This fine novel investigates the fate of displaced people in the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war

It is late afternoon, March 1945, when a German schoolboy cycling home through the dusk sees a number of women under armed guard at the verge. The boy has grown used to the regular transport of workers to the munitions plant beyond town and instinctively senses that this group is different; out of place and suspicious. But by now the war is in its death throes and abnormality has become a given. Allied forces are pouring in, foreign labour is bleeding out. Everyone on Lüneburg Heath, south of Hamburg, seems depleted and confused, no longer sure who belongs and who doesn’t.

Hitler’s war machine was propped up by millions of workers, predominantly brought in from Poland and Ukraine and forcibly deployed to canneries, factories and farms. Once the Deed Is Done, the fine fifth novel from the German-British author Rachel Seiffert, covers the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich’s collapse, when this vast pool of slave labour became a logistical headache and a humanitarian disaster. Ruth Novak, a 32-year-old Red Cross volunteer from England, arrives at the plant to find the guards fled, paperwork burned and scores of hunched, hungry men left behind the iron railings. Undeniably, there is more than enough relief work for Ruth and her colleagues to tackle. But the mystery of those missing women throbs like a sore tooth. There ought to have been more labourers inside the factory, Ruth thinks. So what has become of the rest of them?