Extermination through labor

concentration camp quarry in Upper Austria. Inmates were forced to carry heavy rocks up the stairs. In their severely weakened state, few prisoners could cope with this back-breaking labour for long.]]

**Extermination through labour** is a way of torturing and killing prisoners.  In a system of  by labour, prisoners are forced to do very heavy work without enough food or medical care.  Eventually, prisoners die from malnutrition, illness, or injury.

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both had systems of extermination through labor.  Some people describe North Korea's prison system as a system of extermination through labor.

## Use as a term
The term "extermination through labor" was first used during World War II.  Most of the Nazi SS did not use the term (*Vernichtung durch Arbeit* in German).  However, Albert Bormann, Joseph Goebels, Otto Georg Thierack, and Heinrich Himmler used the term during the fall of 1942, while talking about moving prisoners to concentration camps. Thierack and Goebbels specifically used the term. The phrase was used again during the Nuremberg Trials after World War II ended.

The Nazis also persecuted people who were "German-blooded," but who the Nazis thought of as "social misfits" (*aisoziale*).  The Nazis said these people led useless "-lives" (*Ballastexiltenzen*).  These people included:
* Families with many children who depended on welfare
* People accused of being "vagrant" or "transient" (homeless)
* Alcoholics
* Prostitutes
* Homosexuals
The Nazis lists of these people and persecuted them in many ways.  For example, some were forced to be sterilized.  Many were eventually sent to prison camps for "extermination through labor."  Along with them, anyone who spoke out against the Nazi regime (like communists, social democrats, democrats, and conscientious objectors) were sent to prison camps. Many of them did not survive.

### Concentration camps
#### Conditions
, 1941]]

In the Nazi prison camps, prisoners were treated like slaves:

#### Death rates
A slave worker on a work assignment usually lived less than four months, on average.  Up to 25,000 of the 35,000 prisoners forced to work for IG Farben at Auschwitz concentration camp died.  Some died from exhaustion or disease.  Others were killed after the Nazis decided they were not healthy enough to work any more.

Some work assignments were deadlier than others.  Some prisoners were assigned to dig tunnels for German weapons factories during the last months of the war.  About 30% of them died.  In the satellite camps, which were near mines and industrial firms, death rates were even higher.  In these satellite camps, the supplies were often even less adequate than in the main camps.

The phrase "Arbeit macht frei" ("work shall set you free") appeared on the entry gates at Auschwitz and other Nazi labor camps.

## In the Soviet Union 
Some historians call the Soviet Gulag a system of death camps, particularly in post-Communist Eastern European politics. Other historians argue that this trivializes the Holocaust (makes the Holocaust seems like it was not so bad) because, at least after the war ended, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn introduced the expression *camps of extermination by labour* in his non-fiction work *The Gulag Archipelago*.  In the book, Solzhenitsyn argues that the Soviet Union beat its enemies by making them work as prisoners on big state-run projects (like the White Sea-Baltic Canal, quarries, remote railroads, and urban development projects) under terrible conditions. Roy Medvedev comments: "The penal system in the Kolyma and in the camps in the north was deliberately designed for the extermination of people."

According to formerly secret internal Gulag documents, some 1.6 million people must have died in the period between 1935 and 1956 in Soviet forced labour camps and colonies.  This does not include people who died in prisoner-of-war camps.  Most (about 900,000) of these deaths fell between 1941 and 1945.  At that time, World War II was ongoing, and food supplies were low in the entire country.

Russian historian Oleg Khlevniuk writes that about 500,000 people died in the camps and colonies from 1930 to 1941.  However, these figures do not include people who died in transport (on their way to the camps).  It also does not include the number of people who died shortly after their release due to the harsh treatment in the camps (there were many of these people, according to both archives and memoirs).

Historian J. Otto Pohl estimates that 2,749,163 prisoners died in the labour camps, colonies, and special settlements.  He says this figure is incomplete.

In 2010, Stanford historian Norman Naimark wrote a book called ''Stalin's Genocides*.  Naimark said scholars should change the word *genocide'' so that it also meant killing people because they were in a social class or had political beliefs so that Stalin's killings would count as genocide.

## In North Korea 
It is believed that similar camps are operating in North Korea, and killed at least 20,000 political prisoners in 2013 alone, with at least 130,000 held therein.

## Related pages
* Forced labour of Germans after World War II
* Hunger Plan, a German plan to starve the Slavic and Jewish populations
* Penal labour

## References 
## Further reading 
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## Other websites
* Lemo *Die nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager*  
* *Frauen im Gulag*, Deutschlandradio, May 11, 2003