Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Most of Germany’s foreign workers had been brought there against their will—but not all. Some foreign workers caught in the slipstream of German defeat in May 1945 had come of their own free will—like those unemployed Dutchmen who accepted offers of work in Nazi Germany before 1939 and stayed on.4 Even at the derisory wages paid by wartime German employers, men and women from eastern Europe, the Balkans, France and the Benelux countries were often better off there than staying at home. And Soviet labourers (of whom there were upwards of two million in Germany by September 1944), even if they had been brought to Germany by force, were not necessarily sorry to be there—as one of them, Elena Skrjabena, recalled after the war: ‘None of them complain about how the Germans had sent them to work in German industry. For all of them that was the only possibility of getting out of the Soviet Union.’