The catalogue for our 2026 exhibition Nazi Slave Labour: Perpetrators and Victims, by Dr Barbara Warnock, Dr Clara Dijkstra, and Katherine Funk
Between 1939 and 1945, 20 million individuals were exploited as slave and forced labourers by the Nazi regime. Thirteen million of them were concentration camp prisoners, POWs and foreign civilian workers within the Third Reich, and seven million were forced to work in occupied territories outside Germany as the Second World War was waged.
This catalogue draws on the unique collections of the Wiener Holocaust Library to explore how perpetrators such as the SS, the chemical company I.G. Farben and weapons manufacturer Krupp profited off and exploited slave labourers. It also examines the stories of the many victims of slave labour: from the experiences of Jewish labourers in Auschwitz subcamps dying from chemical poisoning; to prisoners of war being starved to death while forced to build Nazi Atlantic defences in the Channel Islands.