I had come across a wikipedia article when reading about Nazi Germany for my high school history class when I found a page about the detainment of millions of Germans and their use as forced labour to rebuild Europe post war not just by the Soviet Union but the Western Allies too. I brought it up in class and my teacher, a pretty square guy who doesn't seem all that in to the nitty gritty of his courses and likes to define the well known paradigms of who was good and bad in the periods, immediately shot it down as a conspiracy. Is my teacher just close minded or was this a legitimate issue?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_World_War_II (pretty sure the article's been updated since, lessening the figures from much more extreme numbers, U.K with 4,000,000 prisoners to 400,000 etc.)
This is no conspiracy, German prisoners were forced into labor as a "form" of reparation. However, their experiences varied from place to place. Keep in mind that the following only discusses the experience of German soldiers, not civilians, who were in Allied custody at the end of the war.
German PWs in the United States were treated extremely well. They were compensated for the work and due to the time in took many to U.S. servicemen to return from overseas, many were kept though the summer of 1946. To be noted though is that as the time drew closer for prisoners to return to Germany, the United States had to decrease the calorie intake of German prisoners as they would be living in far different conditions in Europe upon their reparation. While the U.S. did indeed hold prisoners till well after the surrender of Germany, their living conditions were far from those of "slave labor". The biggest contribution the U.S. had in the forced labor of German PWs in postwar Europe was the reparation of around 740,000 prisoners to England and France.
The United States sent over 400,000 German PW's to Britain where they were then forced into labor positions, many conducting agricultural jobs. It would not be until 1948 that the last German soldiers in forced labor positions in Britain were officially repatriated.
The forced labor of German prisoners in France was by far the most controversial. In many cases the forced labor in France included war "clean up". Many German PWs were killed after the being forced to clear mind fields. According to one estimate, the number of German prisoners killed performing this type of work totaled around two thousand. Naturally, German PWs in France were not treated the same as they had been elsewhere during the war, such as Britain and the United States.
Overall, the treatment of German PWs in the postwar era was not ideal, but was indeed within the limits of the Geneva Convention. I think it is important to remember that this is a complicated subject due to complex circumstance surrounding the domestic situation in the various Allied countries, the poor social and economic system within postwar Germany, and agreements made between powers prior to the end of the war. So is this a conspiracy theory? Not by a long shot, there is documented evidence of this forced labor and numerous published works by respected scholars on this subject. Sorry I could not provide any commentary on the civilian aspect.
Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany.
Barbara Schmitter Heisler, From German Prisoner of War to American Citizen: A Social History with 35 Interviews.
S. P. MacKenzie "The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II" The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 66, No. 3. (Sep., 1994), pp. 487–520.