The Distorted Origin - Nazi Forced Labor Files

HISTORICAL DATA PROCESSING

The origins of citizens from Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War are still often misrepresented today. Shifting borders and the way Nazi records were kept have, often inadvertently, turned Ukrainians into Russians, Poles into Ukrainians, and generally distorted national and ethnic classifications.

In the context of a documentary film production, the complete personnel files of a large company that produced for the Wehrmacht between 1941 and 1945 using Nazi forced laborers were analyzed in detail for a documentary film. The question of which countries were most affected by the forcible deportation of Nazi forced labor was reflected in the personnel files. The birthplaces and places of origin of the forced laborers were precisely localized and evaluated to determine how the Nazi administration handled national attribution, how mistakes were made and how many of the liberated workers were given a new national affiliation due to the shifting of borders in 1945. This helped the Polish and Ukrainian victims in particular to be described correctly in the film's narrative. The results were also presented at a conference on the politics of remembrance at the regional centers for political education.