The exhibition “Forced Labor. The Germans, the Forced Laborers and the War” was shown from 9 January until 8 March 2026 in the Royal Castle of Warsaw.
The Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation’s exhibition was initiated and sponsored by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (EVZ). In Warsaw the exhibition was under the patronage of not one but two presidents: Poland’s President Bronisław Komorowski and Germany’s Federal President Joachim Gauck. The Royal Castle, which was reconstructed until the 1980’s after its near complete destruction in World War II, showed the exhibition in the Kubicki Arcades. After its inauguration at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the exhitibition was presented in Moscow and, most recently, Dortmund.

The core of the exhibition is made up of over 60 representative case studies. Arranged chronologically, the exhibition draws attention to several examples of forced labor in Poland under German occupation and the individual stories of many Polish men and women who performed forced labor in Germany. The exhibited items and photographs allow viewers to explore the racially defined relationship between Germans and forced laborers – including all the leeway people had in that context. They also make it plain that forced labor was a component of the racist social order of the Nazi state right from the beginning: the Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) and the forced labor of those excluded from it – the two belonged together.

The presentation of the exhibition in Warsaw was realised by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” and the Royal Castle of Warsaw in collaboration with the Foundation for Polish–German Reconciliation (FPNP), founded in 1991. This organization is dedicated to serving the victims of the Third Reich and National Socialist persecution and to promoting German-Polish understanding and dialogue between the societies and the generations.

The Royal Castle, the Foundation for Polish–German Reconciliation and the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation presented an extensive program to accompany the exhibition, including lectures, workshops and an academic conference at the University of Warsaw.