Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944 (review)

Wolf Gruner argues for four basic theses in Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis. First, forced labor was a central feature of Nazi persecution of Jews—one that most historians have strangely neglected or underestimated.¹ It was not only a dominant feature of the Jewish experience prior to deportation, but also sufficiently important to the economic interests of the persecutors that it affected how they implemented their other policies of racial persecution. Second, the enforcement of Jewish forced labor was not primarily the prerogative of the SS. Rather, it was a striking example of the broad division of labor and widespread participation in the exploitation and persecution of Jews by various state institutions, regional and local authorities (especially labor offices and municipalities), and myriad private employers. At times, relations between the various beneficiaries and practitioners of forced labor were characterized by conflicting interests, but just as often there was compromise and cooperation. Third, a comparison of forced labor policies in Germany, Austria, the Protectorate, Silesia, the Warthegau, and the General Government reveals that forced labor was imposed on Jews in various ways in different places and at different times within the German empire. It is a complex historical subject that demands a nuanced and differentiated approach and cannot be characterized by sweeping and simplistic generalizations such as "destruction through labor." Fourth, Jewish labor was exploited primarily for economic reasons, not just as a means of harassment and enervation paving the way to destruction. Systematic forced labor began long before the decisions were taken for a policy of extermination and, despite that policy, continued until the end of the war. Paradoxically, Gruner concludes, "Tens of thousands of Jews survived the Holocaust because they were exempted from genocide due to economic interests and labor shortages" ( p. 294).

Roughly one half of the book is a condensed reworking and update of Gruner's two earlier monographs on Jewish forced labor in Germany and Austria respectively, as well as of his fascinating article on the use of Polish Jews from Łódź and Silesia in road construction projects in Germany.² It is very fortunate that the fruits of this scholarship are now available in an English-language publication and even more so that they have been supplemented by Gruner's comparative studies on Jewish forced labor in the Protectorate, East Upper Silesia, the Warthegau, and the General Government. The chapters on forced labor in Germany and Austria are based primarily on Gruner's own archival research. The chapters on the forced labor of Polish Jews, in contrast, make ample use of printed document collections and the research of other scholars. By the time the reader has traversed all of these regions, the detail is sometimes numbing. But the cumulative effect is quite convincing. Gruner estimates that for Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, there were more than 400 forced labor camps for Jews. When the Protectorate, the Incorporated Territories, and the General Government are added, his estimate exceeds 1,300. Most of these were independent of the SS concentration camp system.

There is one issue of terminology that Gruner does not discuss. He uses the term "forced labor" throughout the book just as Nazi documents consistently used the term Zwangsarbeit to cover an enormous variety of labor relationships. But the historian should not be confined to the use of euphemistic Nazi terminology when that language disguises important distinctions. In the early stages of the German occupation of Poland, Jews were indeed "forced" to work. But as of the summer of 1940, they officially were supposed to receive some pittance in compensation. They retained some freedom to seek their own employment and some ability to evade labor roundups. In 1942, Polish Jews who had hitherto avoided working for the Germans rushed to obtain life-saving work cards, often through bribery and at considerable expense. After the ghettos had...