Abstract
Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh and Christoph Thonfeld, eds, Hitler’s Slaves: Life Stories of Forced Labourers in Nazi-Occupied Europe, Berghahn Books: Oxford, 2010; 552 pp.; 9781845456986, £55.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Christopher Dillon, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
During the Second World War around 13.5 million people – civilian workers, prisoners of war, and internees of camps – were deployed as forced labourers in Germany and its occupied territories. Men, women, and children from at least 27 countries worked in often appalling conditions to sustain the Third Reich’s increasingly unpromising military struggle. Mindful of the supposed lessons of the First World War, when excessive demands on the home front were held to have contributed to the ‘stab in the back’, the Nazi leadership resolved that this time racially-stigmatized helots were to do the hard work, with German supervisors tasting the power of a supremacist ideology. Forced labourers toiled on farms and in camps, in towns and cities, in mines and quarries, in private households and in vast underground factories. Many of the things they built exist to this day.
Yet historians were slow to confront the issue. The two thousand German companies who profited from forced labour were understandably reluctant to open their archives, and not until Ulrich Herbert’s path-breaking research in the 1980s did the topic begin to acquire public and scholarly resonance. The volume under review was commissioned by the foundation ‘Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future’, set up somewhat belatedly in 2000 to disburse compensation payments to surviving victims and to keep alive the memory of their suffering. Its great merit is to bring together the experiences of such a vast and heterogeneous group, particularly of those from smaller countries in Eastern Europe often peripheral to historical discourse on memory and commemoration. As was the case with the compensation payments dispensed by the foundation, all too few were still alive to give testimony. The book, however, does an admirable job of giving voice to as broad and representative a sample of the labourers as possible.
Equally salutary is the decision to encourage the interviewees – nearly six hundred in all – to talk about their lives beyond the National Socialist era, to explore how this traumatic interval was inscribed and negotiated in their broader ‘life stories’. Rather poignantly, some of the subjects were baffled that they should be seen as of interest in themselves. The resultant testimony provides rich stimulus for methodological reflection. It also brings into unsparing focus the various ways in which each of these stories had to be mapped to the various national narratives and cultures of remembrance of wartime occupation. That former forced labourers – like prisoners of war – were often shunned and persecuted as ‘fascist collaborators’ on their return to the Soviet Union, for example, is well known but never loses the power to horrify on the many occasions it comes up in these testimonies. The immediacy and vigour of the life stories, helped by the generally sensitive probing of the interview teams, offers a detailed and valuable resource for historians of forced labour as well as specialists in testimony and memory.
All this being said, the book is not without its weaknesses. The quality of contributions to edited volumes is often uneven and here this is magnified by the use of 28 interview teams whose reports comprise the bulk of the book. Some of these reports feel like promising ‘works in progress’ rather than analytical summaries, and this reviewer would have preferred to read more excerpts from the interviews and less on their logistics, methodologically important as this is. Some of the English-language translations (the book appeared in German in 2008) are also rather ungainly. Most jarring of all, however, is the explicit and inaccurate conceptualization of Jews, Sinti, Roma, and other concentration camp prisoners as ‘slaves’. Slavery is a relationship characterized by an economic rationality, however morally deplorable. The productive power of the slave has to be maintained to gain a return on the initial investment: as such, the death of a slave is experienced as a loss to the owner. To the SS, however, who controlled or ‘owned’ these particular subjects, their death was a measure of power, a victory even. They were neither defined by their labour, nor saw themselves as defined by labour, which was incidental to their primary identity as racial and political enemies marked for annihilation. The inherent flaws in the volume’s conceptual apparatus of slavery are anticipated in its introduction, where the editors write of ‘Jewish slave labourers’ in ‘death camps’ (13).