Free exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library using its archives to show how the Nazi regime exploited slave and forced labourers across Germany and occupied territories.
The Wiener Holocaust Library is hosting Nazi Slave Labour: Perpetrators and Victims, an exhibition that runs from 20 May to 30 October 2026 at 29 Russell Square. It looks at how the Nazi regime profited from slave labour, and it doesn't stop at the camps. Between 1939 and 1945, around 20 million people were exploited as slave and forced labourers: 13 million inside the Third Reich and 7 million in occupied territories. About 2.5 million died, mostly Soviet prisoners of war and concentration camp prisoners. By 1944, one in four employees in Germany was a forced labourer, working in everything from agriculture to chemical production.
From 1942, camp inmates were 'leased' to private companies, unpaid and often worked to death. The exhibition draws on the library's own archives — eyewitness testimony, photographs and war crimes trial documents — to show how the system stretched far beyond the concentration camps and into factories, farms and major companies like the SS, I.G. Farben and Krupp. It also displays records from the Nuremberg 'Farben Case', which prosecuted I.G. Farben executives.
There are a couple of things on display that you won't find elsewhere. Photographer Mike Stone's contemporary portraits of survivors are shown here for the first time, and there's an exhibition catalogue by Dr Barbara Warnock, Dr Clara Dijkstra and Katherine Funk. It's a heavy subject, but the library's archives bring it down to the level of individual lives and the companies that profited from them.
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Entry is free and you don't need to book, so you can just drop in. The exhibition runs from 20 May to 30 October 2026 at The Wiener Holocaust Library, 29 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DP.
