1. The concept of the workers from the occupied territories of the USSR was narrowed down to the labor- and social-legal term "Eastern Laborers". A labor condition among "Foreigners" was hereby created in a segregated "Employment under Special Conditions" which had to be looked upon by those affected, as degrading.
2. The drafting of Eastern workers and women workers often occurred without the necessary examination of the capabilities of those concerned, so that 5-10 out of a hundred, sick and children, were transported along. On the other hand, in those places where no volunteers were obtained, instead of using the lawful employment obligations, coercive measures were used by the police (imprisonment, penal expedition, and similar measures.)
3. The employment in businesses was not undertaken by considering the occupation and previous training but according to the chance assignment of the individual to the respective transports or transient camps.
4. The billeting did not follow the policies according to which the other foreigners are governed, but just as for civilian prisoners in camps which were fenced in with barbed wire and were heavily guarded, from which no exit was permitted.
5. The treatment by the guards was on the average without intelligence and cruel so that the Russian and Ukrainian workers, in enterprises with foreign laborers of different nationalities, were exposed to the scorn of the Poles and the Czechs among other things.
6. The food and care was so bad and insufficient in the camps for the Eastern Laborers being employed in the industry and in the mines that the good average capability of the camp members dropped down shortly and many sicknesses and deaths took place.
7. Payment was carried out in the form of a ruling in which the industrial worker would keep on the average 2 or 3 RM each week and the farm laborers even less, so that the transfer of pay to their homes became illusory, not to mention the fact there had been no satisfactory procedure developed for this.
8. The postal service with their families was not feasible for months because of the lack of a precautionary ruling; so that instead of factual reports, wild rumors arrived in their countries,—among other means by means of emigration.
9. The promises which had been made time and time again in the areas of enlistment stood in contradiction with those facts mentioned under 3-8.
Apart from the natural impairment of the frame of mind and capabilities which these measures, as well as conditions, brought with them, the result was that the Soviet propaganda took over the matter and evaluated it carefully. Not only the actual conditions and the letters which reached the country, in spite of the initial blockade, as well as the stories of fugitives and such, but also the clumsy publications in the German press of the legal rulings relative to the matter gave them enough to manipulate with. Commissar for Foreign Affairs Molotov in his note to the enemy powers referred already in April 1942 to this, especially in para. III of this document in which among others it is stated: