Studies of World War II and the Holocaust have long focused on the Jewish victims. However, from the 1990s onward a new wave of research opened up the Pandora's box of Nazi genocide much wider. Fundamental research has since been published (by Wachsmann, Caplan, Benz, and Distel among others) addressing the process of the creation, development, and differentiation of the network of camps; showing their connections with penal institutions; investigating the foundations of Nazi ideology; and addressing the complex ethnic, national, and social composition of the internee and prisoner populations.

The present volume, edited by Marianne Neerland Soleim, stems from a symposium held at the Falstad Memorial and Human Rights Centre (Levanger, Norway) on 20–21 November 2008. It consciously contributes to this trend by focusing on one of the most significant and yet under-researched topics: prisoners of war and forced labour. More than 7 million military personnel, of all Allied nationalities, were held by the German authorities during World War II, the majority of them forcibly put to work in constructing camps, highways, and railroads, and in mining, timbering, agriculture, and industry. As the editor writes in her introduction, the literature on the topic has developed over two distinct periods and in two distinct directions. Starting from the mid-1980s, studies appeared (by Herbert, for instance) that stemmed partly from the need to compensate economically those forced labourers, and which privileged a quantitative, macro-level analysis. From the 1990s onward new research (by Browning, Schulte, and Berkhoff, among others) has focused more on the agency of decision-makers, perpetrators, bystanders, and victims.

Prisoners of War and Forced Labour contributes in three significant ways to furthering our understanding of the topic. Firstly, the importance of Nazi racist ideology in shaping a hierarchy among the POWs – and not only among concentration camp internees – emerges in virtually all the essays in this volume. For instance, Thomas E. Porter's essay dismantles the “myth of an ‘untainted’ Wehrmacht” that “depict[s] German officers and men as correct, professional warriors”. The author highlights the fact that the German army was “thoroughly indoctrinated through a carefully planned propaganda which imbued the entire Wehrmacht with a racist ideology that considered not just Jews but Slavs to be untermenschen”. This meant that “the war in the East differed greatly from the one in the West”, becoming a “war of annihilation” that eschewed customary military principles and practices.

The volume's second main achievement is to describe accurately the network of camps for POWs in terms of time and place. In Edmund Nowak's chapter we can follow the Polish POWs in Germany through collection points (Kriegsgefangenensammelstelle) and transition camps (Durchgangslagers – Dulags) to the Offizierslagers (Oflags) for officers and the Mannschaftsstammlagers (Stalags) for the other personnel. In other essays we learn of apparently more peripheral parts of the camp network, such as the Ustaša camps in Croatia (Michele Frucht Levy) and the German penal camps in Finland (Lars Westerlund). Information on conditions in camps is provided in most of the essays, together with estimates of the number of POWs who were interned and who eventually died there. The need for a synthesis in writing the essays has perhaps limited the scope for describing the agency of POWs, but Stephen Tyas's essay “Escapes of Allied Prisoners of War and Forced Labourers from German Captivity” represents a significant exception to the rule.

All in all, the focus on the impact of Nazi ideology, the pluralization of the forms of internment/detention, and attempts to stress agency create a more dynamic understanding of the fate of POWs during World War II. This represents an ideal basis from which to address the issue of POW forced labour – the third main achievement of this volume. For instance, a section in Tyas's essay guides us among the British POWs forced to work in agriculture, mining, and construction in Silesia and Thuringia and in the mobile construction battalions that cleared air-raid rubble and snow in many cities and towns. Westerlund describes “penal soldiers” in Finland, placed at the work sites for the Hyrynsalmi-Kuusamo narrow-gauge field railway or assigned to entrenching, mines clearance, and lumber work under harsh disciplinary and living conditions that led to dramatic death rates. Porter sheds light on the 10,000 Soviet POWs who built the IG Farben industrial complex at Monowitz from March 1941 onward, only to become the subject of the first experimental use of the pesticide Zyklon B produced there. The construction and management of that factory and the fate of the c.30,000 POWs and civilian labourers forcibly employed there by 1944 are told by Piotr Setkiewicz.

