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For a long time, the general public and research have primarily associated Jewish forced labour with concentration camps. But regardless of this, forced labour was an integral part of the persecution of the Jews. When the Nazi state banned Jews from pursuing any type of independent income after the 1938 November Pogrom, the labour administration initially arranged for Jews dependent on unemployment benefits to be forcefully used to work on infrastructure projects. In the summer of 1939, there were already 20,000 forced workers, most of them men; many lived in labour camps. Due to the acute shortage of workers starting in 1940, all able-bodied Jews, including women, were then recruited, mostly for the industrial sector. In 1941, there were over 50,000 Jewish forced workers in the Third Reich. Although there were many labour camps in the Brandenburg region, Berlin was the centre of forced labour, with almost 30,000 Jews in more than 200 companies. The strong influence of economic interests on the nature of forced labour, which was also a model for the annexed territories, contradicts the thesis that work meant the extinction of the Jews from the beginning.