page_title: Forced labor of Germans after World War II
section_title: Eastern Europe
hierarchical_section_title: Forced labor of Germans after World War II / Eastern Europe
caption_attribution_description: For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Die Mutter eines Kriegsgefangenen dankt Bundeskanzler Dr. Konrad Adenauer nach seiner Rückkehr aus Moskau am 14. 9. 1955 auf dem Flughafen Köln/Bonn für den erfolgreichen Abschluß seiner Verhandlungen mit der sowjetischen Führung. Dr. Adenauer hatte erreicht, daß bis Ende 1955 über 15.000 Kriegsgefangene, Internierte und Zivilverschleppte in die Bundesrepublik Deutschland entlassen wurden.
context_page_description: In the years following World War II, large numbers of German civilians and captured soldiers were forced into labour by the Allied forces. The topic of using Germans as forced labour for reparations was first broached at the Tehran conference in 1943, where Soviet premier Joseph Stalin demanded 4,000,000 German workers.
  Forced labour was also included in the final protocol of the Yalta conference in January 1945, where it was sanctioned by UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
caption: The mother of a prisoner thanks Konrad Adenauer upon his return from Moscow, September 14, 1955. Adenauer had succeeded in concluding negotiations about the release to Germany, by the end of the year, of 15,000 German civilians and prisoners of war.
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