Flight, Sabotage, Resistance

Many forced laborers tried to protect themselves from hunger humiliation and violence. By leaving their workplace without permission or fleeing, many escaped the poor working conditions. The number of those who fled increased over the course of the war. In late 1943 the Gestapo registered 45,000 such cases per month.

Some dared to engage in active resistance in order to weaken the Nazi regime and its fighting potential. Any form of self-assertion or resistance was life threatening. Nevertheless, forced laborers sometimes also joined together in resistance groups, attempted to make materials and machines unusable, and to thereby sabotage the war industry.

Organized resistance groups of forced laborers increasingly formed in German cities. Only in very rare cases did they receive support from the German populace in their fight against the Nazis. Most often they were left to fight on their own.

One unusual case of political resistance took place in Leipzig. Distributing flyers in Russian and German in 1944, the "International Antifascist Committee" encouraged refusal and resistance. This "committee" consisted of forced laborers from Ukrainian and Russian regions of the Soviet Union and German antifascists. Despite language barriers and the lethal danger they faced, they fought together to end the Nazi regime. In the summer of 1944, however, the Gestapo arrested the members of the group, put the Germans on trial, and deported the Soviet forced laborers to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.