Sweden's internationally renowned IKEA retail chain used East German political prisoners as ''slave labor'' to make furniture, secret police records allegedly show.

The factory in East Germany's Waldheim stood next to a prison, and inmates were used as unpaid labor, it has been reported.

"Conditions were even more primitive there than in the rest of the German Democratic Republic. It was slave labor," Hans Otto Klare, who had been sent to Waldheim prison for trying to escape to West Germany, has told the German TV company WDR that unearthed the records.

"The machines were on the lower floor, and you had little rest. On the factory floor you had no proper seating, no ear protection, no gloves," Klare has said.

IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad is quoted by the files as not being officially aware of any arrangement for slave labor.