefits labor recruiters promised: extra rations, consumer goods, and decent wages. Further, many insisted that they had basic rights: a minimum standard of housing, freedom of movement, basic workplace safety measures, and the long-term prospect of a stable family and community life.
Most ordinary Germans in the Eastern Zone heard about the uranium mines in 1947 as news spread by word of mouth and through Western news reports. It was still possible to distribute newspapers across zones, and the Western Allies and the Soviets spread propaganda outside their own territories—even as they tried to block publications from the other side. Western papers were shipped to West Berlin and to Western communities near the Soviet Zone, making them readily available to Easterners who crossed the intrazonal border.Footnote 47 The Eastern German newspaper Thüringer Volk claimed in July 1947 that it was “astonished” by reports originating from the West: “Two thousand miners are fleeing the Eastern Zone every week! Hundreds of thousands seek to flee [West] to escape conditions in the Eastern Zone! Miners said to be going to [the mines] in Aue are being shipped to Siberia! Rumors and more rumors…”Footnote 48 Miners and people living in the mining district told friends and relatives about their experiences.Footnote 49 Around the same time, the Thuringian Ministry of Labor reported that attempts to recruit volunteers had failed because “the most nonsensical rumors… are buzzing around the region,” making the locals skittish.Footnote 50
By the time the August 1947 recruitment campaign began, reports of ill-treatment, horrific working conditions, and catastrophic accidents abounded. The Thüringer Volk had hoped to convince the public that that such rumors were unreliable. But the paper's editors and the Eastern German authorities had a problem: many, if not all, of the rumors were based in fact. In the early years, uranium miners often did live in filthy improvised housing. Tools and protective clothing were in short supply. Miners and their supervisors paid scant heed to work safety. Illness abounded, ranging from sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis to workplace accidents and radiation exposure. In 1946 and 1947, as many as half of all conscripted workers fled in order to escape the mines.Footnote 51
The rumor mills and the Western press explained conditions in the uranium mines not in terms of postwar difficulties, but as both a uniquely Eastern or Soviet phenomenon, and, to a lesser degree, as a continuation of Nazi-era abuses. Uranium miners complained that the mines were like “peacetime concentration camps.”Footnote 52 Some draftees asserted that former Nazis were being passed over for conscription, and concluded that the new government favored Nazis over antifascists.Footnote 53 Other rumors suggested that the mines were akin to the Gulag, a cover for sending workers to do forced labor in Siberia—or even a front for drafting Germans into the Soviet army.Footnote 54 People with little formal political power used such claims to pressure officials for changes in all the occupation zones, but in the East these arguments posed a direct challenge to Soviet and SED rule.Footnote 55
For a new Eastern German administration staking its legitimacy on its antifascist and supposedly ‘democratic’ credentials, claims of continuity with the Nazis and very real popular hostility to socialism posed problems.Footnote 56 Anti-Soviet and anti-SED feeling ran high among returning POWS, who were sought after as miners, and in early 1947, German mine managers told the Saxon SED that such sentiment was finding fertile soil in the pits.Footnote 57 The Saxon Ministry of Labor responded to reports of discontent and poor conditions in April 1947, claiming that “the rumors are greatly exaggerated” and “largely the result of provocation by fascist elements.” Yet the memo also acknowledged that miners had insufficient tools and received erratic pay, and the ministry urged officials to improve conditions.Footnote 58 Labor officials recognized that in order to run the mines with volunteers, they had to change popular perceptions, as well as conditions on the ground. Wretched conditions might not constitute Nazism or slavery, but they spoke of a system with little respect for workers' rights or agency. In short, by equating poor conditions with Nazism or the Gulag, Eastern miners and the Western press found a powerful weapon for attacking the legitimacy of the Soviet system in Eastern Germany.
