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CHAPTER III
PULLING DOWN THE PILLAR OF LABOR
Enslavement
Allied attacks against German manpower have proceeded
along three main fronts: enslavement, denazification, and
physical incapacitation through undernourishment. Our pres-
ent discussion will take up the first two of these, with starva-
tion postponed for special treatment.
President Roosevelt on October 21, 1944, promised that
"the German people are not going to be enslaved, because the
United Nations do not traffic in human slavery." In the pre-
ceding month at Quebec, however, he had used strong pres-
sure to obtain Mr. Churchill's acceptance of the Morgenthau
Plan which called for "forced German labor outside Ger-
many." Pravda writer Boris Izakov wrote that when in the
following February at Yalta the proposal was advanced to
force German workers to rebuild war-damaged areas, "Presi-
dent Roosevelt called this a healthy idea." 1 It was at this
meeting that Mr. Roosevelt pressed the Morgenthau Plan and
won Mr. Stalin's ominously ready acceptance.
Although at Potsdam it was solemnly promised again that
"It is not the intention of the Allies to . . . enslave the German
people," thousands of Germans had already been marched east-
ward into Russia's yawning slave camps. More than a month
earlier, on June 29, 1945, the following had been published:
"German prisoners in Russian hands are estimated to number
from four to five millions. When Berlin and Breslau surrendered,
the long grey-green columns of prisoners were marched east down-
cast and fearful . . . toward huge depots near Leningrad, Moscow,
Minsk, Stalingrad, Kiev, Kharkov, and Sevastopol. All fit men
had to march some 22 miles a day. Those physically handicapped
went in handcarts or carts pulled by spare beasts.... They will
be made to rebuild the Russian towns and villages which they de-
stroyed. They will not return home until the work is completed." X
It has long been an open secret that Russia maintains under
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