‘Annihilation through work’: London exhibit highlights overlooked story of slave labor in WWII
Robert Philpot is a writer and journalist. He is the former editor of Progress magazine and the author of “Margaret Thatcher: The Honorary Jew.”LONDON — Agnes Kaposi was just 11 years old when she was forced to work on a state farm in Austria contributing to Nazi agricultural production. Still a child, she was later sent to an armaments plant, where she moved materials around a factory producing anti-aircraft guns.Born to a Jewish family in Hungary, Kaposi was one of an estimated 20 million men, women and children exploited by the Nazis’ vast apparatus of forced and slave labor — an often-overlooked topic in wider Holocaust remembrance and commemoration that is now the focus of a major exhibition in London this summer.“Nazi Slave Labor: Perpetrators and Victims” runs through the end of October at the Wiener Holocaust Library. It highlights the breadth and development of the system, which stretched from…
A new exhibition in London, "Nazi Slave Labor: Perpetrators and Victims" at the Wiener Holocaust Library, sheds light on the often-overlooked story of the estimated 20 million people exploited by the Nazi regime's vast forced and slave labor system during World War II. Running through October, the exhibit highlights the breadth and evolution of this system, which spanned from occupied France to the Soviet Union.
Because it’s linked to economic history, it can be quite a dry topic based on anonymous statistics, big numbers and faceless companies.
Curator Clara Dijkstra notes the exhibition aims to "put a lot of faces and names" to the victims, moving beyond academic statistics. The exhibit features testimonies and portraits of survivors like Agnes Kaposi, who was forced into labor as a child, and commemorates the millions who perished, including Agnes's cousin András. It details how forced labor evolved from a punitive measure in early concentration camps to a widespread economic tool, implicating major German companies like IG Farben, Bayer, and Siemens, which rented prisoners from the SS for their factories.
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