The author explores the problems of labor use of Soviet Germans during the Great Patriotic War. During the last months of 1941 – the whole 1942. Soviet Germans, men aged 15–55 and women aged 16–45 were mobilized through military commissariats into the labor detachments, which later received the general name «Labor Army». The peculiarity of these formations was that, carrying out a variety of production activities, they were of military organization, and the camp regime of detention, that is, Soviet Germans in the detachments practically had the status of prisoners.