Forced Labour in GDR Youth Welfare Homes

From 1945 to the mid-1970s, there was a chronic shortage of funding for care homes run by the centrally controlled GDR youth welfare system. The buildings were dilapidated. Clothing, medical care and room equipment and furnishings were totally inadequate. There were few and inadequately trained staff. In this situation, managers of normal care homes regularly enlisted inmates to carry out relief work so that day-to-day operations could continue. In order to improve the financial situation of the homes, they also sent the inmates out on paid work orders from the local authorities or companies based nearby. The income thus generated sometimes benefited the children in the homes, for example by being used to purchase a television.

In the institutions know as special children’s homes, which were intended to discipline and re-educate unruly children, it was internally decreed that the inmates be occupied in production for several hours a day. As a rule, they had to carry out mindless tasks, e.g. screwing together lamp sockets, sorting small parts. This production took place at the expense of school education and leisure time. In tandem with disciplinary education, ‘production-orientated work education’ was intended to shape socialist personalities. The profits from this work did not benefit the inmates, but rather enhanced the home or institution’s financial performance.

In the youth reformatories, which were re-education centres for 14 to 18-year-olds of both sexes, production work took centre stage. As a rule, school education was discontinued when inmates reached the 8th grade, even though schooling was compulsory for ten years in the GDR. This was followed by so-called ‘training as a semi-skilled worker’, which in many cases consisted of learning how to operate a machine. Male youths worked on the production of trucks at the IFA plant in Ludwigsfelde, while others did unskilled work in briquette factories. Girls worked as seamstresses, laundresses or cleaners. As these young people had the same status as apprentices, they were not paid. Their apprenticeship wages were offset against their contribution to the cost of the home. If they behaved well, they received a minimal allowance. The surplus that was paid to them on their release rarely exceeded 100 GDR marks (a production worker earned an average of 600 marks per month).

Refusing to carry out even one of the above-mentioned forms of forced labour would result in an inmate being subjected to severe punishment (deprivation of food, detention, transfer to the closed youth reformatory in Torgau). A number of these forced labour tasks had severe health repercussions for the inmates.

Practices similar to those in the youth reformatories were carried out in the institutions known as youth detention centres, where political or criminal young offenders were imprisoned. There has been very little research into these facilities.