The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

One explanation is that the large proportion of foreign, prisoner of war, and concentration camp workers made it possible to use coercion to keep them working. At the Ford works in Cologne, absenteeism was a problem only among German workers. In 1944 it was estimated that 25 percent of the German workforce was absent on average over the year, whereas the figure for the eastern workers (Russians, Poles, Ukrainians) was only 3 percent. German workers either absented themselves permanently—a total of 1,000 at Ford in 1944, two-thirds of them women—or returned slowly after a raid, one-tenth after one to two days, two-thirds after two weeks.213 For the German war economy one of the major advantages of exploiting captive labor on a large scale in 1944 and 1945 was the possibility of controlling their work effort even in the adverse conditions imposed by heavy bombing.