Limited, Inc.

  One of the oublis of the Nazi state was the accelerated construction of a slave economy – the so called “forced laborers” – Zwangsarbeiter.   There are various estimates of the number of forced laborers – by 1944 there were thirty thousand labor camps and over 8 million forced laborers. The extent of the slave system and the speed with which it was set up to intersect with every industry and service in Germany was astonishing. By 1941, 1.5 million Poles were slaves; 1 million French war prisoners were slaves. 2.5 million Soviets, by 1944. 50 percent of the Poles and Soviets were women. The full awareness that this is what a slave state does – that what the Nazis did in 3 years were what the French, Portugese, Spanish and English did to West Africa for 300 years – seems to have been erased, or at least largely left aside, from the general discussion of slavery. There is a rhetoric among white nationalists in various countries that occasionally discovers white slavery, such as was e