The essays collected in Hitler's Slaves must be read more as an introduction to and users' manual for the ambitious international oral history project “Documentation of Life Story Interviews with Former Slave and Forced Laborers” than as a free-standing volume. The book's editors—Alexander von Plato, Almut Leh, and Christoph Thonfeld—coordinated the larger project; von Plato wrote guidelines for the interviews so as to encourage cooperation and comparability across the various national teams whose work the book describes. The project participants collected nearly 600 interviews between 2005 and 2006; interviews were conducted in twenty-six countries (the largest concentration from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland) and in twenty-five languages by teams of interviewers affiliated with thirty-two different partner institutions across Europe as well as in the United States, South Africa, and Israel.

The book provides a useful framework for understanding the larger project, the aim of which was to document the experiences of people from across Europe who were forced to labor for the Third Reich. The authors point out that the various categories of workers included here—civilian laborers from outside Germany, prisoners of war, concentration-camp prisoners, coerced workers in occupied territories—comprise a vast range of experiences. The interviewees' status as victims of the Third Reich and their opportunities for and interest in telling their stories evolved through the complex and highly politicized postwar history of denial, compensation debates, and diverse cultures of commemoration across Europe.

The foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future” played a crucial role in this project. Following the success in the late 1990s of efforts to recognize forced laborers as victims of both National Socialism and of the firms that profited from forced labor, the foundation coordinated the compensation process, distributing a large fund compiled from German government and private corporate contributions. The foundation also funded the “Documentation” project and the development of its affiliated archive, “Forced Labor 1939–1945,” the site for the publication and dissemination of the interviews. It should be noted, however, that the life story collection process was not limited to the officially recognized groups of forced laborers, but was expanded to include several non-compensated groups such as Italian military internees and western European forced laborers.

Most of the book's short essays are geographically focused; they describe the various national projects. By and large the individual project groups followed the coordinators' suggestions regarding a common format. Each essay typically offers background information about forced labor programs in the region on which it focuses, as well as brief summaries of the biographies of the interview partners whose stories were collected. Each research group was asked to provide some analysis of the stories and if possible to address the question of the long-term impact of the forced labor experience. Finally, each essay touches at least briefly on the nature of the locally prevailing “remembrance culture.”

In addition to the essays that describe each national project, the collection includes several essays organized around themes or methodological questions. For example, an essay by Almut Leh and Henriette Schlesinger offers a summary account of the project's overall organization and methods; Dori Laub and Johanna Bodenstab present an interesting account of reinterviewing some of the Holocaust survivors originally interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the project that became the Fortunoff Video Archive.

The book is both tantalizing and frustrating. Each essay opens up a new realm of local experiences of forced labor and new questions about the politics of historical memory. But given their brevity, the essays can provide little more than an introduction. At most, only brief excerpts of the stories could be included. The one exception, von Plato's somewhat longer concluding reflections, does make suggestive comparisons between historical accounts based on official archival sources and what the stories tell us. He also begins the ambitious project of comparison across the wide range of postwar remembrance cultures. Otherwise, the work of analysis—individual, regional/national, and comparative—of this huge store of voices and stories is deferred to the future.

That said, the tools and documents that would enable further work are in place and available. The archive “Forced Labor 1939–1945” is the real heart of the project (http://www.zwangsarbeit-archiv.de/en/index.html). Developed in cooperation with the Freie Universität Berlin and the German Historical Museum, it stores the actual interviews and makes them accessible to scholars and teachers in audio and video formats. Most of the national research teams also provided short biographies of the interviewees and full interview transcripts, as well as supporting images. Many of the interviews in languages other than German are supplemented by German-language translations of the transcripts. The archive is well organized (following in some respects the organization of the archives of the Shoah Foundation that house 50,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors). The interviews can be sorted and searched according to various criteria such as language or category of forced labor in question. Text and keyword searches are also possible.

Beyond its value to scholars, the project holds interesting pedagogic possibilities. It is easy to imagine setting up student research projects that involve moving between the book's introductory essays and the actual interviews online. Only a small number of the interviews are in English. For students who know German or any of the many other languages represented, however, the possibilities are greater.

“Forced Labor 1939–1945” is an important addition to the growing number of “alternative” archives that, in the wake of the oral history movement, aim to rewrite history through the perspectives and life stories of people who were often marginalized or forgotten in the histories based on official archives. In the words of von Plato, “It's amazing how different history . . . looks, depending on whether it is seen through the lens provided by the archival record or from the point of view of those who experienced it” (p. 441). This project also reflects recurrent historiographical and political contests over historical memory and the impulse to collect and preserve memories of injustice. It thus positions itself among archives of other historical reckonings, whether processes of transitional justice, or other forms of acknowledgment of and compensation for past injury. Hitler's Slaves is a useful English-language guide to the rich life history archive; moreover, it provides valuable documentation of the scholarly, political, and personal impulses that produced the archive, documentation that is necessary for historians' understanding and critical use of the stories of the past that it preserves.