As news of labor conscription spread in 1947, many young men—the workers most wanted in the mines—voted with their feet. Some ignored orders to report for medical exams and labor transports. Others contested their orders, arguing that they were physically unfit or could not leave their families, farms, and businesses.Footnote 59 Some who had already begun work left the mines without permission. And because of what they had heard about the mines, thousands fled to Germany's Western occupation zones. As one young man put it in early 1947, “It is urgent for me to be in the West. . . . The Russians have opened a uranium mine. . . . Aue is like a prison camp . . . to work there for half a year means death.”Footnote 60 American occupation officials noticed a new influx of illegal migrants fleeing labor conscription in the Eastern Zone.Footnote 61 Some even left without waiting to be called up. Eastern officials complained that, even when they had secured miners through conscription or as volunteers, many vanished after boarding trains to the Erzgebirge, disappearing to the Western Zones or melting back into the population of the Soviet Zone.Footnote 62 Some workers even volunteered just to get a free train ticket, which they then used to leave the Soviet Zone.Footnote 63 Others may have headed toward the Erzgebirge—only to change their minds. In one case, a transport of new miners from Thuringia reportedly arrived in Aue with only the transport leader: the rest had disappeared en route.Footnote 64
Other conscripted workers accepted their fate and headed to the mines. Refusing to do so could mean losing ration cards, being fined, or landing in jail.Footnote 65 Miners seem to have acquiesced as much in response to the carrots that employment offices dangled as to the sticks they wielded.Footnote 66 Draftees went to the mines on the understanding that they were committed for a set period (six months or a year), and that the pay and rations advertised in newspapers, train stations, loudspeaker announcements, and shop windows would help compensate for their conscription. Labor recruiters based their promises of high pay, extra rations, vacation, and other perks on formal agreements between the Soviet occupation authorities and the Eastern German labor administration. Beginning in April 1947, labor officials managed to persuade mine managers and Soviet authorities to agree to incremental improvements in housing, the length of work shifts, and health and safety inspections.Footnote 67 Some miners reported these advances with satisfaction. In June 1948, one wrote to the Jüterborg employment office that, after four weeks in the mines, he was “pleasantly surprised”: the work was not as hard as expected and he had saved a pound of butter to send home in his first week.Footnote 68
More workers complained, however, that although conditions had improved, Soviet mine administrators and German pit managers often ignored new regulations. Such violations were a mix of coercive strategy and administrative chaos. Recruits arrived at the mines, only to be told that they would not receive rations until they had worked for ten days.Footnote 69 Mine bosses tried to trick workers into longer contracts, or refused to release them when their contracts expired.Footnote 70 And the agencies running the mining region—the Saxon government, the FGDB and SED, employment offices, and the Soviets themselves—were hamstrung by limited resources and poor communication. They struggled to provide the housing, food, and consumer goods they had promised. Even their successes were uneven: whereas one mining town offered reasonable housing, another crammed miners into unheated barracks. The employment office in Aue argued, “Miners have to reckon with some discomfort, but they understand that something is being done for them, and they are satisfied.”Footnote 71
Miners did seem willing to put up with deprivation when they believed they were being treated fairly and that conditions would improve. Even conscripted workers expected fair treatment, and objected when they felt misled or ill-used. Public opinion soured as well when people heard stories that merchants and former Nazis had been exempted from conscription.Footnote 72 Returning soldiers drafted for the mines, the employment office in Aue reported, “find it unjust that they are not outfitted with appropriate work clothes before they are deployed to the mines.”Footnote 73 As Rudolf M. explained in a letter to the employment office in Eisenach, his fellow miners objected to conscription, not because they were being asked to contribute to rebuilding Germany or because the work was difficult, but because it was unclear how long they would have to remain in the mines. Lack of predictability, not hard work, lowered morale and undermined trust in the German authorities.Footnote 74 Martin H. struck a similar note in August 1948 in a letter to the radio program “The Listener Shares His Opinion”: having watched as the demands of uranium production subverted safety regulations, and having seen that miners were not released from their labor obligation after a year, he and his comrades no longer felt “like free workers, but like ‘prisoners without barbed wire.’” He suggested that simply honoring guarantees that miners would be let go after a year would reduce the number fleeing West.Footnote 75 Like Rudolf M., he complained not of being asked to work, but rather of inconsistent, unpredictable treatment.
Günther F. was conscripted to Aue and was one of only two people in his transport who stayed in the mines. As he explained it, “I wanted to finish my six months so that no one could accuse me of wrongdoing.” But rather than releasing him at the end of the contract, mine managers demanded that he sign up for another year, and withheld his ration card when he refused. Infuriated, he spoke out against these illegal practices at a local Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ) meeting. Günther F. ended up leaving the mines without permission or a ration card, and asked his employment office, “Can people blame us if we try our luck and seek freedom in the West?”Footnote 76 Such miners clearly accepted their duty to provide labor in a time of crisis and rebuilding, but refused to accept that they had no choice about their terms of service. Their stories are a dramatic example of a widespread phenomenon in the Eastern Zone: inconsistency, inefficiency, and abrupt reversals in SED and Soviet policy motivated people to leave the Soviet Zone for the West.Footnote 77 But the complaints also demonstrate that miners did not consider themselves helpless. They used emigration to the West and arguments about personal rights and state obligations to pressure Eastern German authorities into improving workers' legal and material conditions.Footnote 78
