Verschleppt und Entwurzelt. Zwangsarbeit zwischen Soest, Werl, Wickede und Möhnetal by Mechtild Brand (review)

In recent years, local historians have greatly expanded what we know of the social history of European dictatorships, notably Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy. This development is true of Germany as well, where, for the past thirty years, scholars have produced ground-breaking studies of the impact of Nazi rule on particular regions. Following from her previous work on the persecution of Roma and Sinti in her hometown of Hamm, Mechtild Brand examines Polish and Ukrainian forced laborers during the Second World War who were sent to work in the nearby Kreis (county) of Soest, a rural area in what is now North Rhine-Westphalia. Since Ulrich Herbert’s landmark study of 1985, civilian forced laborers have become the object of sustained historical research as well. Still it is not surprising that some of Brand’s sources confessed, “that they could not imagine that a book of their stories could exist” (7). One also encounters this poignant, yet common, assertion from former forced laborers in other recent books on the subject, notably Alexander von Plato’s volume Hitler’s Slaves (2010). Like that book, Brand’s study was made possible through the cooperation of national organizations dedicated to reconciliation and restitution in Poland and Ukraine who put her into contact with former forced laborers; their autobiographical reports represent Brand’s main source base. Placing the moral aspect at the heart of her study, Brand concludes that the diversity of experience encountered by the Poles and Ukrainians was attributable above all to the similarly varied “decisions [made by] every individual” German—the “personal responsibility” of ordinary civilians (309).

In the Third Reich and the occupied territories combined, about 13.5 million people—camp inmates and POWs as well as the civilians Brand analyses—were exploited during the war by the Nazi regime as forced laborers. By mid-1944, foreign workers represented well over ten percent of the total population nationally. While conceding the difficulty of establishing precise numbers, Brand concludes that Kreis Soest was no different, with around 8,000 forced laborers among a regional population of about 73,000. Potential employers inspected the new arrivals at the local employment office before choosing “their” Eastern Europeans in a process remembered decades later as a “cattle [or] slave market” (32). The majority of Brand’s subjects worked in agriculture, on farms or in workshops. They typically came into contact with locals and employers as a result and were often treated relatively well. In the towns of Soest and Werl, however, as well as the industrial area of Wickede, the work was provided by factories and firms. These forced laborers were separated from the German population to a much greater extent, and their accommodation in barracks in itself resulted in more desperate living conditions.

Brand is careful not to neglect the violent aspects of her story. In a new discovery, for example, the book recounts the execution of eighteen Russian laborers in the last days of the war. Yet the full diversity of experience is also conveyed. Brand’s subjects took care to discriminate when it came time for vengeance with the war’s end: they protected homesteads, businesses, and individuals from attack in numerous cases just as often as they identified suitable targets for retribution. Some locals kept in touch with “their” Eastern Europeans for years after the war, with contact extending in some cases to the time of Brand’s writing; others kept photographs of them in the family album. These practices coexisted with a highly selective collective memory. “Over a long period,” Brand writes, “hundreds of abductees were driven through [Soest] on a regular basis, and could not be overlooked by the population.” Yet few anecdotes from the locality itself attest to this fact (31).

At the outset Brand admits to a certain commemorative impulse. The inside jacket shows the former forced laborers in the present, and the text nods to giving...