Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps by Marc Buggeln (review)

Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum recently concluded that more than 40,000 camps and ghettos existed under the Nazis for varying lengths of time between 1933 and 1945. While the public greeted this finding with a gasp, scholars had long suspected that the number was this high. Those working in this area of Holocaust studies have long recognized that the complex system of main camps and satellite camps allowed for a dizzying number and variety of facilities. What most of these particular facilities had in common was that their slave labor served the larger Nazi economy. Indeed, the discursive argument over whether to call these prisoners “forced” or “slave” laborers has taken some time to play out in the scholarship. In his monograph Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps, Marc Buggeln comes down clearly and convincingly on the side of the term “slave labor”: human beings were being sold to various concerns in Germany for unpaid labor.

More important than the semantics involved, Buggeln has provided us with an incredibly detailed and painstakingly researched picture of a concentration camp system. He contributes to the historiography not by writing a biography of a single camp, but instead by providing a broad overview of an entire camp system. In this, his work is path-breaking.

Buggeln begins his study of the Neuengamme camp (near Hamburg) and its system of smaller subcamps throughout the region with a helpful introduction to the Nazi concentration camp system in general and that system’s relation to the economy in particular. He goes on to address an ambitious set of issues, from the role of “industries, government agencies, and individuals in establishing the camp system” to “the question of concrete and diverse living and working conditions of prisoners in the subcamps” (p. 2). The sheer scope of Buggeln’s analysis leaves the reader wanting more description in some places, but it is also a strength of the book.

One of the author’s main concerns is to explain the variance in survival rates from camp to camp within the Neuengamme system. By the end of the war, that system contained eighty-six subcamps. Buggeln focuses on forty-two of these. Clearly, extensive research supports his assertion that “mortality rates in subcamps with more than 1,000 prisoners were significantly higher than in those with fewer than 1,000” (p. 89). He argues convincingly, for example, that mortality rates were higher in larger camps because they tended to contain a larger proportion of Jewish prisoners, and Jews suffered greater abuse at the hands of the guard force than non-Jews (p. 89).

Throughout the book, Buggeln provides detailed quantitative evidence for his comparisons and conclusions. Though at times the many tables and figures can be distracting, they do help to support his interventions into the historiography of slave labor during the Holocaust. For example, they support his assertion that labor “was of far more importance to the daily operation of the subcamps than terrorizing prisoners to satisfy the sadistic tendencies of the SS” (p. 92). In other words, Buggeln found that in camps that were doing vital war work, abuse of prisoners was less random. Here, he is making an important point in the debate over labor as a means of extermination.

Buggeln has crafted a book that allows him to establish a pattern quantitatively and to explore it qualitatively, in human terms. In his chapter on the role of gender and race in the treatment of prisoners, for example, he notes an instance in which factory owners seeking to increase production offered bonuses to female workers. A representative of the prisoners stepped forward and told the SS man in charge that the group would not accept bonuses, as this would imply “freely chosen employment.” This rebuff was allowed to stand, and the prisoners were not punished. Buggeln is right in stating that “one could hardly imagine the SS responding to resistance by male prisoners in this manner” (p...