The importance of choice and the specter of forced labor loomed large for volunteers who arrived in the Erzgebirge only to find that volunteer status did not accord them respect, privilege, or freedom of choice. Often they were treated just like conscripted workers. In September 1947, for instance, a group arrived in Aue only to be told that they could not work until they provided conscription papers, which would have erased their volunteer status and changed their terms of employment. They responded by leaving the mines.Footnote 79 Other volunteers learned that they would not be reimbursed for their travel, as promised, until they signed one-year contracts.Footnote 80 And many volunteers were disillusioned when they found that mine conditions did not match recruiters' promises or their own expectations, as one miner told the SED's Dresden office in September 1947. He had returned to Germany after the war to find that, despite his business training, he could not find a job—so he volunteered to mine uranium: “I didn't let the rumors . . . dissuade me. I told myself . . . that despite widespread shortages, miners must be first in line for food and work clothing.” But his experiences forced him to rethink. “After working [in the mines] for six weeks, I have come to the conclusion that thousands of German workers are laboring pointlessly under inhumane conditions.” He had even joined the SED, but now found “that after this experience…I can't look anyone in the eye when they ask about my political affiliation.”Footnote 81
Miners' responses made it clear that the Eastern German administration and the Soviet occupation authorities were far from all powerful. Despite Western press reports of “slavery” and “forced labor,” many miners not only left the mines when they objected to conditions—but also contacted their employment offices and political leaders to explain their decisions and petition for change. More to the point, their objections sometimes had an impact: in September 1947, as miners' stories of poor conditions and mistreatment spread, the employment office in Schwerin told authorities in Berlin that they would not recruit new workers until they were told what was really happening in the mines.Footnote 82 Further, new draftees reacted to the complaints of experienced miners. In October 1948, a group of eighty-two new miners arrived in the Erzgebirge. They had been told that they were going to Marienberg, but the mine administration redirected their transport to Johanngeorgenstadt. The miners had heard that conditions in Johanngeorgenstadt were particularly bad and refused to work there. Mine officials threatened them with arrest, but in the end, afraid that they would flee, they brought in representatives from the FDGB and the SED, who negotiated with both sides until the workers agreed to transfer to Oberwiesenthal.Footnote 83
A number of scholars have shown that East Germans used the threat of emigration to negotiate with the regime in the 1950s, and the history of the uranium mines illustrates that Eastern German officials were shaping policy in response to emigration even before the GDR was founded.Footnote 84 Still, not everyone won concessions. Some miners were arrested and imprisoned for contract breaking. In other cases, mine administrators' threats deterred further protest. Further, Eastern German labor officials did not want to concede too much ground to workers since they could face arrest if they failed to deliver enough miners.Footnote 85 Still, employment offices paid attention to miners' reports, and many Germans were willing to work in the mines if they felt they were being treated fairly. Moreover, they were willing to confront officials when they thought they were not. They insisted that they had a choice.
Mine Administration: Competing Interests, Chaos, and the Quest for Legitimacy
“We can only respond to the press attacks if we have regular information from Aue.”Footnote 86
One of the greatest problems plaguing efforts to recruit volunteers in the Eastern Zone was a serious lack of coordination. This was a product of poor communication and postwar chaos, exacerbated, in turn, by the Soviets' refusal to share information with German officials, by sudden shifts in Soviet policy, by regional rivalries, and by the Eastern German leadership's own lack of transparency. Wilhelm Pieck, head of the SED, demonstrated the last point when he denied knowing about conscription labor in 1947.Footnote 87 At times, competing interests led both German and Soviet officials to circumvent official rules and agreements, knowing full well that the German labor administration could not stop them.
The DVAS never knew for certain how many workers were in the mines. Mine officials, Soviet soldiers, and even employment offices enlisted workers without routing them through official channels.Footnote 88 Employment offices sent miners to the Erzgebirge only to have them vanish en route. The Soviets released miners without notifying the German-run labor offices. Finally, as we have seen, many miners simply packed up and left when they had had enough.Footnote 89
Given these problems, the DVAS recognized that it was not enough to assign miners to the pits. It had to control public information about the uranium mines as well. Above all, its staff needed to convince workers that the mines and the Eastern Zone served Eastern Germans' interests. But labor officials faced a real dilemma. How could they recruit volunteers, agitate for better conditions, and refute negative reports if they had no idea what really was going on? The DVAS tracked rumor and public opinion, worried that as negative stories circulated, draftee miners would flee, volunteers would vanish, and the Eastern German public would sour on the SED's political project. The DVAS also had to contend with a barrage of negative stories in Western zone newspapers. In late August 1947, the DVAS acknowledged that such articles had “created bad blood,” making the shift to volunteer miners urgent.Footnote 90 The Western press published reports of catastrophic accidents, callous disregard for miners' safety, recruitment of miners into the Red Army, high rates of illness, and massive conscription campaigns.Footnote 91 One paper claimed that “every worker who hears the word ‘Aue’ feels his heart sink into his boots.”Footnote 92
Although the DVAS and regional labor ministries were supposed to combat negative reports, Eastern German labor officials often learned about conditions in the mining district just as everyone else in the Eastern Zone did: from rumors, first-person testimony, and the West German press.Footnote 93 This illustrates vividly that despite Western German claims, Eastern German authorities and even the Soviets could not control the flow of information or of people in the Eastern Zone.
