The Impact of Forced Labour at Telefunken and War Experiences in Ulm on the Health of Female Children and Adolescents (1944-1945)

In the darkest years of the Second World War, the machinery of the Nazi regime relied on a vast, coerced workforce drawn from across occupied Europe. Millions of people were uprooted and forced to labor for the German war effort, but the treatment of these individuals was not uniform; it was dictated by a brutal racial hierarchy that placed Polish citizens at the very bottom. For young girls, particularly those between the ages of twelve and sixteen, this system meant being stripped of their childhood, their education, and their safety to perform delicate, high-precision work in factories. The medical care provided to these children was not designed to heal or protect them, but rather to ensure they remained capable of working and to prevent disease from spreading to the German population. This stark reality forms the backdrop for a recent investigation into the specific fate of a group of girls from Łódź, Poland, who were sent to work in the city of Ulm, Germany, during the final, chaotic year of the war.

The story centers on approximately 1,400 young women and girls who were deported in the summer of 1944 to work for Telefunken, an electrical company that had moved its operations from Poland to Ulm. Their task was to manufacture vacuum tubes, a critical component for military communications, a job that required the fine motor skills and patience that the German occupiers believed only these young girls possessed. To understand what happened to them, researchers Florian Grafl, Marcin Orzechowski, and Florian Steger from the University of Ulm conducted deep interviews with eight people: four of the former forced laborers themselves, and three of their children. They combined these personal stories with a careful review of historical documents, including company records, city council minutes, and files from the post-war denazification tribunals. Their goal was to reconstruct the daily reality these girls faced and to trace how the trauma of that time shaped their health for the rest of their lives.

When the girls arrived in Ulm, their first experience was not work, but a humiliating medical inspection. They were forced to undress in public in front of male officials for delousing and examinations, a procedure that stripped them of their dignity before they had even begun their labor. Once settled, their lives were defined by exhaustion and hunger. They worked twelve-hour shifts, often in two shifts a day, inside the massive stone walls of the Wilhelmsburg fortress, a building chosen not for its suitability as a dormitory, but because its thick walls could shield the factory from Allied bombing. The living conditions were cramped and unsanitary, with dozens of girls sharing small spaces and having almost no access to washing facilities. This led to rampant infestations of lice. Their diet was meager, consisting mostly of bread, potatoes, and thin soups, leaving many of them in a state of constant, gnawing hunger.

The violence of the war soon intruded on their already difficult existence. On December 17, 1944, a heavy bombing raid destroyed the school where many of the girls were initially housed, burning their few personal belongings to ash. Those who had been moved to the Wilhelmsburg fortress faced their own terror, hiding in cellars as the building was bombed repeatedly. The medical care they received during this time was shockingly limited and driven by a single, cold logic: keep the worker alive enough to work, and keep the German staff safe from infection. If a girl fell ill with a disease that would take too long to cure, she was sent back to Poland rather than treated in a German hospital. The only medical interventions that seemed to happen with any regularity were abortions, driven by the Nazi ideology that sought to prevent the "undesirable reproduction" of Polish women, and eye examinations, because good vision was essential for the precision work they performed. One girl died of tuberculosis because she was denied treatment, and others suffered from severe menstrual disruptions, likely caused by the immense physical and psychological stress they endured.

The consequences of these experiences did not end when the war finished and the girls returned to Poland. The researchers found that the physical and psychological scars lasted a lifetime. Several of the women developed osteoporosis, a condition that weakens the bones, which they attributed to the malnutrition and hard labor of their youth. One woman became deaf in her thirties, a condition she linked to the shock of the bombing raids that had left her unable to hear for days. Others suffered from diabetes and severe anemia. Perhaps more pervasive than the physical ailments were the mental wounds. Three of the four women interviewed for the study reported suffering from mental illness after their return, describing symptoms of depression and a deep-seated fear that stemmed from the air raids and the violence they witnessed. One woman recalled watching other Polish women being raped by guards during the transport to Germany, a memory that haunted her for decades.

The study also revealed a painful intergenerational impact. The children of these survivors grew up in households shadowed by unspoken trauma. One daughter described her mother as someone who showed little interest in other people, while another recounted how her mother would cry in her sleep every night, never receiving the psychological help she needed. The researchers suggest that these unaddressed traumas were passed down, affecting the emotional lives of the next generation. The paper concludes that the medical system of the time was not merely inadequate; it was actively designed to serve the war machine and racial ideology rather than human welfare. The girls were treated as disposable components of production, and the lack of care they received ensured that the damage inflicted upon them would echo through their lives and the lives of their children, a silent testament to the long shadow cast by the war.