page_title: The Holocaust in the Sudetenland
section_title: Forced labor
hierarchical_section_title: The Holocaust in the Sudetenland / Forced labor
caption_attribution_description: Čeština: Krematorium koncentračního tábora Richard v Litoměřicích. English: Crematorium of Leitmeritz concentration camp now in Litoměřice, Czech Republic.
context_page_description: The Holocaust in the Sudetenland resulted in the flight, dispossession, deportation and ultimately death of many of the 24,505 Jews living in the Reichsgau Sudetenland, a Nazi German administrative region established from former Czechoslovak territory annexed after the October 1938 Munich Agreement. Due to harassment and violence, including during Kristallnacht, ninety percent of the Jews had already left the Sudetenland by mid-1939. The remaining Jews were subject to property confiscation and eventually deportation. During the later years of the war, tens of thousands of Jews and non-Jews were forced laborers in a network of concentration camps in the Sudetenland.
  After the war, Jewish communities in the former Sudetenland suffered losses due to the discrimination against German-speaking Jews under the postwar Czechoslovak government, but were partially replenished by arrivals from Carpathian Ruthenia.
context_section_description: By 1939, Jews over the age of 14 were required to work at forced labor projects, even though their numbers were not enough to stem the local labor shortage. Due to low numbers, not a single forced-labor camp for local Jews was set up in the Sudetenland, despite the extensive systems that existed elsewhere. Exploitation of the forced labor of non-German Jews by Organization Schmelt became a major profit center for the SS. At the beginning of 1943, nineteen of 177 Schmelt camps were located in the Sudetenland; detainees were housed under conditions similar to those in the concentration camps. In late 1942, more than a thousand Jewish women were employed in the textile industry in Kreis Trautenau. In Postelberg, near Saatz, a forced-labor camp existed from 1943 to 1945, and in December 1944, two forced-labor camps were set up near Komotau. Both camps housed Jewish men from Prague protected from deportation by mixed marriages, the non-Jewish husbands of Jewish women from the Protectorate, and Mischlinge from the Protectorate.
  In 1942, the first subcamps of Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück and Gross-Rosen were established in the Sudetenland, many of them derived from the system of Organization Schmelt. The system was greatly expanded during late 1944 because Sudetenland was one of the last areas to be relatively safe from Allied bombing and therefore favored for the relocation of war industry. In particular, it was  home to many of the subcamps of Flossenbürg, which itself was just over the pre-war border in the Upper Palatinate of Bavaria. One of the largest subcamps in the Sudetenland was Leitmeritz, a subcamp of Flossenbürg organized by the Jägerstab (fighter staff) for aircraft and other armaments production. It had around 18,000 prisoners (including 3,600 Jews), 4,500 of whom died. Seven Gross-Rosen female subcamps in the Sudetenland contained 4,000 Jewish women.
  Thousands of Jews arrived at these camps in the last year of the war, both Hungarian Jews deported during the summer of 1944 and other Jews from the evacuation transports from Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and other concentration camps in 1945. Extensive death marches took place in northern Bohemia in the last weeks of the war, delivering 12,829  prisoners to Theresienstadt from mid-April.
caption: Former crematorium at Leitmeritz concentration camp
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