Eastern German labor officials tried to learn more about conditions in the mines by petitioning officials in the mining district for information. When they suspected they were not getting the whole story, the DVAS, the Saxon and Thuringian regional governments, and even employment offices sent investigators to the Erzgebirge to check on claims made by journalists such as Werner Knop, by miners, and by the Eastern Zone's rumor mill.Footnote 94 In June 1947, for example, the Saxon labor ministry sent an inspector to look into Western press reports of a mine collapse.Footnote 95 In January 1948, a DVAS representative reported that stories that the Aue mine entrances were surrounded by barbed wire, or that workers were treated like prisoners, were untrue.Footnote 96 And in May 1949, an employment office in Mecklenburg hatched a plan to send some of its staff to work in the mines for four weeks. Since the British Zone's Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk was broadcasting negative stories about the mines, the Mecklenburgers hoped that if their staff obtained firsthand knowledge about mine conditions, they could better refute negative reports and persuade potential volunteers.Footnote 97 When labor authorities wanted accurate information, they talked above all to miners themselves.
Western descriptions portrayed the mining district as a prison. They declared Wismut, the Soviet company that ran the mines, to be a “state within a state,” a secretive world about which outsiders—including East Germans—knew little. Western journalist Werner Knop described the mining district as “surrounded with a living wall of police . . . [with] heavy penalties for anyone found leaving or entering . . . without permission.”Footnote 98 Yet Knop and others were able to cover the mining story precisely because the situation in the Erzgebirge, just like the border between the Eastern and Western German Zones, was highly fluid.
The number of people who left the mines without permission, and the vast rumor mill operating in the Soviet Zone, make it clear that the district was neither as secretive nor as impenetrable as Knop and others claimed. Officially, workers could only leave the mining areas with a permit, but when Paul Werner fled the mines to the American Zone in September 1948, he told U.S. occupation authorities that it was indeed possible to leave without one.Footnote 99 Further, as Norbert S. told Thuringian labor officials when he returned from Aue, “We were not sworn to secrecy.”Footnote 100
When the DVAS did obtain reliable information, it often found that, despite the labor administration's efforts to establish a volunteer mining workforce, coercion and compulsory labor continued. Constant demands for new miners pushed local authorities to deliver people by any means. Some local employment offices also treated the mines as a dumping ground for undesirable workers and political opponents.Footnote 101 Hans S. was conscripted despite being blind in one eye and thus exempt. When he objected, his employment office threatened to send him to Aue by force.Footnote 102 Others poached skilled workers from critical industries to fill their quotas, threatening those who resisted with arrest.Footnote 103 Even mine managers complained, arguing that employment offices made unrealistic promises in order to meet their recruitment quotas.Footnote 104
The official shift to purely volunteer labor after June 1948 did not immediately stop conscription, either in form or in spirit. As late as December 1948, labor authorities in Berlin accused the Mecklenburg government of causing 350 men to flee to the West by continuing to draft miners. Mecklenburg responded that an order to find 3,500 miners within two weeks had left them no choice but to use conscription, especially because “whisper campaigns (Flusterpropaganda) and agitation by the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk” encouraged workers to go West rather than become miners.Footnote 105 In 1949, the employment office in Aue reported that mine bosses often illegally seized workers' identity papers, leaving them unable to travel, get rations, or take another job.Footnote 106 Similarly, understaffed mines began refusing to release workers, including volunteers who had fulfilled their contracts. This, the DVAS noted, made finding new volunteers even more difficult.Footnote 107
Scandal in Berlin
The administrative and political boundaries between East and West, still open at the time, meant that sometimes even cross-zonal administrative agencies became involved in the eastern labor market. In February 1948, the West Berlin Social Democratic newspaper Telegraf published an article entitled “Forced Labor from Berlin,” which accused the city's Central Office for Refugees and Returning Soldiers (Hauptamt für Umsiedler und Heimkehrer, HAUH) of improperly conscripting refugees for the uranium mines and of threatening workers by giving them work assignment cards bearing the slogan “refusal to work is punishable.”Footnote 108 The HAUH was part of the Berlin magistrate, which, at least theoretically, was under joint Allied control. In practice, however, much of Berlin's city administration had fallen under Soviet influence. Labor recruitment for the uranium mines was the responsibility of the Soviet Zone's DVAS, which was supposed to limit its recruitment to the Soviet Zone outside Berlin. The HAUH had not only exceeded its authority, but had also aided one occupation authority over the others at a time when tensions threatened to shatter their shared administration in Berlin.Footnote 109 In this context, the Telegraf's accusation unleashed turmoil in the refugee office and excitement in the dailies, as East and West Berlin newspapers accused each other of spreading misinformation in order to influence public opinion and the political outcome of the scandal.
The Telegraf invoked the image of forced labor to sensationalize charges that rested on questions of intrazonal administrative jurisdiction. The paper was correct that the Eastern Zone's DVAS, not Berlin's HAUH, was responsible for assigning workers to the mines. But the accusation that the office was promoting forced labor turned a question of local jurisdiction into an intrazonal human rights scandal.
