How to read this page
This is not a general history of the Third Reich. It focuses on a specific landscape on the Neisse: Forst (Lausitz), its eastern hinterland, Scheuno and the later DSC complex. Municipal, archival and testimonial sources are combined. Jürgen Scholz’s 2004 work on “Ausländereinsatz in Forst (Lausitz) 1939-1945” is an important research guide, but no legally open full text has been found. We therefore do not attribute detailed figures or camp lists to Scholz unless they can be independently checked. The title, author and year are bibliographically confirmed, as is his later 2006 article.
Forst under National Socialist rule
Forst was an important industrial centre in Lower Lusatia. After 1933 its public and economic life was incorporated into the National Socialist system, and wartime demands increasingly shaped the local economy. Three developments need to be read together: persecution of people targeted by the regime, forced labour, and the expansion of armaments infrastructure east of the Neisse. That is why the history of wartime Forst extends beyond the limits of today’s German city.
10 November 1938 - the pogrom reached Forst
An official City of Forst publication states that the November pogrom reached Forst on 10 November 1938. Jewish residents were disenfranchised, persecuted and deprived of their livelihoods. Today’s Stolpersteine and remembrance ceremonies therefore refer to specific local families. This matters for understanding the war years: state-directed violence shaped the city long before the front arrived in 1945.
Forced labour was part of everyday wartime life
A particularly direct testimony is preserved by the Documentation Centre for Nazi Forced Labour. A Polish man deported at the age of twenty described the camp at Schönforst in Lusatia, a work card issued by the Forst labour office, barracks housing 16 men per room, and being marched under guard to the construction site. He explicitly named Deutsche Sprengchemie as the company for which he worked. The testimony links labour office, camp, construction site and armaments plant in one coercive system.
The cemetery record shows the wider scale
A 2010 municipal bulletin, citing a Brandenburg ministry publication, reported about 200 forced labourers from the Second World War buried in Forst’s main cemetery; 43 foreign victims were then known by name. The “Zwangsarbeiterfeld” is a memorial site. These figures must not be automatically assigned to DSC - they concern forced labour in Forst more broadly - but they show that foreign coerced labour was a lasting part of the wartime city.
Scholz: a research guide, not a substitute for sources
The BLHA catalogue confirms Scholz’s 2004 work, while the Museumsverein bibliography lists his 2006 article “Der Ausländereinsatz in Forst 1939 bis 1945”. Their main value here is to structure the research field: camps, accommodation, companies and groups of foreign workers must be studied as a city-wide network. Until the 2004 text can be examined in full, detailed camp assignments on this page are drawn only from records, reliable testimony or institutional sources.
Forst, Scheuno and DSC formed one functional area
The 1995 G.E.O.S. report reconstructs the transport system of the DSC works east of the Neisse. The main access road ran through Scheuno from the Forst-Berge direction, while the railway linked the complex through the Groß Bademeusel area with the wider network. The modern border can suggest two separate worlds; during the war the city, roads, railway, labour office, accommodation and factory formed a single functional landscape.
1945: destruction and division
The official municipal chronology states that 85 per cent of Forst lay in ruins after the Second World War. 1945 was also a political and spatial break: National Socialist rule ended, armaments production stopped and the Neisse became an international border. A previously connected urban-industrial area was divided. Present-day Forst, Zasieki and Brożek therefore preserve different fragments of the same history.
What is confirmed and what remains open
Confirmed are the 10 November 1938 pogrom in Forst, large-scale forced labour, the specific testimony of a Polish worker employed by DSC, the main cemetery memorial record, the functional link between the city and the DSC complex, and the catastrophic destruction of 1945. Complete camp lists, occupancy, nationalities and exact company assignments still require archival work. The Foundation does not automatically connect every camp mentioned in Forst or Scheuno with DSC.
Sources and verification
Sources are ranked by strength: records, archival catalogues and institutional sources before regional secondary accounts. When a full text is unavailable, this is stated explicitly.
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