Hitler's wars for living space sent millions of Germans abroad and aggravated a severe labor shortage at home. German authorities recruited or forcibly transported up to seven million foreign workers to the Reich from 1939 to 1945. A great many of these civilian workers, POWs, and slave laborers came from Poland, the Ukraine, and western areas of the Soviet Union, that is, homelands the Nazi regime stigmatized as particularly “inferior.” Nazi racial thinking and wartime security concerns produced an extensive set of discriminatory measures aimed at the subjugation and strict control of Slavs. Nazi edicts required Poles and so-called Eastern Workers (Ostarbeiter) to wear a purple “P” or “Ost” badge on their outer clothing. Restrictive measures limited allowable movement to their immediate area of residence and work. The regime also imposed a system akin to apartheid. Racial law thus prohibited unnecessary social contact between members of the so-called master race and their “racial inferiors.”