Because Soviet demands for new miners pushed Eastern German authorities to recruit people wherever they could, the DVAS had begun recruiting in transit camps, where refugees and returning soldiers offered a large, tempting population of unemployed laborers.Footnote 110 In winter 1948, the Berlin city government had to cope with thousands of refugees arriving from Eastern Europe, although, officially, these people were not allowed to enter the city. In this context, as the Telegraf charged, officials from the HAUH had placed workers in mining jobs without routing them through the DVAS-run employment offices. The office wanted to move as many refugees outside Berlin as possible, and the mines offered both employment and a destination. This was not the first—or the worst—instance in which officials used the mines to offload surplus refugees. Soviet officers had sent whole transports of refugees to the mines without consulting the DVAS.Footnote 111 The case nevertheless illustrates that even high-priority projects such as miner recruitment were carried out through emergency measures and improvisation, rather than coordinated across agencies.
Local pressures again warped administrative practices, putting them at odds with official rules and with the emerging divide between East and West. As the HAUH explained, Berlin faced the combined pressures of refugees who needed work and employers struggling with labor shortages; as a result, the government had begun placing refugees in jobs—any jobs—including those in the uranium mines. The HAUH wrote that it did not think “one can speak of a ‘campaign’ for [the uranium mining] industry.” Of the 9,000 people it had placed, 93 volunteers had chosen to go to the uranium mines, attracted by promises of private quarters and extra rations: “Not the slightest bit of coercion was used in offering people work.”Footnote 112
In a letter to the mayor, Fritz Geisthardt, the SPD head of Berlin's Social Welfare Bureau (of which the HAUH was a subsidiary), explained, “I see the issue [of labor recruitment for the mines] not primarily as a question of whether or not this is forced labor, but rather of [agencies] exceeding the bounds of their authority.” The Refugee Office, he pointed out, had made decisions without consulting other relevant authorities.Footnote 113 Even German officials from Berlin's Western sectors might have thus considered Soviet Zone labor recruitment legitimate if it had gone through the proper channels. The lack of communication across German administrative agencies nevertheless reinforced accusations of improper “forced labor.” For example, the HAUH's use of job assignment cards that declared “refusal to work is punishable” was illegal. But the HAUH had received the cards from the DVAS, and no one had told its officials that employment offices had begun crossing out this sentence to minimize accusations of coercion.Footnote 114
Public criticism eventually forced the HAUH to stop recruiting refugees for the mines. Internally, the office admitted that its failure to route potential miners through the employment offices had circumvented mandatory medical screening, and it agreed that the outdated job assignment cards were unacceptable.Footnote 115 But publically, the Soviet Zone's Central Administration for Labor and Social Welfare (Hauptverwaltung für Arbeit und Sozialfürsorge, HVAS) admonished the press to demonstrate “more objectivity” in its reporting.Footnote 116 The Eastern Zone eventually struck back in the battle to shape public opinion. East Berlin newspapers ran articles refuting the claims in Western papers and questioning the motives behind them. The Western stories had lied about the details of the Berlin refugee conscription case, they asserted, and the SPD was using the case to undermine the Eastern Zone. Moreover, they emphasized, the workers sent to the Erzgebirge had been volunteers, not forced labor.Footnote 117
The Labor Administration Fights Back
In February 1948, Albert Wesemeyer, the director of Erfurt's Labor and Social Welfare office told a meeting of city and industrial leaders, police, the FDGB, and local newspapers that it was important to make information available about the uranium mines because “the vast majority of the public still has a very negative view of them.” Political parties, workers' councils, and industrial leaders should use their influence, he argued, to convince workers of the mines' importance—instead of helping them avoid mine work.Footnote 118 Improved conditions in the Erzgebirge had produced more volunteers by 1948.Footnote 119 Yet, six months after the Erfurt meeting, the DVAS still fretted that it lacked control over advertising and recruitment.Footnote 120
Refusing to give up, East German labor administrators investigated rumors and honed a new message about the mines' importance. They challenged the Western press, chastised authorities who flouted the rules, and harried Soviet and German officials to improve miners' conditions. They wanted to fill Soviet-imposed quotas for the mines, but they also wanted to change popular views about the mines and the Eastern Zone as centers of forced labor.
