In Waltrop-Ickern Germany I sketched a former forced labor barracks. Today this long building is part of a quiet suburb. Fireplace smoke rose from the quiet home on a peaceful morning. During World War II, Krupp industry in nearby Essen Germany tilized POWs and forced labor for their war production, highlighting the reliance on slave labor in the region’s factories.
In August 1944, there were over 7.6 million Fremdarbeiter (foreign workers) officially registered in the “Greater German Reich,” which represented one-fifth of the total German labor force. Of those, 1.9 million were prisoners of war and 5.7 million were civilian forced laborers. Eastern Europeans made up the majority of civilian forced laborers, a term used to describe people who were involuntarily taken from their homes and deported to work in various places throughout the Third Reich during World War II. The labor policy regarding Eastern Europeans was directly related to Nazi racial ideology, which viewed Slavic peoples as Untermenschen, or subhuman.
In the Waltrop-Holthausen maternity confinement camp, specially established for female forced laborers, 1,273 babies were born during World War II. Most of the infants which were taken from the women, died of starvation or inadequate care within their first year of life. The babies were specifically starved to death by the Germans as a form of racial cleansing.
The camp was set up to manage pregnancies among non-German forced laborers (mostly Polish and Soviets) who had been deported to Westphalia to work in local industries and on farms. The system was intended to ensure these women could quickly return to work and to forcibly abort fetuses and guarantee the deaths of “racially undesirable” children within the German population.
The Polish girl Maria Wieclaw is one of the young women deported to Waltrop Germany for forced labor. At the age of twenty she met her future husband and became pregnant. She gave birth to her daughter Valentina in the Waltrop-Holthausen maternity confinement camp. Her baby was immediately taken from her. To this day, Maria Wieclaw still does not know what happened to her daughter.
Some women tried to break into the maternity confinement camp to recover their children, but if caught they would face certain death. Mothers who were deemed unable to return to work quickly after childbirth were often murdered along with their babies. After the war, many survivors were forcibly returned to Eastern Europe and were ostracized as “traitors of the fatherland” and faced continued hardship.
On April 4, 1945 three American Infantry Divisions advanced south after crossing the Dortmund-Ems Canal. The 291st Infantry Division was on the left, the 289th Infantry Division was on the right and the 116th Infantry Division in the center. They rolled south to crush Waltrop Germany. The 289th pushed forward to seize Ickern Germany. Coal mines factories, and houses needed to be cleared. K-Company of the 289th Infantry Division killed a German platoon when they met them at an underpass of a superhighway.
The canal system was bridged and supplies rolled forward. Tanks moved forward for support and troops climbed aboard jeeps to keep pace with the fast moving column. Although there was some heavy resistance, the Volksstrom or peoples army, often threw ip their hands and dropped their weapons, begging to go home.
The large city of Dortmund Germany lay ahead and it was the task of the 75th Infantry Division to clear the approaches.