‘Gastarbeiter’ in the Nazi Press (1933–1945)

The term ‘Gastarbeiter’ (guest workers) has made a global career across media, scholarly, and political contexts from the 1920s to the present – often through translation into other languages (Rass 2023). However, the formative period of this category of migration policy during the Nazi era (1933–1945) remains incompletely understood. Project A3 of Collaborative Research Center 1604 (Production of Migration) at the Institut für Migrationsforschung und Interkulturelle Studien (IMIS), Universität Osnabrück, examines the historical semantics of such key terms through digital corpus analysis. Engagement with such terms can employ different approaches and methods, from qualitative content analysis to quantifying text mining procedures. The number of digital text corpora available as source material for such purposes has been growing rapidly and dynamically for several years. This expansion is occurring in a complex landscape of national and international full-text databases, presenting both opportunities and challenges. This essay probes deeper into the history of the term ‘Gastarbeiter’ during the Nazi period using two of the largest newspaper databases available in Germany to reflect on their potential as historical sources in relation to this topic. This analysis of newspaper articles documented in the German National Library Newspaper Portal and the North Rhine-Westphalia Newspaper Portal reveals that ‘Gastarbeiter’ underwent systematic propagandistic appropriation between 1941 and 1945, with peak usage in 1943–1944. The term served multiple strategic functions in Nazi discourse: euphemizing forced labor as temporary guest work, hierarchizing foreign workers within the racial order of the “Volksgemeinschaft”, and legitimating mass exploitation through associations with prewar practices of governing international labor migration. The regime deployed ‘Gastarbeiter’ in coordinated propaganda campaigns that framed foreign labor deployment as part of a European project under German leadership. By November 1944, facing military defeat, the regime attempted to upgrade even ‘Ostarbeiter’ to ‘Gastarbeiter’ status through the introduction of “Volkstumsabzeichen” (ethnic badges), revealing both the instrumental nature of these categorizations and the collapse of previously rigid racial hierarchies. These findings demonstrate how ‘Gastarbeiter’ acquired durable semantic properties during the Nazi period that would resonate in postwar West German discourse from 1961 onward. Methodologically, this study models an iterative approach to analyzing incomplete digital corpora, showing how provisional findings at successive stages of digitization can productively advance conceptual history without requiring impossible completeness.