In order to make mining more palatable, labor administrators claimed that miners—volunteer and conscripted—were providing a critical national service and were not being exploited by the Soviets. In August 1947, Jenny Matern, vice president of the Eastern German labor administration, presented uranium mining as a cure for regional poverty. Thanks to uranium, she claimed that “the western Erzgebirge has been recalled to vigorous life,” and that rumors of poor conditions were nothing more than malicious propaganda.Footnote 121 Framing mine work as national service was crucial, since, in legal terms, public service in a time of crisis was not considered forced labor.Footnote 122
Eastern German authorities knew that to win public acceptance of conscription, along with international legitimacy, they needed to make the case that uranium mining contributed directly to the German recovery, and that it was not a reparations program designed solely to benefit the Soviets. DVAS propaganda thus presented uranium mining as critical for German reconstruction.Footnote 123 In December 1947, the DVAS argued that the mines were connected both to the Erzgebirge's past and to Germany's postwar future:
Miners are the most sought after workers at the moment . . . and everything is being done to awaken understanding for the importance of increasing mine production. Economic rebuilding, not only in Germany, but in all of Europe . . . depends on producing raw material. [Mines] are essential for making up wartime losses . . . and for raising people's standard of living.Footnote 124
The Erzgebirge had been an important mining region since the Middle Ages, the DVAS noted, and uranium mining had “once again brought the Erzgebirge's importance for the national economy (Volkswirtschaft) to the fore.”Footnote 125
This message might have been compelling had the mines been producing coal or iron. But uranium? After World War II, German governments and companies were forbidden to use radioactive materials—but the Soviets were committed to joining the United States as a nuclear power. It was in this context that Herr Loppuch of the DVAS told a 1947 meeting of labor officials that one barrier to recruiting miners was the fact that neither German leaders nor the general population understood the purpose of mining uranium. Herr Steinke, head of the FDGB, asked whether uranium production was “for our economy, or will it be shipped to Russia?”Footnote 126 He thought that the Eastern German labor union should not support a project that benefited only the Soviets. Loppuch suggested that the mines were producing other ores besides uranium: “one can conclude that this isn't just about reparations, but about becoming independent of the West.”Footnote 127 This approach did not produce instant success: a 1948 missive from the Thuringian FDGB complained that the state's labor ministry was still failing to explain the mines' economic and political importance.Footnote 128 Nevertheless, the idea that uranium mining was important to Eastern German rebuilding became central to labor administration rhetoric. In November 1948, for example, the labor office in Arnstadt argued that officials should stress the mines' importance for political as well as economic development in order to win more public support.Footnote 129 And by 1949, a paper in Thuringia could describe uranium mining as a German “national project.”Footnote 130
Convincing Eastern Germans that the mines were legitimate meant, above all, combating their negative reputation. Far from enveloping the mines in secrecy, as some Westerners claimed, Eastern German labor officials tried to reshape the discussion by tackling their critics publicly. The press in the Soviet Zone provided a crucial forum through which officials could reach a wide audience in the East—and even in the Western zones. As early as August 1947, Eastern papers began publishing such articles as “The Truth about the Mining in the Erzgebirge,” in which the Sächsische Zeitung argued: “The enemies of our democracy . . . tell tall tales about Aue in order to rob our young people of their will to work.” It agreed that uranium mining was difficult, but assured readers that miners were well compensated with food, housing, and cigarettes.Footnote 131 An article in the Berliner Zeitung acknowledged discussions of forced labor, arguing that although conscription “is a problem in all of Germany, conditions in the Soviet Zone have attracted unusually malicious criticism from a sector of the press.” But, it explained, “when major projects, especially mining, are necessary to maintain the Volk . . . the question arises as to where to find the necessary labor. . . . No one gladly uproots himself . . . ; we can [nevertheless] count on the number of volunteers continuing to rise as the good pay, food, and consumer goods become more widely known to the public.”Footnote 132 Another piece in the Sächsische Zeitung acknowledged that working conditions in the Erzgebirge left something to be desired: “Naturally, everything can't be arranged to miners' and locals' full satisfaction immediately,” but the article assured readers that officials were working on improvements.Footnote 133 In October 1948, the HVAS planned to send a reporter from Neues Deutschland to visit the mines and provide a “truthful” report about their condition.Footnote 134
Eastern Zone papers even reprinted passages from Western German articles, declaring them lies and refuting them point by point, sometimes launching into outright political vitriol. For instance, the Sächsische Zeitung called Der Sozialdemokrat's staff “a bunch of former fascists and workshy elements who seek to parasitize working people.”Footnote 135 The HVAS wrote directly to the West Berlin Telegraf in 1948, claiming more diplomatically that its report about women working underground in the mines was incorrect.Footnote 136
