7. Payment was carried out in the form of a ruling in which the industrial worker would be left on the average with 2 or 3 RM each week, and the farm laborers with even less, so that the wage transfer to their homes became illusory, not to mention the fact that no procedure was as yet developed for such transfer.
8. The postal service with their families was not feasible for months because of the lack of preparatory measures, so that instead of factual reports, wild rumors arrived in their countries—among others, by way of emigrants.
9. The promises which had been made time and time again in the areas of enlistment were in gross contradiction with the facts mentioned under 3 to 8.
Apart from the natural impairment of morale and working capacity resulting from these measures and conditions, the result was that the Soviet propaganda seized upon this matter and exploited it carefully; for this, an ample basis was provided not only by the actual conditions and the letters which reached the home country [of the workers] in spite of the initial blockade, as well as by stories of fugitives and such, but also by the clumsy publications in the German press about the respective legal regulations. As early as April 1942, Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Molotov, in his note to the enemy powers referred to this, especially in section III of that note in which among other things it is stated:
“The German administration is stamping under its feet the long recognized laws and customs of warfare by ordering its troops to take into captivity the male civilian population, in many places even the women, and to apply to them the kind of regime, which the Hitlerites have introduced for the prisoners of war. This does not only mean slave labor for the captured peaceful inhabitants but in most cases also inescapable death by starvation or death through sickness, corporal punishment, and organized mass murders.
“The deportation of peaceful inhabitants to the rear which has been very widely practiced by the German-Fascist Army at the time of its advance is taking on a mass character; it is carried out at direct orders of the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces (OKW) and its effects are especially cruel in the immediate rear areas during the retreat of the German Army. In a series of documents which have been found by units of the Red Army at the staffs of destroyed German units, there is a reference to the Order of the High Command under No. 2974/41 of 6 December 1941 which orders the deportation of all grown men from the occupied places to prisoner of war camps. * * *
“Sometimes, all the inhabitants were deported, sometimes the men were torn away from their families, or mothers were separated from their children. Only the smallest number of these deported people have been able to return to their homes. These returnees report about unheard-of degradations, heaviest forced labor, enormous numbers of deaths among inhabitants because of starvation and tortures, about the murder by the Fascists of all the weak, wounded, and sick.”
The effects of this large-scale radio, press, and leaflet propaganda which is based on documentary evidence, a propaganda operating even into German-administered territories, must be considered as one of the main reasons for this year’s stiffening of the Soviet resistance as well as the threatening increase of guerilla bands up to the borders of the General Government.
In the meantime, after a betterment of the condition of the eastern laborers had been insisted upon, not only by the Main Office for Politics in the Reich Ministry for the occupied eastern territories, which has been able to find support in the repeated requests by the High Command of the Armed Forces, but also by the gentleman charged with the responsibility for all labor employment as well as the Department of Labor Employment in the German Labor Movement, which has the supervision of the eastern laborers—those previously existing legal and police rulings have been mitigated and the conditions in the 8-10,000 camps in the Reich have, on the whole, been improved. * * *