As democracy in Europe faltered, so did worker's rights. Nazi Germany used the workers of the countries it defeated as forced labor, and systematically worked dissenters and Jewish people to death. During the Cold War, in the West, social peace was bought by improving working conditions; while, in the East, the worker, supposedly so central to communism, lost many basic rights. There was renewed hope in the seventies that things would get better for workers, but it turned out to be a false dawn.