Labor camp

“ SAUCKEL: They were camps where workers were billeted; where they lived.
THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle) : That is right; and labor training camps were different from the labor camps, weren’t they?
SAUCKEL: They were basically different. The labor training camps were an institution of the Reichsführer SS; the labor camps, in which they lived, were set up by the factory or group of factories where the workers were employed.
THE TRIBUNAL (Mr. Biddle) : So when a man was sent to a labor training camp, he was not sent simply to labor ”

“ Mining, lumbering, and fruit growing, for instance, employed thousands of workers during the rush months and turned them out at other times. The inevitable result was an army of migratory laborers wandering from camp to camp, from town to town, and from ranch to ranch, without fixed homes or established habits of life. From this extraordinary condition there issued many a long and lawless conflict between capital and labor, giving a distinct color to the labor movement in whole sections of the mountain and coast states. ”

“ Although labor unions had existed in Everett since 1892, and agi- tation for shorter hours, job security, higher wages, and better working conditions had been growing stronger, there was little organization until the closing years of the first decade of the twentieth century. Workers in logging camps were coming to be largely migratory laborers, who traveled by brake rods, blind baggage, or boxcar, carrying their rolls of bedding from camp to camp, often a dirty, vermin-infested, and disease-ridden place. ”

“ They are watching all the time for something to hang on us. If we had turned him back, they would have said, 'Slave labor camp! He doesn't want anyone to see what he's doing'—or something of the sort. ”

“ This state, in coöperation with the state Young Men's Christian Association, developed a state camp for the purpose of enlisting and training boys and young men to supply the extra demand for farm labor made necessary through the increased-acreage propaganda. ”

“ Here were gathered the usual camp followers, those who did the store-keeping, the washing, the ironing, the makers and vendors of every commodity bought and sold in the camp. In this place all grades of camp-followers were sheltered.
Men were there, some few decent and eager only for the labor and exchange of money for that labor which came to them; others willing to buy and sell anything on earth which could be traded off. ”

“ In other words, in this type of camp a city man, acting as leader, comes into a community with a group of boys who live at the camp but receive their training with the near-by farmers. A labor-supply camp, composed of able-bodied boys, is a type which adequately meets the need at small expense. ”

“ DR. FLÄCHSNER: Did you know, during your activities, that the workers from concentration camps had advantages if they worked in factories?
SPEER: Yes. My co-workers called my attention to this fact, and I also heard it when I inspected the industries. Of course, a wrong impression should not be created about the number of concentration camp inmates who worked in German industry. In toto, 1 percent of the labor personnel came from concentration camps. ”

“ The decree states at the end that workmen, paid by the factories, are to be employed in the camps to see to the upkeep of the camps.
Then there is Document Sauckel-18, a memorandum for works managers and Eastern Workers, which contains camp rules. The introduction says:
“In response to a wish of the Plenipotentiary General for Allocation of Labor, Gauleiter Sauckel, I recommend that the officials satisfy themselves from time to time that the regulations issued with respect to the employment of Eastern Workers are being adhered to within the establishments.” ”

“ According to recently published figures to the camp of the wage-earning class belong now no less than thirty-three and a half millions of men, women, and children, not younger than fifteen years of age. This gigantic army, with the little children, the wives of some of the 4workmen and other dependents, whom the capitalists so far have not succeeded in hitching up to the machinery in their factories, constitutes already the overwhelming majority of the entire population of the country. ”

“ DR. KAUFFMANN: I asked you whether you knew anything regarding the treatment, the food, and the employment of the internees in these correctional labor camps?
KALTENBRUNNER: I knew only that correctional labor camps had the task of doing labor for public works, that is, in public construction work like roads, railroad maintenance, and, in particular, for repair of damage due to air raids. The internees of correctional labor camps have been seen by the entire population when so employed. The impression which the appearance of these internees made... ”

“ Here is a construction camp which employs largely Negro workers. In four years 8,504 laborers were employed and there was an average labor turnover of once each month, or forty-eight different sets of men working on the buildings and road under construction during that time. This camp employed men from different Southern states in the order named: North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana; while stragglers represented eleven states outside the South. Why this turnover? Why do men travel from state to state? ”

“ It may be possible to earn as much money wages for a given amount of labor in a mining camp, where no social services are available, but a mining camp is a poor place to spend one's life in. The density and productivity of population is the primary cause of rent, but contributory to density and productivity are the social services provided in the locality. ”

“ Camp, "in Altruria every one works with his hands, so that the hard work shall not all fall to any one class; and this manual labor of each is sufficient to keep the body in health, as well as to earn a living. After the three hours' work, which constitutes a day's work with us, is done, the young people have all sorts of games and sports, and they carry them as late into life as the temperament of each demands. ”

“ But already a big percentage of formerly independent American citizens and the sons and daughters of a still bigger percentage of them, are found to be stripped of all income-bearing property, driven into and concentrated in the camp of the proletariat,—the propertyless wage-earning class—towards which, like iron filings towards a powerful magnet, are gravitating the rapidly increasing millions of ruined, formerly independent citizens, the modern proletariat. ”

“ I explained that sufficiently yesterday. Because of this, the Organization Todt had large offers of workers who went there voluntarily, unless, of course, you see direct coercion in the pressure put on them through the danger of their transfer to Germany, and which led them to the Organization Todt or the blocked factories.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Were they kept in labor camps?
SPEER: That is the custom in the case of such building work. The building sites were far away from any villages, and so workers’ camps were set up to accommodate the German and foreign workers. ”

