Elizabeth Harvey’s research while affiliated with University of Nottingham and other places

Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany - edited by Elizabeth Harvey July 2019

Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany - edited by Elizabeth Harvey July 2019

Cambridge Core - Twentieth Century European History - Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany - edited by Elizabeth Harvey

Foreign labour was an essential resource for the Nazi war economy: by September 1944, around six million civilian labourers from across Europe were working in the Reich. Any initial readiness on the part of the peoples of Nazi-occupied Europe to volunteer for work in the Reich had quickly dissipated as the harsh and often vicious treatment of foreign workers became known. The abuse and exploitation of foreign forced labourers by the Nazi regime is well documented. Less well understood is why women formed such a substantial proportion of the labour recruited or forcibly deported from occupied eastern Europe: in September 1944, a third of Polish forced labourers and just over over half of Soviet civilian forced labourers were women. This article explores the factors influencing the demand for and the supply of female labour from the Nazi-occupied territories of the Soviet Union, particularly after the appointment of Fritz Sauckel as Plenipotentiary for Labour in March 1942. It explores the attitudes of labour officials towards these women workers and shows how Nazi gender politics and the Nazi hierarchy of race intersected in the way they were treated.

History conjures up an image of the past and transports it into our present. Photographs both facilitate and, at times, markedly determine this historical process, especially for the twentieth century. For better or worse, they have irrevocably shaped the way we imagine the characters and sites of modern history. From infamous dictators to mass political rallies, from radical protests to everyday leisure pursuits: photographs form powerful frames through which we historians represent the past to ourselves and to our audiences.