This picture was taken inside accommodations for immigrant miners and their families in Oelsnitz in the Vogtland region of Saxony. It shows a family of six who had immigrated two years earlier from what was then Czechoslovakia. The family shared a single room for living and sleeping in these residential barracks, whose individual living units were only separated by metal cabinets. The Weimar Republic’s immigration policy was very restrictive, but since there was an acute labor shortage, especially in industry and agriculture, companies could apply for the employment of foreign workers if no domestic workers were available. Most of these labor migrants came from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Austria. The Reichsanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung [National Agency for Labor Placement], which was responsible for their recruitment and placement, unofficially pursued a policy of prioritizing the recruitment of ethnic German migrants.
The photo is taken from the publication Die Wohnungsnot und das Wohnungselend in Deutschland [The Housing Crisis and Dire Living Conditions in Germany], which was published in 1929 by the German Association for Housing Reform under its executive director Bruno Schwan. The association was committed to improving the living conditions of workers in particular and called for government measures to promote housing construction instead of leaving it to private developers alone, as had been the practice during the Kaiserreich period. Schwan and his colleagues had traveled to 150 German cities, towns and communities and documented the cramped and often unhealthy living conditions they found all across Germany.