Between 1938 and 1944, more than 13 million people from across occupied Europe were forced into labor for the Third Reich, a system that killed an estimated 2.5 million of them. This History Hit documentary reconstructs that history through personal diaries and survivor accounts, tracing how German bureaucrats, industrial corporations, and ordinary citizens all profited from the exploitation. Stories of resistance and forbidden romance between forced laborers and German civilians sit alongside the grimmer machinery of the system: recruitment drives that became abductions, factory floors run on starvation rations, and the postwar silence that let companies and communities avoid reckoning with their role for decades. The film treats the labor camps as a distinct crime from the Holocaust's extermination camps, giving them their own evidentiary weight rather than folding them into the broader Nazi genocide narrative. Archival photographs, wartime documents, and location footage anchor the account, building toward the question of why this particular chapter of the war stayed buried in German memory for so long.