Soviet officials organised their wartime deportation policy largely along ethnic lines. As a response to the German invasion, Soviet citizens of German descent in border regions were targeted for deportation to the rear where Soviet authorities had no need to worry of their conspiring with the enemy. Such dubious ethnically-derived logic was not reserved for Germans. Many Finns were also forcibly relocated in the first year of the war simply for their heritage, though they were mainly sent to remote areas in the northern rear, such as Siberia, rather than Central Asia. A large portion of the German deportees, however, were sent to Kazakhstan. The remobilisation of relocated human resources into the labour force was pivotal to Soviet wartime production policy, and to that end many able-bodied deportees were conscripted into a “labour army” with military style discipline.