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Eastern workers
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Eastern Workers or Ostarbeiter was the official term introduced in Nazi Germany to denote people "of non-German national origin who inhabited the Reich Commissariat for the Ukraine, the General Commissariat for White Russia, or territories bordering on these territories to the east or on the former free states of Lithuania and Estonia, and who were brought into the German Reich, including the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and employed there after the occupation by the German armed forces." Their status was legally defined by the Ministerial Council for Defence of the Reich in June, 1942.
Most of these "Eastern Workers" were native Russian, Belarusian, Crimean Tatars or Ukrainian inhabitants of the eastern lands conquered by Nazi Germany, and used as a source of unfree labor. Posters for "volunteer" labour, with inscriptions like "Come work with us to shorten the war", hid the appalling realities faced by Russian workers in Germany. Many people joined the partisans rather than risk being sent to an unknown fate in the west. Since 1943 children of Eastern workers were concentrated in Ausländerkinder-Pflegestätte, where the mortality was very high.
The threat of Nazi indoctrination was one reason that the returning eastern workers were viewed with caution by the Soviet government upon their return home. A handful of eastern workers had volunteered to join the Russian Liberation Army. After the liberation of "Eastern Workers" by the Soviet Army many of them were sentenced for treason and colloboration with the Germans, often without sufficient reasons, and sent to GULAG labour camps.
After the war, a significant part of them was accumulated in camps for displaced persons in the Western occupation zones of the post-war Germany. Many of them were from the Kresy territory of Poland occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939. For various reasons, ideological and personal, some eastern workers resisted and/or avoided repatriation.