“ At many of these so-called working camps our inspectors were refused admission on the ground that they might learn trade or war secrets. They succeeded, however, in having the men sent outside in order that they might inspect them and hear their complaints. There were in Germany about one hundred central camps and perhaps ten thousand or more so-called working camps, in summer time, throughout the country. Some of the British prisoners were put to work on the sewage farm of Berlin but we succeeded in getting them sent back to their parent camp. ”

“ Laughter and jest were on the lips of the men who crowded the Verona, and songs of the One Big Union rang out over the sparkling waters of Puget Sound. Loyal soldiers were these in the great class war, enlightened workers who were willing to give their all in the battle for bread, happiness and liberty. Men of all callings these—logger, carpenter, laborer, railroad clerk, painter, miner, printer, seaman and farmhand, all united with one common aim—the desire to gain for Labor the right of free expression. ”

“ Factory hands and mine workers fit in more or less, but farm hands, small farmers, peddlers, little shop keepers, clerks, servants, soldiers, policemen, firemen slip out of the net. The tendency, when you are appealing to the "working class," is to fix your attention on two or three million more or less confirmed trade unionists, and treat them as Labor; the other seventeen or eighteen million, who might qualify statistically, are tacitly endowed with the point of view ascribed to the organized nucleus. ”

“ How simple the method of obtaining the labour: simply go to the labour bureau attached to the imprisonment camp nearest to your workshop, and ask for a wheelwright. You keep your industry going, and thus in the only practical way keep open the job for the man who is called to the colours.
The employer pays the man no wages, but the local trade-union rate of wage is paid to the [181] commandant who supplies him. Thirty thousand prisoners from a single camp contributing to the industry of the nation, and the wages of 30,000 prisoners contributing to the cost of the war. ”

“ At the camps, they are away from their accustomed places of labor, and have not been so promptly paid as could be desired, and are exposed to the same circumstances which often dispose soldiers to make as little exertion as possible. ”

“ When certain seasonal occupations begin, as the harvest fields, the construction camps, and lumbering camps, the organizers set to work enrolling members. Rumors circulate that no one will be permitted to work on certain jobs unless he carries a red card; that the “wobblies” will throw all non-members off freight trains; that all the other workers are taking out membership cards; that the employers of a certain district are going to cut the wages of transient labor, or that in other localities the wages are good because the I.W.W. will not permit anyone without a red card to work. ”

“ The extensive coastal fortifications which I have ordered to be erected in the area of Army Group West make it necessary that in the occupied territory all available workers should be committed and should give the fullest extent of their productive capacities. The previous allotment of domestic workers is insufficient. In order to increase it, I order the introduction of compulsory labor and the prohibition of changing the place of employment without permission of the authorities in the occupied territories. ”

“ But after the war, economic and social changes diminished the size of this labor reservoir and altered the character of the transient labor in gen eral. As southerners migrated to the mills and logging camps of the Pacific Northwest, as the region's population grew, and as the automobile made logging camps less isolated from towns or cities or made them disappear entirely, more and more lumber work ers became "home guard" workers like the factory workers of the East. ”

“ The complete employment of all prisoners of war as well as the use of a gigantic number of new foreign civilian workers, men and women, has become an undisputable necessity for the solution of the mobilization of labor program in this war. ”

“ The great mass of unskilled workers in the factory towns proved quite as tempting to the propagandist. Among laborers of this class, wages are the lowest and living conditions the most uninviting. Moreover, this group forms the industrial reservoir which receives the settlings of the most recent European and Asiatic immigration. These people have a standard of living and conceptions of political and individual freedom which are at variance with American traditions. ”

“ Among the working classes, though they suffered heavily when the supply of cotton was diminished, we had many firm and devoted friends, who saw and felt, however imperfectly, that the cause of free labor was their own cause, no matter on which side of the Atlantic the battlefield might lie. ”

“ Cedric Long, graduate of Union Theological Seminary, a former organizer for the Amalgamated Textile Workers says:
"Many young men and women have thrown themselves directly into the labor movement. Some of these have been animated chiefly by the scientific spirit; they have hoboed through the harvest fields and mining districts, worked in the ranks of unskilled labor in factory and mill,—trying to get the 'feel' of life and toil and union activities as the workers at the bottom find them. ”

“ Taken in the aggregate, there is no division of the working class more clannish and provincial, more isolated from other divisions of labor’s countless army, than railway employes, the workers engaged, directly and indirectly, in steam railway transportation. Nor is there a group or department in the entire working class that, outside of its own sphere of industrial activity, is more ignorant of the true essentials of the labor question or more oblivious of the class struggle and the fundamental principles and objects of the labor movement. ”

“ It is time for us to realize that a man who is out of balance physically should be looked after. Moreover, men should not become out of balance. The truth of the matter is that our mechanical devices have gone so far toward taking the place of manual labor that we only have one line of physical development—our athletic sports. ”

“ Leaving France and Germany and looking at Swiss and Italian workers, much the same statements may be made, the lace-workers in Switzerland, for instance, being an illustration of the very minimum of result for human labor. Like the lace-workers of Germany, the fabric must often grow in the dark almost, basements being chosen that dampness may make the thread follow more perfectly the will of the worker, whose day is never less than fifteen hours long, whose food seldom goes beyond black bread with occasional milk or cabbage soup, and whose average of life seldom exceeds forty years. ”