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Joachim Neander, “The SS
and the Economics of Genocide,”
Review
article on: Michael Thad Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS,
Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps; Hermann Kaienburg, Die
Wirtschaft der SS; Jan Erik Schulte, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung:
Das Wirtschaftsimperium der SS. Oswald Pohl und das
SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt 1933-1945.
Michael Thad Allen and Jan Erik Schulte present the results of their
in-depth research on the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office
(WVHA), a hitherto little known organization that among others
controlled the economic enterprises of the SS, which are the subject
of Hermann Kaienburg’s study. The authors’ different methodological
approaches—Kaienburg’s rather micro-economical one, Schulte’s
classical, structuralist one, and Allen’s based on the theory of
modern bureaucratic organizations—yield a multi-faceted,
comprehensive picture. It includes the rise and fall of the SS-WVHA
and its role within the SS organization, the German war economy and
the National Socialist attempts to establish a “New Order” under
German hegemony in Eastern Europe, for which the genocide of
European Jewry marked the bloody beginning. |
