Page Eight

Ostarbeiter Slave Labor

In early 1943, Germany issued special 6-pfennig-plus-6-pfennig message-and-reply postal cards for the use of Ostarbeiter slave laborers, with trilingual inscriptions in German, Russian, and Ukrainian.

Pictured Above and Below: A September 7, 1943, Ostarbeiter message-and-reply card from a woman slave laborer at the Landsberg- Warthe Angerlager O subcamp of Dachau, an aircraft factory. The reply portion of the card is still attached. It was never used because by this date the Red Army had driven the Germans from Kiev. Soviet authorities confiscated such mail, regarded as evidence of collaboration with the Nazis; most of it remained in KGB archives until after the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

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