Title:
Allen, Michael Thad. The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
What made up the WVHA and what were the motivations of mid-level managers and engineers? How did perpetrators endow their institutions with personal significance? Why did Nazis think this management was the right thing to do? [My question is: Why do historians have to prove that Nazi ideology or ordinary men would be driven to commit murder like it is an alien act OR maybe, more important: why it is SO DIFFERENT than our belief system? Obviously, it is the same through a variant lens]
See focus in Argument, 2nd paragraph.
Summary of Argument:
Presenting a crucial history of the WVHA, or SS Business and Administration Main Office, MTA presents a comprehensive study akin to Wildt's monograph on RSHA. During Nazism WVHA assumed different roles and tasks to manifest new institutions. Pohl established this office to administer the SS and watched over financial aspects of CC and Death Head's units. The SS manager's lack of technical expertise, however, proved to be non-profitable except for the textile company using female slave-labor. All departments put forth their ideology of modern technology, but Office Group C - headed by Kammler (along with its SS engineers) - believed in German supremacy above all. And with this they cleansed the Germanic East, built workshops in mountains, and developed the machinery of murder at the expense of numerous lives, both Jewish AND non-Jewish. [OH! - Wiesel, damn it!!! (pg. 15) wrong again! Why quote him anymore!!!???]
Allen's focus, nonetheless, is not on a history of the WVHA, its organization, or those lives involved in its path, but on the motivations of mid-level managers, engineers, and functionaries within the bureaucracy. Not to blame mono-causes, he mentions throughout: A/S, racism, as well as thought pertaining to technological, economic, and German supremacy. These common belief made up (and motivated) the bureaucracy. He puts forth that these men were following concepts of modernism - that is modern machinery not management - for they rarely, if ever, understood this technology that they oversaw. In essence, these were men of their time. Thus, his monograph discounts and debunks Arendt's "banal," or the arguments of "cogs in the machine," as well as the common "technocrat" motivation and against Sofsky "power" by focusing on logical ideology. In other words, "This book argues that ideology is embedded in the quotidian tasks of bureaucratic operations because it lies at the root of collective identity and consensus. The function of consensus is best understood by considering the nature of modern management, whose techniques transform local, particular experiences and artifacts into fungible information amenable to collation, interchangeability, and abstract transfer" (11).
Comment:
Unfortunately, I do not know much about the WVHA except for the top leaders and their functions within the Nazi government but I understand that this is a major work by an authoritative figure that I can utilize pedagogically. Additionally, I would of course agree with Allen since I do not mystify Nazis as evil or un-happy - they seem to me to be normal men who reflect their global peers (except for that genocidal ideology). My one critique, as usual, concerns generalization - not all felt this way and while he seems to focus on mid-level men his thesis wants to blanket all organizations and Nazis - which is always dangerous territory for a historian. I must admit I am rather tired of the "why"/"motivation" question. Who cares? It happened - let's focus on the how and give a proper history of a vital Nazi organization.
Argument (Chapter Outlines):
Introduction
I: Origins of the SS: The Ideology Is the Modern Organization
Modern Men: The New Administrative Officers of the SS
The Führer Principle
Heinrich Himmler's Favored Industrial Projects
"We Are No Pencil Pushers!": Theodor Eicke's Total Institution and the Primacy of Policing
Origins of the SS Construction Corps
II. A Political Economy of Misery: The SS "Führer" Corporation
The German Earth and Stone Works
Profits from Women's Work
Opportunistic Idealists and the Shady Legality of SS Industry
The "Organic Corporation"
III. Manufacturing a New Order
The "Final Form" of the German Commercial Operations
The Venality of Evil: Modern Mismanagement of Slave Labor
IV. Engineering a New Order
A High Degree of Order?
Odilo Globocnik: Handcrafting the New Order
Hans Kammler: Modern Engineering in the SS
The "Great Industrial Tasks" of the SS
Engineering Ideology
V. My Newly Erected House: Slavery in the Modern War Economy
Industry and Ideology
The Rise of Albert Speer
Putting the SS's House in Order for Total War
The Armaments Ministry's First Pilot Projects
VI. The Hour of the Engineer
Rehearsals
The SS and the Rocket Team
Mittelwerk and Dora-Mittelbau
Less than Slaves: Labor at Dora-Mittelbau
The Fighter Staff
VII. Total War and the End in Rubble
Modern Management and Its Discontents
The End
Notes:
- Focus on WVHA (SS Business Adm) and the climax of effort in Spring '44 (2)
- Anti - Arendt (4-5) Not Cogs but Big Fish in control (158)
- WVHA men came from white-collar workers (7)
- Ideological motivation for harsh CC conditions (9)
- Actors: 1. WVHA managers, 2. Commandants, 3. State planners and individuals (12)
- Goals: 1. Remake European image, 2. Führer principle, 2. Emphasis on Soc of Nat. Soc. (12-13)
- Productivist ideology: Not so much make products but make Germanness and Germans (13)
- Early SS: 1. Pohl administration, 2. Himmler industrial ventures, 3. Eicke's CC = all together with slave labor they all agreed prisoners must be punished (19-20)
- Dachau - old powder factory (36)
- Eicke - "we are not guards but political soldiers" (38)
- Death Heads training - honor and empowerment (40) no civilian clothes even on holiday
- '36-'38: 1. government support to CC, and 2. prisoners-> laborers (57)
- message clear - Germany must radicalize against Weimar (64)
- "Arbeit Macht Frei" reality - early (66)
- Modernization turns to radicalization through Nazi cultural goals (79)
- Always acting within Nazi ideology - (96) [of course for SS]
- New order/Germanization strategy brings them together
- Soldiers receive military and business training ( 112)
- 14f13 - unfit for work (125)
- "All or nothing" in East -> Genocide during victory '41-'42 (129)
- SS based on modernity of productivism and racial supremacy over rational capitalism (137)
- Keep some Jews for labor since there was none other (151)
- Crux of war economy: human labor (166)
- IG Farben in Auschwitz = Henkel works in Orienenberg (168)
- Never forced companies to use slave labor (170)
- Most control in CC -> Commandants (with subordinates) and Kapos (178)
- Not Sofsky "power" but logical ideology (190)
- Office group C builds death camp machinery (202)
- Nazism as "modern" (273)
- Nazis as human! (276)
- Not silence but action (284)
- Nazi historians most disturbing to him (283)
- WVHA men were following concepts of modernism - that is modern machinery not management - for they rarely, if ever, understood this technology that they oversaw. In essence, these were men of their time.
- WVHA mid-level ideology included A/S, racism, and Germanic technological and economic supremacy that motivated bureaucrats.
- Nazis were human, and mid-level WVHA managers were not silent but very active in building the system.
- Ideology proved to elide prisoner (both J and non) well-being for German supremacy, especially showing that they must actually be punished.
- With their supremacy they cleansed the Germanic East, built workshops in mountains, and developed the machinery of murder at the expense of numerous lives, both Jewish AND non-Jewish.
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