When the city of Berlin surrendered to the Red Army on May 2, 1945, there were approximately 370,000 forced laborers throughout the city. Prisoners of war, concentration camp prisoners and so-called civilian workers. Most of them were still at their places of deployment and in the camps at the end of the war. The weeks in April and May 1945 were marked by hunger, despair, fear, resistance and hope.
Many former forced laborers from Western and Southern Europe were still able to return to their home countries in the summer of 1945, either on their own or with the help of the Allied repatriation transports. Other liberated persons tried to resist repatriation. Especially in the Soviet Union, the returnees were long suspected of treason and collaboration with the Germans.

The history of the liberation of the Nazi forced labor camps in Berlin has not been comprehensively reappraised to this day. We take the 75th anniversary of the end of the war as an opportunity to look at the former forced laborers. How did they experience the last weeks of the war? What was their first contact with the Allies like? What happened to the liberated camps?

On our blog, we document eyewitness accounts, diary excerpts, letters, and memories from the Berlin metropolitan area.