Archive Forced Labor
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The interview archive "Forced Labor 1939-1945. History and Memory" commemorates the over twenty million people who were forced to work for Nazi Germany. It consists of 190 video and 393 audio testimonies of former forced laborers. The detailed biographical interviews were collected from 2005 to 2006 within the scope of the project “Documentation of Life Story Interviews with Former Slave and Forced Laborers” coordinated by the Institute for History and Biography at the FernUniversität Hagen.
32 project teams conducted interviews in 26 countries, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe. Most of the interviews were recorded in Ukraine, Poland and Russia. The interviews were conducted in the native languages of the witnesses or their present adopted language.
Since 2007 the Freie Universität Berlin has been working on permanently securing, allocating and in-depth indexing of the interviews and their accompanying materials and on presenting them in an online platform. The archive is accessible online after registration and is available in German, English and Russian.