Ian Buruma’s father, Leo, endured forced labor in a Nazi-occupied Berlin factory between 1941 and 1944. His son’s memoir, drawn from personal correspondence and fragmented diaries, documents a life of hunger, exhaustion, and calculated brutality. While Leo survived, Buruma’s account reveals a narrow slice of an unending story: how wartime exploitation laid the groundwork for postwar European labor markets that now strain under the weight of migration crises.
The book’s limitations mirror broader gaps in Germany’s historiography. By framing Leo’s experience as a “quiet tragedy” rather than a systemic atrocity, Buruma sidesteps questions about the scale of forced labor—millions of Soviet POWs and European Jews worked to death under the Third Reich. The New Statesman critique captures this tension: the narrative humanizes but does not confront the economic logic of fascism, which normalized slavery for “untermenschen” to fuel war.
The absence of corporate accountability threads is glaring. Firms like Krupp and Siemens, which operated under the Reich’s labor policies, remain Germany’s most valuable industrial brands. Buruma’s focus on the accounts department—a bureaucratic nerve center managing slave laborers—highlights how capitalism and genocide intertwined. Yet his book omits the legal battles now fought over reparations, where descendants demand reparations from these very companies.
The EU’s current labor reforms, which permit seasonal migrant worker exploitation, echo the dehumanization Leo described. When Austria and Germany reintroduced work permits with digital shackles for Ukrainian immigrants in 2024, the parallel to 1940s labor camps was not lost on activists. Buruma’s work, though emotionally resonant, does not connect these dots, allowing present-day policymakers to evade harder questions about their continent’s past.
What’s missing is not just data, but witness testimony. Leo’s story is one of an estimated 500,000 surviving wartime laborers in Germany, many still alive but unspoken to. The New Statesman notes that Buruma’s account avoids confronting German state complicity in denying these individuals pensions or reparations after 1945—a policy that echoes in today’s anti-migrant rhetoric.
The EU’s 2027 draft labor code, which may mandate wage minimums for foreign workers, will test whether Germany heeds such histories. If passed, it could mark a shift from exploitation to redress. But without narratives like Leo’s anchoring policy debates, the past will remain a footnote, not a warning.