Note particularly the repeated use of the emotionally powerful term "conscripted" workers in the subtitle and second paragraph of the translation. In reality, however, the term "conscripted" and its varients appear nowhere in the 'Im Hotel Markischer Adler' text; they are the product of a more recent attempt to rewrite history through selective and deceptive translation. The Das Reich text actually refers to Dienstverpflichtungen, a far more positive term meaning "service obligation," which read in context is roughly similar to the national service and job training programs for youth seen in many countries, including the United States. The Nazi version of Dienstverpflichtungen of that time was restricted to the so-called "Aryans" described in Noelle's article.
Read in its entirety, Noelle's 'Im Hotel Marischer Adler' article presents a positive picture of a program that provides good food, shelter, entertainment and considerable personal freedom for participants. They are said to suffer from homesickness, however.
By the time this article appeared in 1941, there were hundreds of thousands of true conscript laborers and POWs in Germany and German-occupied Poland located at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Dachau, and at hundreds of so-called "side camps" attached to the main Nazi concentration camps. The Nazis' extermination- through- labor programs eventually worked millions of these men and women to death.
Read in its historical context, the "Markischer Adler" text provided a publicity cover for, or plausible deniability for the quite public, mass deportations of thousands of Vienna's Jews and political prisoners to concentration camps at Mauthausen and Ebensee. ' Why worry about the Jews and the Communists', many Germans asked, according to Nazi Party security service reports of the day, 'when our own people are also suffering from the war?'
Here, the first page of Noelle's revisionist translation is reproduced; then the key paragraph from the original Das Reich article; then copies of the widely accepted translations of the words in dispute, which are reproduced from the CollinsGerman-English dictionary (1988).
