“It was a lace factory, and they had made it for the ammunition . . . pipes and bolts and nuts, that sort of things. They made up the factory. So they took there about 200 women to work there. 150 or 200. The quarters we had outside, not far from the factory. But it was still quite human.” Yolan Frank, a young Jewish woman taken to Auschwitz, arrived in early 1945 at the Mehltheuer labor camp, one of three subcamps of Flossenbürg operating in the Plauen area in the southeastern part of Nazi Germany. In her book, a 2017 dissertation from the University of Bamberg, Katherine Lukat did not use Frank's and another forty-eight Shoah Foundation video interviews about these camps in her attempt to write the comprehensive history of foreign, forced, and slave labor in the city and surroundings of Plauen. She did use a wealth of other material from many archives, including newly digitalized personal files from the International Tracing Service.

The author's objective is ambitious: “To draw a comprehensive picture of the living conditions that were dominant for the heterogenous group of foreign workers in Plauen” under Nazi rule (33). Lukat's eye for the heterogeneity of the foreign workers whom Nazi Germany recruited from occupied and neutral countries and the diversity of their living conditions is laudable and often not shared by German scholars. Her aim is empirical description, not theory-informed, thesis-powered analysis, and the book does cover all the various groups of civilian laborers, recruited voluntarily or by varying degrees of force from West and East Europe, prisoners of war, and inmates in SS-run concentration camps. A longer sequence is even dedicated to the forced labor of detainees from Plauen's jail. Although most were Germans, their story is described at length—one of several inconsistencies in the structure of the book. As for the character of the city's “punitive camp” Sachsenhof, Lukat remains undecided: was it a labor-education camp (Arbeitserziehungslager) or not (347ff)?

The local-history approach, pioneered by Walter Struwe with the example of Osterode in the Harz mountains (Aufstieg und Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus in einer industriellen Kleinstadt [1992]), has proven its potential to grasp the workings of German everyday life between 1933 and 1945 and the way National Socialism functioned, including its undeniable appeal to “ordinary Germans.” Lukat could have drawn inspiration from Struwe, but she gets there by way of later works. Focusing on a specific city demonstrates the diversity of the Ausländereinsatz (exploitation of foreign labor) and the maneuvering space available to local political and business leaders and the choices they made, whether informed by Nazi racist ideology, pragmatic concerns, or, in some cases, an empathetic mindset. As far as the attitude of the German rank and file is concerned, the picture remains vague.

To alleviate labor scarcity, the Nazis—reluctantly, because of their hyper-nationalist ideology—recruited foreign labor in increasing numbers, partly by way of brutal force. Only in 1942, foreign workers were brought in in larger numbers by big companies, as they relocated armaments production from air-raid-threatened city centers. In Plauen, they reestablished production in abandoned textile mills that had traditionally dominated the regional economy. By mid-1944, more than 25 percent of Germany's labor force were foreign workers, mostly employed under miserable conditions. In the Plauen area, Lukat demonstrates, some discriminatory regulations concerning the large groups of Polish and “Eastern” (i.e., Soviet) workers, envisioned as threats to German security and “racial purity,” were eventually lifted—although not for Jewish laborers. In fact, “Eastern workers” made up 50 percent of all foreign workers in Plauen—as was the case in Germany generally.

The local-history approach makes it possible to get close to the actual living conditions—the primary objective of Lukat's study—and detect variations in the greater picture. For the general development of the Ausländereinsatz, she relies on Mark Spoerer (Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz [2001]) and Ulrich Herbert (Fremdarbeiter [1985]) without, however, taking into account the Europa und der ‘Reichseinsatz’ (1991) volume, edited by Herbert, the earliest synthesis of Nazi Germany's exploitation of foreign labor that included the political background in the countries of origin and offered first answers to the question why workers went to Germany. Knowledge of the latter work could have saved Lukat from some blatant mistakes, for instance about the few Danes registered in Plauen. The first impression of every stone having been turned does not hold. Also, her description of the Plauen-area concentration camps remains sketchy and inconclusive. On the other hand, some elements of historical background, like Plauen's textile-industry tradition, are described in too many details, considering its limited relevance to the 1939–1945 situation.

The book's strength is the quite thorough description of most aspects of the everyday experienced by foreign workers: wages and taxes, accommodation, food, gender relations and health care, work functions, and punishment for violating rigid Nazi regulations. A weakness is Lukat's penchant for drawing far-reaching conclusions from a limited source material and without establishing how representational the case studies are. Practical policy toward foreign workers and its radicalization may have been shaped to a high degree by local decisionmakers, but Lukat does not substantiate this conclusion through comparison to other cities or regions. Likewise, the lack of comparison over time leaves unproven her conclusion that violence against foreign workers escalated throughout the war years.

The book contains many interesting observations and keeps its promise of describing empirically—although with varying intensity—the treatment and foreign workers’ everyday life in an unspectacular part of provincial Germany without erasing the nuances of the situations of workers from different countries and categories, which is laudable. However, the analytical shortcomings, the too-lengthy background sections, and frequent redundancy make the book tiring to read. Instead of irrelevant statistical tables detailing voting patterns in Weimar Plauen, one would have wanted maps of the mentioned locations and especially photographs of the human beings who are, after all, the book's main subjects.