Summing up his approach to the Nazi regime, Wolf Gruner in a recent contribution to this journal writes that his scholarship has been “dedicated to demonstrating the decentralized, bottom-up nature of the anti-Jewish persecutions.” That ambition also drives Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis, which concludes with the observation that “Not just Hitler … but tens of thousands of people—officials and employees from the labor administration and ministries, local and regional agencies…, city administrations and the police: members of the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Organisation Todt, and countless employees and workers at small and large private companies and public enterprises … —took part in the development of the forced-labor programs. Thus, they shared responsibility for the years of social discrimination and brutal exploitation of hundreds of thousands of Jews in all parts of Europe” (pp. 294–95).

It is, of course, a truism today that responsibility for the Nazi regime's many crimes was shared, both widely and deeply, by German society as a whole. In the case of Jewish forced labor, however, Gruner has a very important point. Historians have tended to minimize its significance as an autonomous policy of persecution, viewing such labor instead as a prelude to, or even a part of, the extermination of the Jews orchestrated by the SS. The author demonstrates beyond any doubt that Jewish forced labor—more precisely, segregated deployment of Jewish labor in closed columns—was an undertaking that developed separately from, and largely outside, the jurisdiction of the SS and its concentration-camp universe. The forced labor of Jews described by Gruner consisted of many semi-independent projects and initiatives, loosely coordinated by the Labor Administration in Berlin but frequently emerging from local and regional pressures, which reached truly massive proportions. By the author's count, more than a million “Jewish workers in the Greater German Reich and in the occupied Polish territories were interned in more than 1,300 separate forced-labor camps” between 1938 and 1944 (p. 288).

The motive, according to Gruner, was neither murder nor “destruction through work.” Rather, it was both a specific type of persecution and a rational, self-interested answer to the problem of what to do with the large numbers of unemployed, impoverished Jews who emerged everywhere in the wake of anti-Jewish measures such as Aryanization, restrictions on professional activities, and ghettoization in the years 1933–1940. Forced labor, which came into being well before the plan to murder all Jews, was a way to segregate and punish, to make the Jews pay for their own keep, and to exploit them for a variety of economic needs—from back-breaking, unskilled public work projects to highly skilled labor in the armaments industry.

If forced labor was an independent variety of persecution with an important economic dimension that tended toward Jewish survival through work, what was its relationship to Himmler and the SS's ideologically based insistence on deportation and extermination? Like Christopher Browning, Gruner argues that whatever conflict may have existed between the two dynamics was always resolved in favor of the latter. At the same time, however, the author points out that the exponents of forced labor and economic rationality retained considerable influence over shaping the modalities of deportation. That explains why those Jews who performed the most valuable labor for the armaments industry were almost invariably the last ones to be deported and murdered (e.g., the infamous Fabrikaktion of February 1943) and in some cases even survived the Third Reich. In Gruner's words, “after the first intense conflicts between the political and the economic objectives,… deportation plans were coordinated, indeed synchronized, locally by pragmatic agreements with the production interests. …[E]conomic interests led to decided modifications in the course of deportations” (pp. 290–91).

The book's principal organization is topical-regional, with chapters on Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the occupied territories in Poland. Each traces anew the story of forced labor from its beginnings in late 1938 (in Germany and Austria) and 1939–1940 (in the Czech lands and Poland) until its termination in deportations to the death camps. Just over half the chapters are revised and expanded versions of material the author published over the past decade in Germany. The remaining chapters, introduction, prologue, and conclusion are new. The combination of the book's thematic organization and its blend of old and new chapters makes for sometimes difficult reading. The problem is partly addressed by the excellent introduction, prologue, and conclusion, but these do not entirely prevent the reader from having to flip back and forth to piece together the different parts of the puzzle: chronology, decisions, programs, numbers, laws, regulations. In other words, integration of the material is probably not as successful as it might have been.

The Labor Administration (Reichsanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeitslosenversicherung) that plays such a crucial role in the study remains something of a black box: an un(der)examined quantity. The importance of the economic dimension of Jewish forced labor is repeatedly asserted, but, apart from anecdotal evidence, neither seriously examined nor quantified. There are relatively few but some striking typos: the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) is repeatedly misabbreviated as RHSA instead of RSHA; Yad Vashem appears in places as Vad Yashem. But these are minor flaws that cannot detract from the fact that this book represents a crucial revision of established opinion on Jewish forced labor in the Third Reich and makes available Wolf Gruner's meticulous scholarship to a wider audience in the English-speaking world.