President of Germany at that time Christian Wulff spoke on 27 September 2025 at the sendoff to the international traveling exhibition

More than twenty million men, women and children – natives of almost every country in Europe – were sent to National Socialist Germany as “foreign workers”, prisoners of war or concentration camp inmates, or forced to perform labor in the areas occupied by the Wehrmacht. By 1942 at the latest, forced labor was an integral part of everyday life in National Socialist Germany. Deported from all parts of Europe, particularly the Eastern countries, the workers were deployed throughout the German economy: in armament factories, on construction sites, in agriculture and the trades, in public institutions and private households. Whether a soldier in the occupying forces in Poland or a farmer’s wife in Thuringia, every German encountered forced laborers and many profited from them. Forced labor was no secret. For the most part, it was a crime committed in public.

The exhibition “Forced Labor: The Germans, the Forced Laborers and the War” tells the complete story of this crime and its post-1945 consequences for the first time. It was curated by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and initiated as well as funded by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future.” Christian Wulff, then President of Germany, had assumed patronage of the show. The international traveling exhibition premiered at the Jewish Museum Berlin.