A photograph of a German soldier with a rifle stands above an image of a tank. The caption reads: “On the battlefield of war, 1914.” To the left is an image of a tractor and a man with a shovel, with the caption: “On the battlefield of work, 1934” (649). This photographic montage appeared in the official newsletter of the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization in 1935. It revealed—as does so much propaganda on similar themes—that the Nazi regime's “battle for work” (Arbeitsschlacht) slogan was never meant as a mere metaphor to describe its confrontation with the economic crisis inherited in 1933. In the early years of the Third Reich, the regime truly was at war against staggering unemployment, illegal or under-the-table labor (Schwarzarbeit), and female “double-income earners” (Doppelverdiener). It was a war fought with a variety of weapons on numerous fronts. Detlev Humann's lengthy study, a shortened version of his doctoral dissertation, revisits those battlefields, armed with a sound evidentiary record based on an extensive array of diverse national, regional, and local sources.

The book is divided into seven sections, examining such topics as the Nazi regime's attempts to drive women from the workplace, forms of illegal work, and the Reich Labor Service—all topics that have been researched and debated extensively for decades. Humann's book thus offers more of an overview of existing studies rather than startlingly new or different interpretations about the “battle for work.” The author does make some real contributions, however, in his investigations of “emergency labor” (Notstandsarbeit) and the “rural aid” (Landhilfe) program, topics that have received much less attention.

In March 1934, over 600,000 Germans were employed in emergency labor projects, such as the construction of irrigation works. The hours were long and the wages low, and Notstandsarbeit was thus deeply unpopular. One official report from Landau noted that many male emergency laborers felt “very pressured” (296) to keep working for wages that still did not provide adequately for their families. Here, as in the chapters on the Landhilfe program—which thrust often inexperienced and ill-suited urban Germans into agricultural labor—Humann repeatedly stresses the coercive elements of the Nazis' “battle for work.” Both initiatives, whose participants rarely had any choice in the terms of their employment, were widely resented in the opening years of the Third Reich.

The propaganda surrounding such programs, as well as the “battle for work” more generally, told a different story. Humann's chapters on propaganda are of value for their inclusion of many high-quality color and black-and-white reproductions of posters, photographs, and film stills, all of which essentially said the same thing: the Nazi regime was winning—or had already won—the war against unemployment. In one, the Führer himself wrestles the numbers of unemployed (here depicted as a snake stretching across a bar graph) into submission. To claim such victories, Humann explains, the propagandists deliberately falsified labor statistics; at the same time, they kept silent about the harsh conditions and compulsory character of the work-creation programs, as well as about the decline in living standards that many Germans were actually experiencing.

Historical assessments of popular support for the Nazi regime have long highlighted how crucial it was that Adolf Hitler was credited with personally solving the unemployment crisis soon after coming to power. Humann's study, like many before it, warns against accepting the Nazis' own myths, which trumpeted an “employment miracle” by 1934. There was no miracle, Humann stresses: only brutal repression and terror, on the one hand, endless propaganda and overt manipulation of labor statistics, on the other. It was only Hitler's rearmament drive, begun in earnest after 1936, that actually solved the joblessness of the Weimar years. Yet, while well supported by numerous examples and evidence, this is hardly a new argument about the Nazis' “battle for work.” On the whole, Humann's Arbeitsschlacht is a reiteration of previous studies, with the exception of his work on the Notstandsarbeit and Landhilfe programs, which are relatively little known parts of the story. In sum, these 800 pages offer a comprehensive, thoroughly researched overview, but few original insights into the topic.