Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938–1944

Forced labor was a key feature of Nazi anti-Jewish policy and shaped the daily life of almost every Jewish family in occupied Europe. This book systematically describes the implementation of forced labor for Jews in Germany, Austria, the Protectorate, and the various occupied Polish territories. As early as the end of 1938, compulsory labor for Jews had been introduced in Germany and annexed Austria by the labor administration. Similar programs subsequently were established by civil administrations in the German-occupied Czech and Polish territories. At its maximum extent, more than one million Jewish men and women toiled for private companies and public builders, many of them in hundreds of now often-forgotten special labor camps. This study refutes the widespread thesis that compulsory work was organized only by the SS, and that exploitation was only an intermediate tactic on the way to mass murder or, rather, that it was only a facet in the destruction of the Jews.

1. Segregated labor deployment: central planning and local practice, 1938–45; 2. German Jews in forced labor camps, 1939–43; 3. 'Special service': forced labor of so-called Jewish mischlinge, 1942–5; 4. Initiatives in Vienna: Austrian Jews in the segregated labor deployment program, 1938–45; 5. The failure of deportation: forced labor of Czech Jews, 1939–45; 6. Camps and ghettos: forced labor in the Reich Gau Wartheland, 1939–44; 7. On the 'Führer's road': Polish Jews in the Old Reich, 1940–3; 8. The SS organization schmelt and the Jews from Eastern Upper Silesia, 1940–4; 9. The labor office versus the SS: forced labor in the general government, 1939–44.

Forced labor was a key feature of Nazi anti-Jewish policy and shaped the daily life of almost every Jewish family in occupied Europe. For the first time, this book systematically describes the implementation of forced labor for Jews in Germany, Austria, the Protectorate, and the various occupied Polish territories.

Wolf Gruner currently holds a position at the Institute for Contemporary History in Berlin, where he is coeditor and researcher on The Persecution and Extermination of the European Jews under the Nazis, 1933–1945, a multivolume collection of primary sources. He is the author of many works on the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, and has held positions at Webster University, Missouri, Harvard University, Massachusetts, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others.