Sabotage I.

This is coolbert:

Back to the topic of impressed or forced labor as used by the German during the Second World War [WW2]. Persons working under duress and involved in the manufacture of military munitions producing the a product I might assume the quality of which would be highly suspect and questionable.

Here from an Internet web site a forum devoted to the subject with extracts from same

"Sabotage by forced labour"

[all spellings of labour in the British manner!]

The comments of one participant to the forum suggesting that sabotage as committed by forced labor during the Second World War [WW2] rather rare. That impressed work force [not so great in size to begin with?] for a variety of reasons not able to perpetrate damage as might be thought to be the case.

1. "Firstly, only a relatively small portion of the German workforce was comprised of foreign workers and concentration camp inmates. However, this number did increase during the later half of the war."

2. "Secondly, those who were interned in a POW camp or concentration camp were often happy to be able to work in a German factory, since this meant their food allowances were increased. They would not sabotage the equipment they were producing if they wanted to keep their job."

3. "Thirdly it was nearly impossible to sabotage their work. Of course there was strict quality controll, but besides that most of the time the people forced to work were performing unskilled labor. Hence the nature of their work was such there was nothing they could do wrong (or sabotage)."

4. "Fourthly the only effective means of sabotaging the German war effort as a forced worker was working as slow as possible, but this the Germans countered by assigning German workers to do the same job the forced workers had to do. In this way it would clearly show if one was working much slower than a properly motivated colleague doing the exact same thing."

5. "And last but not least, the people being interned in POW- or concentration camps had no way of knowing how the war was developing, especially if they had been there for some time. All they know was what German propaganda told them, and this was of course that the Germans were winning. So as far as they knew the German armies were on the doorstep of the Kremlin and London was being bombed to ruins by the V-weapons. Why would they risk their lives if the war would end in just a few months with a clear German victory anyway?"

See my previous blog entry regarding sabotage as committed by impressed [forced] labor during WW2 with comment:

http://militaryanalysis.blogspot.com/2015/11/sabotage.html

coolbert.