6 April – 9 May, 2016
EPEKA Gallery, Maribor

In cooperation with the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation, EPEKA Gallery is organising a commemorative exhibition entitled FORCED LABOUR – Germany, forced labourers and World War II. The opening will take place on the symbolic date of 6 April, at 7 pm, on the 75th anniversary of the attack on the old Yugoslavia or the bombing of the then capital Belgrade, and the closing on Victory Day, 9 May.

During the Second World War, more than 20 million people from all over Europe were forced to work in the labour camps of the German Reich. National Socialist Germany had long planned and prepared for the war, which was carried out with the aim of subjugating and exploiting Europe. To this end, they plundered the occupied territories and took millions of men into forced labour.

Forced labourers had to work wherever they were assigned – in arms factories, on building sites, in agriculture, in shops or in private households. All Germans – whether a soldier in the occupying army in Poland or a farmer’s wife in Thuringia – had the right to use them. National-socialist racist ideology was reflected in all aspects of relations with forced labourers. Nevertheless, there was some room for leniency towards them, and if a worker suffered humiliation or abuse, there were cases of some vestiges of humanity, but that depended largely on the supervisors in individual cases.

The core of the exhibition comprises more than sixty representative case studies, which together serve to make the complex subject of forced labour understandable and tangible for visitors. These case studies have been meticulously researched and compiled specifically for the exhibition from a wide range of archives in Europe. The exhibition website provides a small glimpse into the exhibition itself.

This international travelling exhibition is the first to tell the whole story of forced labour under National Socialism and its aftermath after 1945 in its own way. It also sheds light on the racially based relations between Germans and forced labourers.

The exhibition is organised in cooperation with the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation and in the framework of the project Roma Genocide – Part of European History, supported by the EU’s Europe for Citizens programme.

It is particularly important to highlight the fact that the Slovenian writer, Boris Pahor, a Slovene from Trieste, was forced to work in Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.

For more information see:
Press and Publicity Department
Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation
pneumann@buchenwald.de
Phone +49 (0) 3643 430 156
Fax +49 (0) 3643 430 100

or epeka@epeka.si