Peter Ruggenthaler and Walter M. Iber, eds., Hitlers Sklaven—“Stalins Verräter”: Aspekte der Repression an Zwangsarbeitern und Kriegsgefangenen: Eine Zwischenbilanz

1The anthology Hitlers Sklaven —“Stalins Verräter”, edited by Peter Ruggenthaler and Walter M. Iber, endeavors to shed more light on a hitherto under-researched subject of the history of twentieth-century Europe, namely the fates of the persons who became forced laborers in Germany during the Second World War. The book deals only with the forced laborers from the Soviet Union, who accounted for almost half of the estimated up to 13.6 million laborers employed during the war. As the book’s title suggests, they became “victims of two regimes”; their odyssey was not limited to their forced labor employment, but continued after the war with their repatriation and countless repressions suffered in the Soviet Union, which is also the proper focus of the book. The tome is the final result of a yearlong research project by a team of international scholars, funded by various Austrian government agencies and presented at a conference in December 2006. The research rests extensively on pr