Representing one-fifth of the total labour force, over 7.6 million Fremdarbeiter, foreign workers, were formally registered on the employment rolls in the territory of the "Greater German Reich in August 1944". Among those were 5.7 million civilian forced labourers and 1.9 million POWs. Eastern European labour policies also directly reflected Nazi racial philosophy, which considered Slavic peoples as Untermenschen, or subhuman.
In a covert memorandum, high ranking Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories official Dr. Otto Bräutigam said:
"With the natural inclination of the Eastern peoples, the primitive man soon discovered that for Germany the slogan: "Liberation from Bolshevism" was only a pretext to enslave the Eastern peoples according to her own methods...With unequalled presumption, we set aside all political knowledge and treated the peoples of the occupied Eastern territories as "Second Class Whites," to whom Providence has only assigned the chore of serving as slaves for Germany."
Although Nazi labour officials had always intended to use Eastern European foreign labour during the war, there was no master plan for a thorough forced labour programme. Rather, the combination of Nazi racial philosophy, German labour shortages, and Eastern Front losses came to produce a comprehensive forced labour policy. This was typified by "recruitment quotas," progressively aggressive means of finding Eastern European labour, and forced deportations.
Labour Policy 1939–1941 in Occupied Western Poland
Once Hitler came to power in 1933, the new Nazi government carried out a massive propaganda campaign aimed at eliminating women from all kind of employment. Nazi racial and social philosophy praised motherhood and created a set of incentives meant to raise Germany's birth rate. Keeping women out of the workforce became a major determinant in the choice to take advantage of Polish labour when 4.4 million men were enlisted from the German economy into the armed forces between 1939 and 1940.
As historian Edward L. Homze notes:
"The Nazi choice to employ foreign labour directly derived from their social policy about women and their place in society. The Nazis followed a presumably simpler path than trying to boost the mobilisation of native, especially female labour; they hired millions of foreigners.
Meeting on May 23, 1939, between Adolf Hitler, Herman Göring, Erich Raeder, Wilhelm Keitel, and officials of the German armed services, the earliest reference of the use of foreign labour to fill unemployment gaps occurred. The minutes of the conference record Hitler saying, following an attack on Poland, "the population of the non-German areas will perform no military service, and will be available as a source of labour."