The West and Forced Labour in the GDR

It was one of the unspoken rules of the international market economy that the buyer of a cheap product did not ask under what political conditions it had been produced. It was only in this millennium that many large companies, under pressure from consumers, began to commit to codes of honour which meant certain producers were excluded. But, as early as the 1970s, West German retailers began to take critical sentiments among shoppers into account. New brand names were sometimes invented to disguise the origins of goods produced under the GDR dictatorship. In individual cases, companies stopped importing or, at least, demanded that no prisoners were involved in the production. The regime in the GDR tried to overcome possible moral concerns primarily by offering the goods at dumping prices.

Trade within Germany was regulated in the Federal Republic by a ‘trust agency’, a half-private, half-state institution. There is no known case of this trust agency intervening because products that had been manufactured using forced labour crossed the inner-German border.

The West German press only reported a few spectacular cases of forced labour in the GDR and thus contributed very little to raising critical awareness. In 1982, the International Society for Human Rights planned protest actions in front of IKEA shops against the production of furniture by GDR prisoners. At the beginning of 1984, there was a series of arson attacks on furniture stores. Leaflets found at the scenes of these attacks pointed to the political motives of left-wing groups. The investigations into these incidents were not conclusive. IKEA then demanded that the producers put an end to the involvement of prisoners. The GDR side promised to do so, but failed to keep this promise. Thus, IKEA apologised to the GDR forced labourers in 2012. Press reports on the deaths of several forced labourers in Bitterfeld due to mercury poisoning remained similarly episodic. Educational brochures published by Amnesty International never gained much attention. Forced labour in the GDR was rarely discussed in the German Bundestag.

Thus, trade between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany, even in products in which forced labour was involved, essentially proceeded undisturbed. In the areas of textiles, small electronics, cameras and furniture, the GDR was able to offer products at dumping prices thanks to prisoner labour. The buyers – mostly without realising it – thus prolonged the life of the dictatorship in the 1980s.