Forced labor of Germans after World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In March 1947, an estimated 4,000,000 Germans were being used as forced labour
//
The largest group of forced laborers in the Soviet Union consisted of several million German prisoners of war. Several hundred thousand of these POWs had been transferred by the US to the Soviets[4] which used them, alongside Soviet captured POWs and German civilians, as forced laborers. Most German POW survivors of the forced labor camps in the Soviet Union were released in 1953.[5][6] The last major repatriation of Germans from the Soviet Union occurred in 1956.
Estimates of German POW casualties (in both east and west and cumulative for both the war and peace-time period) range from 600,000 to 1,000,000.[7] According to the section of the German Red Cross dealing with tracing the captives, the ultimate fate of 1,300,000 German POW's in Allied custody is still unknown