These are, no doubt, ground-breaking narratives on the forced labour of POWs, and they will undoubtedly stimulate further research. Yet, for all the detailed information contained in most of the essays we lack a key with which to place them in a broader theoretical framework. This focus on description rather than interpretation is yet another sign of the link between this volume and the “new historiography” on internment, detention, and forced labour in the Third Reich. But the lack of any theoretical insight is particularly evident here, since the volume merely reproduces the fragmented programme of the conference from which it derives (and unfortunately also the numerous typographical errors in the original papers), while the editor's introduction does not synthesize the main themes emerging from the scattered perspectives and uneven findings of the individual chapters. This has significant consequences on at least two levels.

On the one hand, some of the relevant theoretical issues are virtually ignored. Were POWs slaves, for instance? The importance of this question has already been explained in the present journal.Footnote 1 In Prisoners of War and Forced Labour the issue of the definition of “forced labour” is dealt with briefly in the editor's introduction and in the chapters by Nowak and Ruggenthaler. Although the fluidity between the status of POWs and civilian labourers is noted, this leads not to a broad historiographical discussion but instead to a narrow search for a feasible legal definition.

Levy's discussion of the Ustaša genocide of the Serbs during 1941–1945 is further evidence of the lack of any interpretative approach. The author vividly portrays how racial discourse, policy, and practices caused the destruction of over 80 per cent of the tiny Jewish and Roma minorities and the deaths of some 400,000 Serbs in the independent state of Croatia (NDH). However, he fails to link this to the main topic of the volume – forced labour. He could have done this by asking himself what the conditions were that led to genocide rather than to forced labour or a combination of the two. This question would create scope for comparative research on POWs and forced labour beyond the limits of World War II studies.

On the other hand, the interesting theoretical insights that are offered in this volume are insufficiently and unevenly developed. This is especially the case in the attempts to compare POWs and forced labour under the Third Reich and in the Soviet Union. Particularly in the essay by Marina Panikar on Soviet POWs in Norway and foreign POWs in the European north of Russia, the comparison appears poorly legitimated by references to the rather abstract “similarities of the political systems”, and vague arguments such as “similar climatic conditions”. A less static comparative approach can be found in Porter's and Nowak's chapters, which focus on the experiences of Soviet POWs interned and forced to work first in the Third Reich and then in the USSR (Porter) and on separate groups of Polish POWs interned and forced to work in Nazi Germany and in the USSR after the invasion of Poland from the west and the east in September 1939 (Nowak). In the latter case, however, reference to the ideologically loaded concept of “totalitarianism” appears more questionable than the author seems to assume.

There is, however, at least one exception to the lack of theoretical insight in the essays contained in this volume. It relates to the forgotten and divided memories of the internment of POWs and of forced labour in postwar and contemporary Europe. There are chapters convincingly portraying the Ustaša genocide against the Serbs as a decisive antecedent of the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s (Levy), discussing the impact of the Soviet massacre of more than 20,000 Polish POWs in March 1940 on postwar Polish–Russian relations (Nowak), and presenting the archaeological project “Landscape of Evil”, which seeks to preserve the very structure of the Nazi camps in Norway so that future generations do not forget (Jasinski, Stenvik, Neerland Soleim). In this broader context, one chapter that seems to deviate completely from the book's topic in doing so reveals its importance. Indeed, one might consider the essay by Isaac Herskowitz on the call by two rabbinic Nazi camp survivors for a religious protection of human prerogatives completely out of place, since it makes hardly any direct connection with the issue of POWs and forced labour. Yet, situated at the very core of this volume, it reminds the reader that research on these issues is not just about legal categories and statistics for economic compensation; it also addresses deeper ethical issues and the duty of memory.