Between 1939 and 1945, more than a million civilian workers of both sexes, many of them very young, were deployed to what is today Austria and what was then the “Ostmark.” They had to do forced labor in different sectors of the economy. Forced laborers secured the agricultural supplies for the population and worked in a variety of trades from forestry to construction work and, of course, in the war industry. In 2001 the Austrian government established the Österreichische Versöhnungsfonds (Austrian Reconciliation Fund) in order to pay surviving former forced laborers in Austria, as well as Austrian victims of political repression during World War II, a certain amount of money as a gesture of recognition of their fate. Within the next five years, the team of the Reconciliation Fund in Vienna, with the assistance of partner organizations in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine, processed 132,395 applications of survivors from seventy states. The amount of compensation depended on the economic sector in which the applicant had worked. Forced laborers in agriculture, households, and hotels received less than forced laborers in industry, trade, and construction. The highest compensation was paid to slave laborers who had been detained either in a concentration camp or in a similar place of confinement under inhumane conditions. In order to prove their eligibility for payments, applicants had to describe their fate in Austria, the work they were forced to do, and their treatment by employers. After the Reconciliation Fund had completed its work at the end of 2005, the files were handed over to the Austrian State Archives but closed to the public and academia for reasons of data protection. However, in a special research project, former staff members of the Reconciliation Fund investigated certain aspects of the material; their results are presented in this book.

The introductory chapter by Dieter Bacher describes the history, work, and aims of the Reconciliation Fund. In a chapter titled “The Structure of the Forced Laborers Deployed to Austria on the Basis of the Files of the Austrian Reconciliation Fund,” Hermann Rafetseder gives an in-depth quantitative evaluation of the applications filed with the Reconciliation Fund. Unfortunately, Rafetseder limits his investigation to this material and does not place it in the context of existing research, for example, that of the Austrian Historians’ Commission (Florian Freund, Bertrand Perz, and Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeiter und Zwangsarbeiterinnen auf dem Gebiet der Republik Österreich 1939–1945, Oldenbourg, 2004; Stefan Karner and Peter Ruggenthaler, Zwangsarbeit in der Land- und Forstwirtschaft auf dem Gebiet Österreichs 1939 bis 1945, Oldenbourg, 2003). Therefore, the result of his diligent investigation is limited as the sample of the Reconciliation Fund comprises only one-fifth of the total number of forced laborers in Austria and, what is more important, only the younger age groups that lived long enough to file an application.

The subsequent articles by Heinrich Berger and Jürgen Strasser deal with the personal fate of forced laborers in Austria. Jürgen Strasser's paper on French forced laborers shows the strength of the material under investigation, as he analyzes the personal narratives of the applicants. His evaluation shows not only empathy with the survivors but also an impressive knowledge of French cultural and linguistic idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, he methodically takes into consideration the passage of sixty years since the events narrated in the application. Quantitative methods are used to support and expand his analysis.

In the last part, Barry McLoughlin and Dieter Bacher investigate the postwar fates of two groups of forced laborers: those who emigrated to England and those who stayed in Austria. Both articles offer good insights into the national and international policies that influenced the choice and possibility to go to Britain or stay in Austria. The strength of both articles is that the authors combine prior research findings with the material of the Reconciliation Fund.

The articles in this publication give a partial insight into the material collected by the Reconciliation Fund. Unfortunately, a rigid approach to data protection is withholding this valuable material from further research.