In June 1948 the German Economic Commission ordered the Soviet Zone to phase out conscription labor. Workers who had been conscripted for indefinite periods now had a legal right to be released after six months. New recruits were supposed to be volunteers. Although this rule did not target the uranium mines in particular, they were critical to change since conscription had already fallen to 4.9 percent of labor in most industries, but remained 60 percent in the uranium mines.Footnote 137 Wismut officials tried to argue that, as a Soviet company, it was exempt from German law—an interpretation the German Labor Administration rejected.Footnote 138 Although resistance from Wismut continued, the labor administration carried the day, and, in 1949, the uranium mines began the shift to an all-volunteer workforce.Footnote 139
The end of conscription prompted East German labor officials to find new strategies for attracting volunteers. They put new emphasis on the message of rebuilding, personal opportunity, and public service in their advertisements. Posters urged workers to “decide for yourself” whether to help with demolition in the West—or with rebuilding in the East.Footnote 140 They argued that mining also meant personal advancement: “Don't believe malicious rumors about Aue,” they urged. And of the material benefits promised to miners, they wrote, “It sounds like a fairytale, but it's all true!” They described miners' unusually good pay and benefits, suggesting they were a way for entire families to escape postwar poverty.Footnote 141 The new rhetoric presented mine work as a personal choice, and a growing number of East Germans embraced such work in response to these arguments, as well as to more positive popular reports from the mines as living conditions improved. By September 1948, administrators in the Eastern German coal mines even complained that they were losing large numbers of workers to Aue.Footnote 142
The number of people volunteering to work in the uranium mines rose sharply in 1949, and labor officials did their best to reinforce the trend. A Thuringian paper hailed volunteers as “men of action.”Footnote 143 In July 1949, the SED newspaper Freie Presse described the arrival of volunteer miners in Zwickau: their train was hung with banners that read, “Despite harassment, to Aue!” (“Trotz Hetze, nach Aue”) and “We are working for peace in Aue” (“Wir arbeiten in Aue für die Friedensfront”). The travelers marched into town, accompanied by a police band and FDJ members waving flags.Footnote 144 This story was a far cry from even the most positive reports of the early years, which had focused on the fact that someone (anyone!) was volunteering for the Erzgebirge. In 1949 the Freie Presse could plausibly paint a picture of willing, valued volunteers joining a disciplined organization.
By 1949 miners' testimonies became standard fare in newspapers and recruitment advertisements.Footnote 145 Thuringia's labor ministry claimed that for doubters still influenced by “the lies” of the Western press and the work shy, “letters and reports from miners offer insight into real conditions.”Footnote 146 Employment offices stayed in touch with miners from their districts, and as the correspondence grew more positive, they circulated testimony suggesting that volunteers were happy in the Erzgebirge.Footnote 147 In some cases, employment offices actually tracked down local miners to elicit their testimony.Footnote 148 Recruitment brochures featured quotes from miners and even included their home addresses, linking them to local communities.Footnote 149 In late 1948, Thuringian radio stations began broadcasting letters from and interviews with local uranium miners.Footnote 150
Labor recruitment took ever more creative forms. Posters and slogans appeared in vitrines, on banners, and in the cinema.Footnote 151 The Thuringian labor ministry began settling recruiters in rural communities so that they could approach potential miners in the guise of locals.Footnote 152 A radio play told the story of Franz, a strapping young volunteer who returned home to tell his struggling neighbors that they could end their financial troubles in the mines.Footnote 153 In October 1949, the Office of Labor and Social Welfare in Suhl decided that their slogans promoting the mines did not resonate well with the public. They converted their message into rhyme, penning such classics as:
A few were even in dialect, reinforcing the idea that the uranium mines were of local interest:
Whatever their methods, these officials repeated the themes that dominated mine recruitment campaigns across the Soviet Zone: volunteerism, contributions to rebuilding, opportunities for personal betterment, and the mines' relevance to local economies.
These strategies did not end Eastern German labor authorities' fears about accusations of forced labor, however. The Western press still claimed that Easterners were enslaved in the Erzgebirge. Der Tag even asserted that the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, was leading recruitment and targeting its political enemies for mine work. Footnote 155 But these claims were far less plausible than they had been in 1946 or 1947. The 1948 ban on formal labor conscription marked a real shift in recruitment practices: the number of genuine volunteers was rising, and employment offices could now expect many of the people they signed up as miners to report for work. Employers from metalworks to the post office began to complain that Wismut was recruiting their most skilled workers.Footnote 156
Coercion still played a role, however. When the numbers of volunteers fell short of Soviet demands, the mines and employment offices had to make up their quotas, and some still conscripted workers illegally.Footnote 157 But when mines tried holding onto workers, they unleashed a flood of complaints from miners.Footnote 158 Employment offices also stepped up efforts to force other industries to deliver workers for six-month stints in the mines: formally, such people were volunteers, and a good number of workers took advantage of the new regulations and refused to become miners. But it is clear that outside employers and employment offices with quotas to fill continued to pressure workers to comply with calls for “voluntary” service into the 1950s.Footnote 159
