Eastern Workers or Ostarbeiter is 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 defined by a law issued by the Ministerial Council for Defense of the Reich in June, 1942.
Most of these "Eastern Workers" were native Russian, Belarussian, Crimean Tatars or Ukrainian inhabitants of the eastern lands conquered by Nazi Germany, and they were used by the Nazis as a source of slave labor.
After their liberation by the Soviet Army, a majority of the "Eastern Workers" were subject to "filtration" and "internal exile", the latter mostly amounting to serving in labor camps for six years.
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. This presented a dramatic issue, since Soviets sought to "repatriate" them, while many of them sought to avoid this kind of "repatriation", see, e.g., Ruthenia: Belarusians.
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