Making socks, sewing underwear, soling shoes - for thousands of people who had to perform forced labour in the German Reich during the Second World War, such activities were part of everyday life. At the same time, clothing served to stigmatise forced labourers during the Nazi era.

Forced labour was widespread in the German textile industry: Several thousand companies used forced labourers. Among them were many small manufacturers that no longer exist, but also clothing and shoe brands that are still well-known today, such as C&A, Hugo Boss or Salamander.

The then 16-year-old Vera Friedländer worked in a Salamander repair shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg in the winter of 1944/45. There she had to sort used shoes and check the seams. Later she found out that the shoes belonged to people who had been murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp and other camps.

Vera Friedländer remembers: "I had to take the shoes in my hand, determine the damage and sort the pairs into other carts: for quilting, for gluing, for soling and so on. When a cart was full, I pushed it to where quilting, gluing or nailing was done. The carts rolled heavily. (...) They [the guards were SS men] made sure that we did nothing but work. We, that was Polish cobblers, women from Serbia, French workers, Jewish women, girls like Hannchen and me."

At the end of 1942, some companies in the textile industry began to produce particularly simple clothing especially for forced labourers, mainly outerwear and underwear, but also shoes made of wood. Such wooden shoes had to be worn, for example, by women like Janina Łyś, a Polish forced labourer at Pertrix in Berlin: "Nobody wore leather shoes, because they would have fallen apart after three months, there were only wooden shoes." These shoes were uncomfortable, it was hard to walk in them and the feet got infected.

Forced labourers not only had to sew clothes, but were also stigmatised by clothing. In concentration camps (KZ) they were forced to wear striped prisoners' clothing, which they had to make themselves in the SS-owned company "Deutsche Gesellschaft für Textil- und Lederverarbeitung mbH" in Dachau and Ravensbrück.

Even outside the concentration camps, people were marked on their clothing according to the racist Nazi ideology. Jews had to wear a "Jewish star" from September 1941 if they were older than six years. All those who were deported from Poland and the Soviet Union to the German Reich for civilian forced labour had to sew a piece of cloth with a "P" or "OST" badge onto their clothing. Only civilian forced labourers from Western Europe, who were ranked higher in the racist Nazi hierarchy, were spared this - they did not have to wear badges.