Still, coercion was not what it had been and labor officials could no longer legally punish those who now defied conscription orders. Herr Studzinski of the Thuringian Labor Ministry responded to complaints from Herr Proschljakow, the head of the Soviet Military Administration's labor division in Thuringia, about low recruitment numbers in June 1949, noting that the new rules prohibited the arrest of unwilling workers and the seizure of their ration cards. As a result, the ministry could no longer guarantee the number of new recruits the Soviets wanted.Footnote 160 The Mecklenburg government wrote in February 1949 that workers' new legal right to contest mine conscription had resulted in over 1,400 challenges from workers and their employers.Footnote 161 Furthermore, employers resisted handing over their staff.Footnote 162 As a Thuringian official complained about a large plant nursery: “the last recruitment campaign was a complete flop” because the nursery management had refused to send the number of workers the ministry had requested, “and the firm's attitude has spread to other nurseries.” As a result, the official said, “one can hardly speak of ‘compulsory labor.’”Footnote 163 At the same time, some German labor officials used the new rules to pressure the mines to release workers who had finished their contracts, thereby combating the administrative anarchy that had characterized labor relations since 1946.Footnote 164
By the time the Thuringian Labor Ministry met with representatives from the regional labor administration, the FDGB, and major industries in 1950, all of them conceded that volunteer labor was the only legitimate way to staff the uranium mines. Participants argued that the East German public still needed to be educated about the mines' role in rebuilding Germany and preserving peace in the new Cold War context. But the speakers insisted that the use of volunteers differentiated the GDR from Nazi practices and from the Soviet Gulag. For these East German leaders, staffing the mines was no longer just about meeting Soviet demands. It was about building a new society.Footnote 165
Conclusion
In April 1952, the Los Angeles Times ran a story detailing the horrors of forced labor and slavery in the Soviet “empire.” The headline appeared above an American Federation of Labor (AFL) map of forced labor colonies in the Soviet Union. The map was framed with images of barbed wire, shackles, and human skulls, and the article cited new American reports on the Gulag, a UN investigation of Soviet forced labor, and testimony about the USSR given to the International Commission against Concentration Camp Practices. But it framed its discussion around a single case: that of a German man drafted to mine uranium in the Erzgebirge. The article described the mines as an entirely Soviet project, a story of unremitting exploitation, a tale of workers trapped as helpless prisoners in a ruthless system. It claimed that “the forced labor situation in East Germany differs in no way from the conditions of any Gulag camp in Siberia. . . . Life for the Germans was entirely in the hands of the Russians.”Footnote 166 Such accusations of human rights abuses remained a staple of American and West German Cold War rhetoric, though attention shifted away from the uranium mines in the 1950s.Footnote 167
The Eastern German uranium mines made extensive use of both coercion and conscripted labor between 1946 and 1949 and even into the 1950s.Footnote 168 Miners faced danger, misery, and intimidation. Yet, the uranium mines were not simply an extension of the Gulag. No one volunteered to go to the Gulag, but genuine volunteers did go to the uranium mines as early as 1947. Furthermore, the mines were not an exclusively Soviet project. The Soviets controlled actual mining operations, but the native German administration was deeply involved from the beginning in recruiting labor, providing food and housing, and shaping domestic, intrazonal, and international views of the mines. By the summer of 1947, pressure from Eastern German labor officials had helped create new labor protections, regulate the recruitment of miners, and oversee a shift from pure coercion to material incentives. Workers came to regard mine work as something they could choose to do—or not do.
In the early days, deciding against the mines might mean flight to the West. But the risks of refusal diminished over time. Some miners' refusal to accept their work as “forced” undermined the compulsory labor system long before it was formally dismantled. And the proximity of the West provided an escape hatch for thousands. By 1949, the German administration boasted that it had an all-volunteer workforce. Although some of those “volunteers” had accepted mine work under pressure, others seem to have responded to material incentives and the mines' somewhat improved reputation. It is also clear that by 1949, at least part of the Eastern German public began to understand the uranium mines as a German, rather than as a purely Soviet, project.
Still, the shift away from conscription to volunteer labor in the mines is not the whole tale. Equally important is why both Eastern Germans and Western observers thought that change was important. In 1947 and 1948, Eastern German labor officials used conscription even as they tried to boost volunteerism. They recognized that volunteers would provide a more stable long-term workforce, and that conscription undermined domestic support for the new Eastern German regime. But they also worried that the mines, and thus the Eastern Zone, would be permanently tarred with the brush of forced labor. The association of forced labor with the Soviet Gulag eclipsed its earlier associations with Nazism by 1950 and threatened the emerging state's legitimacy at home and abroad. The Eastern Zone's porous border connected it to rival occupation zones in the West and to their media. Its claim to legitimacy as a truly democratic, antifascist, German workers' paradise meant that East German labor officials could not afford to dismiss Western charges of forced labor as mere political cant. In the mines, as elsewhere in the Eastern Zone, German officials tried to balance Soviet demands against the claims of the populace. They sought to make the mines “German”—arguing for their relevance to postwar rebuilding and to regional communities. In the end, their efforts show that postwar concerns about labor and early Cold War efforts to assert political legitimacy shaped Eastern German politics and society.
