Reich Labour Service: building a channel in the forest, 1937

A broad, straight channel with stone-paved banks runs through the spruce forest. In its bed young men in white shirts or bare to the waist stand knee-deep in the stream and dig out the gravel, wheel barrows along planks laid on timber trestles, break stones with a sledgehammer and set them along the banks; rubber boots stand in a row on the bank, and a young leader in a field cap watches from the crest.

The archive record describes the men digging ditches, working in the water and moving earth with wheelbarrows in the Bavarian Alps. River control, drainage and land reclamation were the service's great tasks, carried out almost entirely by hand: the spade, not the machine, was its emblem.