The History of Forced Labour in the GDR

Regular productive work is permitted for prisoners. It is often perceived as a relief from the monotony and boredom of everyday prison life. The prerequisite is that the work complies with the international conventions that have been developed since 1930.

The ‘traditional’ labour relations between local prisons on the one hand and companies based in the surrounding area on the other, some of which had survived from the National Socialist era, collapsed after 1945 in the Soviet occupation zone. Initially the new administrators of the state-owned enterprises and the agricultural production cooperatives were generally opposed to the employment of prisoners. In years after 1945, there was an extreme shortage of work to occupy prisoners in the Soviet Occupied Zone (SBZ), which had serious psychological consequences for many of them.

At the same time, Soviet-style labour camps were set up in the Soviet Occupation Zone for delinquent juveniles and adult prisoners, which generally consisted of wooden barracks of the simplest construction, surrounded by barbed wire fences and watchtowers manned by snipers. Inmates were lent out to local companies. Near Johanngeorgenstadt, for example, prisoners spent the winter in an unheated goods train while they were deployed on track construction.

When the GDR was founded in 1949, the Ministry of the Interior took over both basic types (camps and prisons). In the following years, forced labour was treated as an economic factor. The aim was to employ one hundred per cent of prisoners in industry. Contrary to international conventions prisoners were also deployed in mining. Medical care, leisure time, labour rights and accident protection were reduced to a calculated minimum, so that the economic benefits of the prisoners’ labour were optimised.

From the 1960s onwards, the deployment of prisoners was integrated into the planned economy, i.e. each industrial sector was allocated a certain number of prisoners according to a fixed formula. It is still unclear today how it came to be that the number of convictions corresponded to the number of forced labourers required.

At the end of the 1970s, the GDR very slowly began to implement the United Nations’ international rules. These included the ‘Minimum Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners’, which had been adopted by the UN in 1955. As the number of prisoners was reduced during this time, the pressure on individual prisoners to reach the excessive quotas grew.

Replacing forced labour with acceptable prison work was one of the demands of many prisoners who, in the autumn of 1989, went on strike for the first time or peacefully occupied ‘their’ prison. The reforms initiated in this way were part of the Peaceful Revolution.