‘A kind of Siberia’: German labour and occupation policies in Poland and Lithuania during the First World War

Abstract

Forced labour was not a phenomenon limited to the Second World War. Already in the First World War, German labour policy in occupied Poland and Lithuania was increasingly marked by coercion. It is little known in scholarship that the militarily administered territory of the Baltic (Ober Ost), especially, had developed into a laboratory for forced labour and total war. This article examines the conditions, forms and consequences of forced labour and recruitment in occupied Poland and Lithuania between 1914 and 1918. It will contribute towards explaining the extent to which the German labour policy of 1914–1918 served as a blueprint for the Nazi forced labour system during the Second World War.