Johannes-Dieter Steinert

The following conversation is an abridged transcript of a discussion that Prof. Dr. Beata Halicka (UAM) held with Prof. Dr. Johannes-Dieter Steinert of the University of Wolverhampton in the UK. It took place on December 1, 2022 and was the opening event of a conference entitled Little Workers: Child Labor in socio-cultural and economic perspectives throughout history. The conference was organized by the Department of Economic History, the Department of Eastern European History and the Research Unit of Cultural History and was held at the Faculty of History of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. Johannes-Dieter Steinert is a prominent specialist in the field of child forced laborers in National Socialist Germany and German occupied Eastern Europe. His books on the subject have been published in English, German and Polish.

Between 1945 and 1961 West Germany experienced one of the greatest waves of emigration in German history. However, before the emigration of Germans to European and overseas countries had even reached its zenith, German migration policy had laid the foundations for the immigration of foreign workers, and the era of organized recruitment had begun, which lasted until 1973. This article analyses how the migration agreements with Italy (1955), Spain (1960), Greece (1960) and Turkey (1961) came about. Based on official documents it will argue (a) that the Mediterranean countries had initiated the negotiations about these agreements in order to regulate at least parts of their outward migration according to the needs of their own labour markets, and (b) that German politicians and ministerial civil servants involved held no fundamental debate during their period of deliberation about the possible length of the employment of foreign workers, and avoided a public discussion about migration and migration policies.