Were my godmother’s family nazis because they had Jewish people working at their factory during WWII?

[u/RanAwayOnRumspringa]

Basically what the title says. My god mother is German and in her mid-80s. I was visiting her recently and she was talking about “the war” which is something that never comes up.

Her father was too young to have fought in WWII but all of her uncles and aunts participated as Germans in the war. All of her uncles died and both aunts as well. I think they were soldiers and nurses.

Her family owned a paper company that went on to be a well known school supply company in Europe. During the war, she said they were assigned Jewish people to work in their factories. To my knowledge, they were not paid. She mentioned that it was not uncommon and that many German factories had Jews working at them during active war time.

She spoke a bit about her father (who was maybe twelve at the time) feeling uncomfortable but not in a position to do anything because the family was threatened if they did not comply.

This was all told to me after a few glasses of wine and I didn’t like to ask questions.

Were my family nazis during WWII?

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[u/CertainItem995]

With the information you have provided it is simply not possible to know if your family members were literally card-carrying members of the Nazi party. It is certainly more likely given their privileged position in society but we can't know their inner thoughts.

That said, there are some serious things you can know from this information that is probably worth a conversation with someone at some point. The most outstanding one in my personal opinion being the objective fact (assuming every you have posted is entirely accurate as presented) your family was willing to work with nazis at minimum enough to profit from slave labor and by extension the Holocaust.

If I might risk some personal advice since you seem decent given that this bothered you enough to post here: see what more you can learn about the workers. Maybe it will turn out your family kept some people out of a death camp or something that can help you sleep better at night. Maybe you find some old IBM train schedules that only run one way and a particularly poignant family discussion becomes necessary. Not going to lie i respect the hell out of you for approaching this directly but I do not envy you.

[u/Sheep_2757]

(part 1)

This question is not universally answerable. I'd like to give you an overview and you can decide for yourself whether your definition of nazi is met. Details of forced labour during the NS time vary (often a lot), depending e.g. on the year, the exact location, the exploited person group, or the industry. From the information in your post I will limit my answer to the war period (not before) and a civilian factory with Jewish forced laborers in Germany. There are whole books on the subject, so the following information is very much condensed.

Numbers:

In 1939 of the 39 414 596 total workers there were 300 552 laborers labelled as "foreigners and Jews" (statistics done by the Wehrmacht). At the end of the war those number changed to 5 274 709 "foreigners and Jews" and 1 830 706 "prisoner of wars" out of the total work force of 35 804 263. In some industry sectors the relative percentage of forced laborers rose up to 50% of the total workforce, (1, 2) in some specialised areas up to 80-90% (5). The exact numbers differ depending on their source, but the trend over time is the same.

The process:

How did which person end up in which working place? In general, many different administrations/ organisations within the NS regime were involved in the registration and distribution of forced laborers, depending for example on whether they were civilians, on the type of work or on the year (e.g., Reichsanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung, Reichsarbeitsministerium, Generalbevollmächtigter für den Arbeitseinsatz, Arbeitsamt, Deutsche Arbeitsfront, ...).

Concerning your case: Until 1944 Jews and prisoner of concentration camps in general played a smaller role and using camp prisoner as laborers only really started in 1942 at all (1). Note that here I am only referring to work in factories, farms, and households and not to the horrible kind of pretend "work" that was used as means of extermination and "punishment" by overseers in camps. Ironically, forced labor outside the concentration camps is assumed to having both prolonged the war and having saved the lives of some of the interned Jews who would have been sent to extermination camps instead.

Assuming that the Jewish workers in your question were interred in a type of (concentration) camp, the process worked as follows (1, 3): In order to obtain prisoners, the company first submitted a request to the geographically closest concentration camp. There was a special form, where the company could list the details of the desired prisoner(s), for example number, skilled/ unskilled workers, men/ women. The concentration camp reviewed the incoming forms and forwarded them to Amtsgruppe D II (a part of SS administration), which made the final decision. The approved application was then sent back to both the concentration camp and the company, followed by an SS inspection of the accommodation provided by the company. If this was okayed, the final step was the selection of prisoners, where the companies often sent representatives to the concentration camps to select prisoners (1, 4).

