The SS and the Economics of Genocide in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume XXXII

The SS and the Economics of Genocide: 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.