Hitler's Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich

This is an account of the most important instance of forced labor by foreign workers outside their own country in the twentieth century, when millions of workers from the USSR, Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Italy and elsewhere toiled in the service of the Nazi regime. The workers are examined first from the viewpoint of the Nazi leadership, the entrepreneurs and the authorities, and second through the eyes of the workers themselves. The Nazis could sustain World War II only by replacing the skilled German workers who had been sent off as soldiers by a foreign work force brought to Germany and employed in agriculture and industry. After this scheme had failed to work on a voluntary basis, from the spring of 1940 huge numbers of foreign workers were brought to Germany by force. This is the first major study of what in effect was slave labor on a massive scale, whose reverberations are still felt today in current debates about work compensation and the legacy of the Third Reich.