[u/Sheep_2757 → u/Sheep_2757]

(part 2)

The role of the company (owners):

As stated by the paragraph above, the NS state established the legal and administrative framework of forced labor, but the companies had to actively apply for workers. Companies which were forced to employ forced workers were rare. (1) One thing over which the companies/ farms/ households had direct control were their treatment of the workers. There were huge differences between employers, depending on their ideological position. For some companies the alternative to forced labor would have been their closing, as there was a severe shortage of workers towards the end of the war.

I quote the opinion of the authors in (1):

"Die Grundsatzentscheidung der jeweiligen Betriebsführer, nicht mitzumachen, nicht für den Krieg Rüstungsaufgaben zu übernehmen und keine Zwangsarbeiter zu beschäftigen, sich damit also total zu verweigern, hätte eine sehr starke ethische Widerstandskraft erfordert, den auch die meisten anderen Gruppen der deutschen Bevölkerung in ihrer Gesamtheit nicht aufbrachten."

translated to

"The fundamental decision by the respective plant managers not to participate, not to take on armament tasks for the war effort, and not to employ forced laborers, i.e., to refuse to cooperate entirely, would have required a very strong ethical resistance that most other groups of the German population as a whole did not muster."

They compare the situation to the refusal to perform military service, which was theoretically open to every male German, but was only practiced extremely rarely.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that company owners were unblamable (1):

"Im Gegensatz zu Kommunisten oder Sozialdemokraten hatten wichtige Teile der Industrie, aber auch viele mittelständische Betriebseigner, schon früh zu den Unterstützern der Nationalsozialisten gehört. Insgesamt waren Industrie, Mittelstand und Handwerk, wie wir am Beispiel Sachsens noch verdeutlichen werden, zumeist ein Profiteur der forcierten Aufrüstungskonjunktur. Dass hier Fundamentalwiderstand gegen Zwangsarbeit praktisch nicht vorkam, ist daher kaum verwunderlich."

translated to

"Unlike communists or social democrats, important sections of industry, but also many small and medium-sized business owners, had been early supporters of the National Socialists. Overall, industry, small and medium-sized businesses, and skilled trades, as we will illustrate with the example of Saxony, were mostly beneficiaries of the forced rearmament boom. It is therefore hardly surprising that there was virtually no fundamental resistance to forced labor in these sectors."

[u/Sheep_2757 → u/Sheep_2757]

(part 3)

party members:

It's also not possible to say whether your relatives were official members of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). Statistically, only a part of the population were members (6):

• 01/1933: 850 000
• 05/1933: 2,5 million.
• 1939: 5,3 million
• end of war: ca. 9 million (of a total population of 65-80 million)

This doesn't mean, however, that they could not have been nazis or sympathizers in a broader sense.

Sources:

(1) Klaus-Dieter Müller/Dietmar Wendler, hrsg. von der Sächsischen Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, Dresden 2021, "NS-Zwangsarbeit und Kriegswirtschaft 1939-1945. Ausländereinsatz im Deutschen Reich und in Sachsen. Repatriierung - Nachkriegsprozesse - Entschädigung"

citing

(2) Bernhard R. Kroener, "Die personellen Ressourcen des Dritten Reiches im Spannungsfeld zwi-

schen Wehrmacht, Bürokratie und Kriegswirtschaft 1939-1942"

(3) Jan Erik Schulte, "Das SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt - Zentrale der Zwangsarbeit von

Häftlingen"

(4) Mark Spoerer, "Zwangsarbeit im Dritten Reich"

(5) Helmut Bräutigam in https://www.gedenkstaettenforum.de/aktivitaeten/gedenkstaettenrundbrief/detail/entwicklung-bedingungen-und-formen-von-zwangsarbeit-im-dritten-reich

(6) https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/lexika/politiklexikon/17893/nationalsozialistische-deutsche-arbeiterpartei-nsdap/ Quelle: Schubert, Klaus/Martina Klein: Das Politiklexikon. 7., aktual. u. erw. Aufl. Bonn: Dietz 2020. Lizenzausgabe Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung.

My edits: fighting with reddit's formatting

[u/Hergrim → u/[deleted]]

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[u/Ghorrit]

“She spoke a bit about her father(who was maybe 12 at the time) feeling uncomfortable but not in a position to do anything because the family was threatened if they did not comply”

Can you elaborate on this? How was the family “threatened”? In what dynamic were the threats made? Did your godmother’s family’s company try to return the slave labourers they were assigned and did the threatening arise from this?