Sauckel struggled to ensure foreign laborers were given more humane treatment so as to employ them efficiently and even to give propaganda value to his program. He insisted that they be fed appropriately and was backed by the Pleiger, the coal tsar. Besides existing complications, such as the popular feeling that any increase in rations for foreign laborers would have to be compensated with another increase for Germans, Backe opposed this on the grounds of the continent-spanning food crisis. Hitler intervened on Sauckel’s side and dictated that more food should be given to the foreign workers. This was achieved, though it had to be done at the expense of the food supply in the occupied territories.
The SS also learned to better nurture its labor pool. Camp workers received improved medical attention, had their rations increased after the winter of 1942-3 and were stimulated with bonuses of food and cigarettes.
Ways were also found to distribute food more efficiently. In Upper Silesia, the innovation of Leistungsernaehrung (performance feeding) deducted rations from underperformers and redistributed them to overperformers, concentrating resources on the strongest and sending the least able on a spiral of malnutrition. By the end of 1944 it became a standard practice across the country.
The question of discipline also had to be dealt with. From September 1942 escapes were handled by a comprehensive system of police cordons on roads and cities. Punishments for incorrect performance also had to be dealt. There were legalistic means -the police, courts and SS. Sauckel wanted them to have a monopoly, with any corporal punishment within the workplace being treated as assault. However, official means were long-winded and kept workers unavailable. It was sometimes more convenient to let foremen handle the problem on site. Furthermore, corporal punishment was already present in the German workforce. Sauckel lost this case to Pleiger and Robert Ley.
Among civilian Ostarbeiters, mortality remained higher than Germans or their counterparts in the Soviet Union, but mass attrition ended completely: in July-August 1943 there were only 2,300 deaths among a population of 1,6 million.
Productivity rose: comparing a September 1942 Krupp study with investigations eight months later, productivity as a % of German counterparts rose from 70-85 to 80-90 for the French, 70-85 to not far from 100 for Eastern women and 57 to 60-80 or 80-100 for Eastern men. However, the figure for Soviet POWs was only 42% in the Krupp study. Those who were in construction, along with concentration camp inmates, remained at less than 50% of their German counterparts.
Overall, once contradictions were overcome, a massive pool of foreign manpower was efficiently integrated into the German economy. This was one of the pillars of the “Speer miracle” and output increases in the last three years of the war.