ABSTRACT
Beginning with the occupation of the Czech Lands in October 1938 and the November pogroms of 1938, the Nazi regime built up what was to become Europe’s largest program of deportation and forced labor in the twentieth centuries. Tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews as well as millions of other Europeans were affected. Ulrich Herbert has enhanced the knowledge on how the Nazis’ forced labor system evolved on the macro-political and macroeconomic level. His story of forced labor is in essence that of two competing forces, racist ideology versus economic pragmatism. Herbert’s focus was confined to civilian laborers and prisoners of war. The third large group of foreign laborers was that of inmates. Herbert was very well acquainted with the Nazi labor statistics and knew their problems. He has always been very cautious concerning the total number of foreigners employed in the German war economy and put it at somewhere around 12 to 12.5 million.
